Any ideas?

The top one looks like a carriage chassis with the wheeled axles on top.

The bottom one looks like a works wagon.


Just blind speculation, though.

First of 73 new wagons for LU arrived from China by ship to Southampton.
Sent for testing on GCR Great Central Railway.

www.railwaygazette.com/modes/london-underground-orders-chinese-wagons/44262.article

Will the old wagons be offered for sale .

I'm not sure anyone will want them!

Is it just people like me, who live near Shildon, who find this whole thing obscene?

Obscene because they come from China, or because there are new wagons being bought.

If you were to include the human cost, you might find the balance not so favourable.

We all know the most cost-effective way of picking cotton in a global environment, don't we?

Don't Hitachi just assemble trains there? AIUI the bodyshells are actually made in Japan and Italy.

The only firm currently building trains in the UK is Bombardier in Derby - who are busy making various Aventra variants.

WH Davis is still in business building rail wagons in the UK.

This is yet another example of buying-in things that we build, without any concern or responsibility for the well-being of future generations.

It turns out that we are doing it on a far wider scale than anyone could believe possible. The much-vaunted 'coal free electricity' week involved importing electricity!

At least the grave is environmentally friendly.

Oh!

That makes it all right, then!

Sorry, that was a glib sarcastic rejoiner, and only suitable for YouTube. I'm prone to it, but I usually manage to spot it before I press 'reply'.

What I meant was, a series of carefully-evasive answers couched in politico-economic jargon doesn't justify irresponsible disregard for one's fellows.

If it did, then Jim Crow would still be picking cotton, and the rest of us would be happily wearing it.

Even if you completely ignore the human cost, the figures still don't add up. Buying from China doesn't pay the dole for the people whose jobs you have thrown away. The people of this country do that. IF you factored that in, and IF you insisted that the equivalent Chinese workers were paid at the same rate, and worked in the same conditions as ours, then the true situation would emerge.

During the ROVER scandal, it was revealed in the Trade Press that Chinese car workers get the equivalent of our Minimum Wage.

BUT, they get it per DAY, not per HOUR.

The problems are not political, they are economic and logistical.

The politicians have to play within those limits.

And it's not a matter of being evasive. Each person has to decide for themselves whether they would have preferred that we were years behind our current position in various ways in order to protect local manufacturing and crafts. You can't (or, at least it's very difficult to) just change the odd bits you don't like. If you want to scrap free trade, you have to accept that a lot of good things that happen will disappear along with the bad.

The problem is that we live in a society based on consumerist greed.

The fact that it is cheaper to ship railway wagons half-way around the world than to build them on-site ought to tell us that something is wrong.

Trouble is, we don't want to hear it. It makes us feel uneasy; and we don't want that.

Yes, I've PM'd you to apologise.

After I wrote the PM I realised it looks even worse than I thought as the 'it's not politics' looks as if it's a direct contradiction of what you said.

I'm a bit out of synch with things at the moment because I'm in the middle of doing something rather complicated*, and snatching the odd moment here.


* no, not walking and chewing gum.