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Post by grahamhewett on May 30, 2017 6:53:40 GMT
norbitonflyer - well, all train services have had to be sanctioned by parliament. Technically, what requires them (as distinct from merely enables them) to run these days is any PSO imposed by the 1993 Act as amended, although again, the imposition of the PSO itself is not actually specified in the 93 Act,merely pursuant to it. Same goes for the 1962 Act (and the amending 1968 Act); I used to write the periodic letter to BR telling them to do this -effectively, the whole of the national railway service - (and sign the letters permitting them to discontinue all services at closure) , but I am glad the letters didn't create "DTp trains", let alone "Hewett trains"... No such letter was generated for LU, although the LT Chairman obviously received, after 1984, a periodic letter from the Secretary of State telling him what was to be delivered. I think, on balance, the legal opinion was that LU were exempt from the closure process and that they could drop services from their PSO without going through the closure procedure (as could, of course, other public transport operators such as bus services*). Problems may -theoretically - arise where another operator such as T&W or LU has taken over bits of the ex-BR infrastructure and services should they ever wish to close them. It would be a lawyers' treat to consider the question in relation to the Drain, for example...** The privy assumption within Whitehall was that such instances were likelyto be so remote as to be not worth fretting over. *Before any smart**** points out, I do know that bus services provided under the 1987 Act which enabled the Board to provide a bus ervice in substitution for a train service must, themselves be subject to a closure process (as has happened recently in the infamous Stone case) but that is the exception that proves the otherwise universal truth. **Damn! Never considered that at the time I was organising its transfer (and I would have shut up about it if I'd remembered anyway)
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Post by grahamhewett on May 29, 2017 7:18:25 GMT
There is a further twiddle on all this, in that it has always been a subject of some difficulty as to whether the 1962/1968 statutory closure procedures actually applied equally to LU services. LU has tended to behave as if they did (probably just to be on the safe side), but DTp lawyers have also debated whether (a) the term "the Board" (ie BRB) in the legislation also included "the Executive" (ie LTE), and (b) whether LU should be allowed to create a precedent if they were not legally obliged to do so.
The issue for Parliamentary draftsmen (especially after rai lprivatisation) has been how to make the closure process bites on TOCs but not others such as preserved railways, or tramways or - horror - tram-trains. (The Rotherham case, if it is ever closed* will be a special treat for the lawyers). * It has to open first, of course....
It is likely that most if not all of the LU oddball services such as the Watford N curve are as much about rusty rails as avoidance of closure cases.
@rincewind - sorry, I meant "Friday".
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Post by grahamhewett on May 28, 2017 20:58:30 GMT
Strictly, a Parliamentary train was one running pursuant to an Act of 1844 (I believe that's the date - a piece of Gladstonian legislation) which required all train companies to provide at least a once a day all stations 3rd class service. That requirement disappeared with the 1948 nationalisation and (without having the 1844 Act to hand) it must have been a fairly loosely defined obligation as services came and went quite frequently (eg the various MR services to Kew). The services discussed earlier in this thread are often called "Parliamentary" but they owe their existence to the wish to avoid a closure case for a particular piece of track. Services that run for this reason don't have to run daily - there's the famous case in Lancashire which runs Sats only and in only one direction. The legal advice on what might trigger a closure was the removal of a service "on which people had come to rely" - hence a weekly service was one such. There are other complications: for example, when the last Willesden LL to Broad Street was withdrawn, the DTp lawyers had an agonised debate as to whether a closure case was required even tho' there was a continuing Willesden HL-Broad Street service. (in the end, it was regarded as "not a closure" - a pity - I had always liked that 0802 Willesden departure, as I had the train to myself...)
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Post by grahamhewett on May 26, 2017 16:09:23 GMT
snoggle - there is a precedent for the airport charging the punters to use "their" station as that is what was originally proposed for the Brussels airport link PPP, with barriers openable only after purchasing a specific token railside - imagine the fun with that... Fortunately, the next idea was for SNCB to collect a small addon supplement to the fares. [That nearly failed too when SNCB refused, at first, to collect the money, leaving the banks and the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund - the main PPP financiers - to have collect the money themselves which led to delightful visions of under-performing merchant bankers being given a peaked cap and going out to inspect tickets... Eventually, common sense prevailed there, too]. You are right, time is ticking, tho' I'm not sure who is the loser (apart from Joe Public) if the issue isn't sorted by next year.
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Post by grahamhewett on May 26, 2017 10:51:36 GMT
35b / snoggle - the problem of access charges at Heathrow is bedevilled by the fact that revenues from the Link are not included in the regulated airport income, so HAHA (as I believe it now is?) has every incentive to screw the maximum out of TOCs including CrossRail; that will continue to be the case after 2023, alas, although their scope for trying the trick will hopefully by limited by the eventual High Court decision. There is no scope for tit for tat pricing of access charges on the NR section of the HEX route - the charges are determined by ORR formulae which have to be applied everywhere. The one weapon that TfL has is the nuclear one of not serving the airport and shaming the ever greedy HAHA (and , no doubt, causing all the other schemes such as WraTH and SWELTRAC to fall down' with knock-on impact on the views about the desirability of a 3rd runway); otherwise primary legislation looms.
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Post by grahamhewett on May 15, 2017 8:19:38 GMT
<<rincew1nd: Posts made before 20th May were initially made in this thread>>crusty54 - the trouble with extending the DLR anywhere but the more lightly used areasis that it runs (much) shorter trains than a modern tube; if you're going to spend a few big ones any way, a few more gives you a step up in capacity.
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Post by grahamhewett on May 14, 2017 18:22:50 GMT
drainrat - I might just take you up on that offer*. (Not for a bit, tho' - just off to eastern Europe for a fix of Tatras and some remote Czecho ng steam). *As you may imagine, the transfer process was - like the rest of the privatisation - something done in dreary offices, usually in the small hours (bankers didn't turn up until after dinner, we discovered and then became hungry again by about 0200 - I always made sure that my side of the table had a plentiful supply of personal snacks, which they were encouraged to eat about then).
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Post by grahamhewett on May 14, 2017 7:28:51 GMT
drainrat - thank you - my private agenda, as BR Company Secretary at the time, in pushing the transfer was to prevent it being used as a precedent for privatising the tube generally - so,yes, highly successful, and a rare win over the politicians during the privatisation process... [The key thing was to keep quiet about the real reason and to be seen to sell it to the Board as a trivial piece of tidying up which cost nothing].
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Post by grahamhewett on May 11, 2017 10:49:28 GMT
drainrat :-) [Sometimes, the more realistic senior management used to speculate on how long the railway would carry on running without them - answers varied from a few weeks to "the next crisis", which could be months away and usually involved the money running out.] Privatisation came as a shock to many senior (and middle) management because they kept finding out things they didn't know and which now had to be incorporated into some legal agreement. As a rule of thumb, those who practised management by walking about tended to know a lot more than those who "stuck close by their desks and never went to sea". The Drain,in particular,had been too small to engage senior staff attention before its transfer; same with the Island Line. Again,there, senior people kept discovering new matters like the source of the ballast, or the location of the power controls, which became privatisation show stoppers for a while, but which they had never considered before.
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Post by grahamhewett on May 11, 2017 7:00:41 GMT
drainrat -senior management are often told things that are different to what actually happens on the ground* ... (There was a lot of that at the time of privatisation, especially in relation to assets which were suddenly "discovered" after the event; less of an issue with staff, who would usually pipe up if overlooked - apart from the photographic unit attached to one of the Infracos - another story). roythebus - I wasn't told about any LU staff transferring to BR at the time of the Drain transfer (why would they? As you say, they would have had to start at the bottom of the relevant ladder) *It's the comments from the sharp end on this site that provide a necessary corrective to the ivory tower view...
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Post by grahamhewett on May 9, 2017 7:23:21 GMT
Gentlemen - when I put in place the paperwork to transfer the Drain to LU, most of the staff were TUPE'd across and became LU employees. I believe drivers were given the choice (because none was a dedicated W&C man). Many chose LU because the conditions and pay were better. LU told us -and them, presumably - that they would be integrated into the Central Line workings (as I have explained earlier in this thread). There was no mention of Elephant at the time and I imagine there would have been serious trouble if staff were faced with one thing at no notice, having been promised something different.
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Post by grahamhewett on May 3, 2017 9:21:53 GMT
DWS - Wrong, I'm afraid. LU paid BR £1 for all the shares in a company - the Waterloo and City and London Underground Extensions Ltd (of which I was a director at the time and still have a sample of its headed notepaper). In that company, we had vested not only the assets of the Drain but also sundry other BR assets such as track at New Cross/New Cross Gate which I was anxious to see transferred away from Railtrack. Technically, you can't give away shares - there has to be a transaction (didn't have to be £1, of course, could have been a pair of white gloves at Candlemas) but in this case, the value of the company's assets far exceeded £1...
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Post by grahamhewett on May 2, 2017 14:02:04 GMT
I seem to remember someone telling me that when LU took over the W&C the drivers were based at Elephant & Castle because it was the closest depot, it was only later that Leytonstone took over although the Bakerloo Line managers remained until they were replaced by DRMs in 2010 (or there abouts). Management came over to the Central line a lot earlier than that. Waterloo & city became a stand alone with its own GM and PM before 2006, it then closed down for engineering works and was brought into Central line management thereafter. In between bakerloo and Central line manager, it was also managed along with the East London line. I think the drivers have always been from Leytonstone since 94, management was the responsibility of the Elephant & Castle TCM later TOM drainrat - yes, that's what I remember being told - the management and the crewing were separate.
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Post by grahamhewett on May 2, 2017 13:44:16 GMT
aslefshrugged - Interesting - LU definitely told me about the integration with the Central crew at the time I handed the line over to them but perhaps it took a while (and no doubt some negotiation*) to implement. norbitonflyer There was some competition amongst the Jehus to see who could do the trip fastest. With the 1940 stock, I was told the best that could be achieved on a straight run (ie not using the Bank crossover) was 3m 35 sec. Not a comfortable ride, perhaps. Not sure what the record was with the current stock - probably around 3m 10. BTW, there was a spoof (?) "Railway Performance" article in the Railway Magazine c1956 which produced a table of comparative runs on the line of mostly around the 4m mark. *A syndicate/mafia boss would have greatly interested ex-BR staff.
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Post by grahamhewett on May 1, 2017 17:41:49 GMT
In BR days, we always tried to staff the W&C off the Salisbury diagrams to ensure that no one got bored, and when we handed it over to LT, they used the Central for the same purpose, because it had a high percentage of surface running as well as similar stock (although I seem to recall on this site that there were actually some technical differences - to do with braking?)
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Post by grahamhewett on Apr 28, 2017 19:32:23 GMT
@atlastrack - certainly from the mid-50s onwards, the Dreadnoughts didn't keep to permanent formations - much to the annoyance of those trying to clear the entire fleet...
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Post by grahamhewett on Mar 13, 2017 17:06:22 GMT
twihlet - probably a Circle train - I can (just) remember these running in high summer <c1952 with the doors left open, much to the terror of my mother...
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 27, 2017 18:46:18 GMT
spsmiler -it's difficult to see how you could eliminate split ticketing, especially with advance purchases - simply order the two legs in advance; provided the train stopped at the join (another issue,ofcourse),who would know you hadn't boarded the train anew?
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 27, 2017 10:13:45 GMT
Looking through the Middleton Press book on the ELL, I see F stock with duty numbers 02 and 12; in later years, the numbers seem to have been much higher - 173.
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 27, 2017 8:23:38 GMT
@chris M - I have had a similar experience in using my staff Oyster; for example, when going through the barriers only to find that the service is disrupted and then trying to exit again immediately. I was told there is a time delay built in to prevent closely successive entries/exits, but it would be nice to have that confirmed.
BTW does anyone have experience of trying to persuade staff to operate LU barriers with a BR staff pass (which is a simple "dumb" piece of plastic these days, although it's not so long ago that it was a rather nice silver medallion!) - there are quite a few LU routes which had been transferred,sometimes long ago, from BR (eg the W&C or even KX to Moorgate) where the Rail Staff Travel website assures us that BR staff pass holders can travel free. I have never tried to gain entry using my "BR Status Pass", and always relied on my staff Oyster, but given the obscurity of some of the available options, I can't help feeling that the LU staff would be utterly amazed/baffled...
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 26, 2017 23:05:45 GMT
It was just plain speculation, as the Weekly Capping on Oyster was planned to come in during 2016. One of the very first things that budding scientists, lawyers, historians and analysts are taught - usually well before GCSE - is that just because event B follows event A, it doesn't mean that B depends in any way on A...
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 13, 2017 16:11:55 GMT
Dmitri - thanks for that. I believe it was line 2 that I used. A propos Tallinn, whilst my team was there busy privatising Eesti Raudtee, we did give some thought, prompted by the government, to looking into the scope for at least an S-Bahn operation based on the suburban network of Elektri Raudtee. The services weren't very frequent -mostly hourly - and would have required considerable investment in additional stock and some interesting (and no doubt expensive) surface infrastructure to bring it closer to the city centre ( we looked at upgrading the access lines to the main port,which get quite close to the key area around Viru) but I think the cost was a major discouragement. PS Like the shot of the MTV-82!
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 10, 2017 16:16:56 GMT
It must have been the line I used then...
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 9, 2017 23:15:28 GMT
@innercircle - I fear that Tallinn has only trams,no metro. It's a well-organised 4 route system with mostly street running plus some running on reservation. No tunnels, no metro vehicles, all boarding at ground level - -only trams.(If Tallinn has a metro than so has every country in the world that has a conventional tramway system...) I write as somebody who lived in Tallinn for two years during which I travelled the entire system many times. There *are* some hybrid systems such as the Brussels and Charleroi pre-metro systems where conventional trams run in tunnels in the city centre but run as conventional trams in the suburbs (like Boston as mentioned by countryman ) . The trickiest metro system I have used so far is the St Petersburg one - the stations all have platform edge doors; the doors are blank and so are the platform edge walls between the doors, so on arrival at a station there is no visual indication of where you are at all - you have to rely on counting the stations and the difficult to follow Russian announcements. And of course, the Moscow system has the best stations.
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 7, 2017 11:37:33 GMT
crusty54 I guess that the with racks version was motivated by the contemporary Heathrow Surface Access Study for which LU offered an express Piccadilly option.
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 3, 2017 13:45:39 GMT
Although it's difficult not to be a GW man, I have a very soft spot for the LBSC, where my greatgrandfather was the freight manager - we long had a sepia photo of 333 Remembrance, the LBSC war memorial loco, which had hung in his office after WW1 (my parents lost it when they moved, alas).
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 2, 2017 9:38:03 GMT
Mention of pointing hands - the subway at Oxford (before the last rebuild) used to have a pointing hand attached to a very carefully painted tweed cuff complete with buttons - only the GW and only in Oxford?
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 2, 2017 9:32:28 GMT
snoggle - absolutely - a typical PIC/CIL contribution from developers tends to be £1-2k per dwelling; even at £10k/dwelling, that's going to raise a mere £2bn - a spit in the ocean for CR2's cost.
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 1, 2017 10:45:20 GMT
For many years, a religious group advertised its thoughts on a blank house wall at the end of a sharp dog leg turn alongside the WCML at Willesden with "The end of the world is nigh" - a good reminder to speeding motorists.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jan 24, 2017 11:01:10 GMT
In which case, it's everything whether vertically integrated or not, otherwise you'll end up not mentioning historic lines such as the West London line and its various components, which never ran trains but built a lot of key track on which others did (or the more recent example of HS1 Ltd which has never run a train in its existence). Contrarywise, you'll struggle with non-franchised Eurostar which owns no track (other than a depot) but runs trains over other people's lines. You'll also get into difficulty otherwise with such things as the Metropolitan Railway Company which began service by relying on the GWR and later the GNR before running its own stock with its own locomotives, which would push back its "opening date" by a couple of years. legally, the lawyers deal with all this by talking of the "directing mind", ie which company caused the trains (whether they owned them, leased them or hired them in from third parties) to run. "It's a railway, Jim, but not as we know it"...
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