I've had enough!

worse thing that any goverment has ever done was to privatise the railways , if everything was kept in house so to speak, these delays would never have happened

on a brighter note however , and speaking from inside the cab and not from inside the saloon , i am getting home earlier most evenings the tsrs are in cos the job goes tits up , my train was cancelled on three occasions this week, was told to go for next pick up, which meant, in my case, go home . i hope the temperature is even hotter tomorrow . ;D ;D ;D

Why dontcha take a bitta holiday until it´s over ?

Of course I dunno the amounta holiday you gets...

I as an excutive get 1 3/4 Months off (I reallly need them, two of my colleague executives just got the sack due to some affair that falls into the category of "Something i Don´t wanna know", and so us three have to practically run our 15 side offices in Europe completely and are travelling around all the time, and when we are actually in london, we get at least 3 night shifts a week for Corresponding with our Australian+Chinese Offices!)

I´m quitting in August and I´ll see ---

While it's dead easy to blame the government for this (and many other things), in reality, a lot of what they're doing is EU-driven. I don't have the actual directives to hand at the moment, however things like regionalisation, the forced use of metric measurements (remember that guy who was all over the news for selling meat in imperial measurements?) and privatisation are all EU measures that the government (and governments before this one) have been rubber-stamping to make them as law in this country.

Anyone aware of the new(ish) EU ruling that says that in a couple of years' time, right hand drive cars will not be allowed on the continent? BMW put out an ad recently advertising a new car that doesn't have a steering wheel - controlled by your eyes. If I can find it, I'll scan it and post it up here somewhere.

Adding to aetearlscourt, Her Majesty's Rail Inspectorate and LUL Chief Engineer's Directorate keep a close eye over what the Infracos are up to. Not to mention zealous Infraco Asset Engineers who enforce LUL standards and procedures and can serve improvement and prohibition notices. Basically they have the power to shut down parts of the railway if its unsafe in their opinion.

It's a criminal offence to refuse to cooperate with the HMRI during an accident investigation and they can walk into any office and speak anyone or take whatever paperwork they see pertinent to their investigation.

Here's a true (but very long and boring) story about a District line station in need of replacing it's rather old escaltors that kept on breaking down.

Before the old escalators could be switched off and replaced the London Fire Brigade wanted in place an alternative way for passengers to cross the two side platforms. Without this the station would have to close which was unacceptable to LUL.

It was therefore decided to build a temporary footbridge at the end of the platform. Sounds easy but the engineers had to sell the idea to the LUL safety people, the Group Station Manager (GSM) and the people responsible for station maintenance.

Not only that, the footbridge had to be designed to the LUL standards for heavy loading and train collision impact but this was not possible due to the size of the existing platforms. Therefore a case had to be made to the Chief Engineer to grant concessions against the standards.

Then the said footbridge had to be designed to fit in with the existing platform canopy structure. The canopy wasn't to be touched. If it was then a) the station would have to close to remove the asbestos from it b) the canopy would have to be rebuilt to comply with current LUL standards. Very disruptive and expensive. In order to avoid this the staircase leading up to bridge had to run through the canopy skylight.

The way the canopy skylight and its supporting beams were arranged meant that the standards for minimum staircase height and width couldn't be met. So it was back to LUL to state the case for yet more concessions. On top of that because the only place where foundations of the bridge could go, the platform width would be too narrow. Cue more talks with LU.

The next challenge was to check the foundations of the platform to see what work had to be done for it support the bridge. This meant digging up parts of the platform and erecting hoarding. So it was back to the GSM and LU safety people for permission.

And it goes on and on...12 months of telephone calls, meetings, writing documents, arm twisting, hair pulling etc. This was before any escalators were even mentioned... ;D

Forgot about the form filling in...

"rear covering" springs to mind .........