The Weather

I've got to be at Baker Street tomorrow morning at 11, what are the chances I wonder. The shuttles are the best option. Chesham shuttle didn't seem to work much today.

You should've asked!

I would have offered assistance.

A freak snow event like this must be murder for you guys, but to us 6" is a minor inconvenience as we're prepared for it and have the equipment to deal with it. So far this season we have 62" total! One of the worst I can remember was in Feb of 2003, when we had 18" overnight. Here's a few photos to put that in perspective.

I open the garage door to find...


The view from the house. The brown thing at the end of the driveway is my mailbox. It sits on a 3 foot post. No sign of the post, as the town plows have relocated a bunch of snow from the road to my driveway. Note the banks either side of the driveway are already above the mailbox height from previous storms.


My Husky loves snow, but this was a bit much


Where did I leave that bone?


Fun time for a Husky. She was 'porpoising' in and out of the snow as she ran and I managed to catch her in flight.


Here's how we deal with 18", on top of what we already had


My best to you all!

/Jimi

Easily the winner for 'Cutest Thread' of the Winter.

www.flickr.com/photos/24772733@N05/

Amazing scenes

And here starts day two...

Bakerloo suspended Queens Park to Harrow & Wealdstone due to weather.
Circle suspended due to a faulty train at HSK.
District suspended Edgware Road - Wimbledon due to above faulty train.
H&C suspended Whitechapel - Barking due to weather.
Jubilee - Minor delays due to a faulty train at Neasden.
Met - Minor delays due to weather.

Clicky linky thing to TFL live travel news.

Thanks for that. I see where you're coming from (I guess also Whitechapel is outside, which isn't going to improve reliability at turnaround time...). Interesting to get that kind of horse's mouth info - one of the really good things about the DD board

The trains were running a little better today. I wasn't happy with the Met Line tho. My local Baker Street left early so I went to Moor Park to get a fast train. Clearly some cleaver sole decided NOT to de-ice the fast lines between Harrow and Wembley so we crawled behind an Aldgate local! We even stopped at Preston Road-can't blame the driver, cos I'd have done the same. I missed the start of my meetng because of it. The way home was the same, used the down local line!

There were no de-icers on, despite D on being displayed on the platforms! Poor form. Who decided to run 32tph on two tracks?

My girlfriend was wondering why the Bakerloo wasn't running but the LO was. I mearly suggested that a delay on the Harrow branch would cause problems with the rest of the service as the trains have to slot in at Queens Pk, or is it that the 72s are rubbish in the snow?

Central line was suspended Hainault to Woodford virtually all day, yet this closure wasn't mentioned until esrly evening!

The Central was running shuttles thus:

Epping - Leytonstone
Hainault - Marble Arch
Liverpool Street - White City
White City - Ealing / Ruislip

A clever use of overlapping services helped to minimise problems with crew reliefs etc, and kept a pretty frequent service going in Central London, even if the outer branches suffered a little. Coded manual was in use from Leytonstone to Epping, with trains running much slower than usual. I daresay this was the situation west of White City.

The overlapping shuttles meant that the central area wasn't affected by the slow running in the open sections.

Passengers don't like shuttle services because they have to change. What they don't realise is that the service would be far worse without the shuttles, and it would take them much longer to get to their destinations.

I think the Central line controllers should be congratulated for this.

There's a couple of pictures by me up in my picture gallery, which can be found here. Four pictures at the moment (scroll to the bottom), rather rubbish quality as the camera batteries died.. *sigh!*

wer1070 - your photos are apparently private and cannot be viewed.

Very sorry about that ;D

The afternoon service WAS better than the morning (trust me, it was).

The fast roads between Harrow and Wembley were de-iced and re-opened roughly 1430 southbound and 1530 northbound. They were in a bit of a state, and being as there are both local and fast lines, it was decided to leave the fasts out till last.

The lines were in fact de-iced using the train you saw in your later post. By mid-evening we had everything (all sidings and crossovers) back except Watford North Curve.

As for the 32tph service over 2 lines this morning, it's always a difficult one to work out. Who do you stop getting to work? Where do you send the trains you tip out at Harrow if they can't go to Neasden? Who is going to drive them if the driver was due off at Wembley? Sometimes it's better to stomach the delays in order to get everyone (staff and customers) to near enough where they want to be. As it goes, a number of trains were taken out of service, but when you've only got 50% of your track, it's always going to get a bit crowded.

Not everywhere had the D boards still on - some had turned them to off at 0700 (which is the regular time on most chilly days, but not today.) Regardless of this, following yesterday many of the tanks were empty, and the services yesterday meant most trains were away from the depot for longer. Believe it or not, during the day today there was quite a fair amount of natural thawing. Come 1700 this evening, everyone was back de-icing - with full tanks.

Sorry, I'm not a ski person and have no use for feet of snow in my driveway and would thus prefer it stayed up in the ski areas - or better yet in Canada ;D But I understand from those who are into it, that we have several excellent ski areas in NH (north of me) similar to Killington. Significant tourist income. I like this location - about 1 hour from the seacoast, 90 mins from the Lakes Region and 3 hours from the White Mountains. Plenty of choice. Excellent for rides on the HD in summer -- which will apparently be a while arriving if one believes the "Puxatawny Phil" (Groundhog Day) theory. He saw his shadow yesterday, thus the legend says that we have 6 more weeks of Winter to go. We will also briefly get above freezing this weekend for the first time since I can't remember (December?). Rough Winter - lowest temperature I saw was -20F.
Some local wag once opined NH has 3 seasons - Fall, Winter and July 4th. But in truth it seems to me to be just a little more 'intense' in its seasons compared to my memories of the UK.

Best, Jimi