Recent content by 3141

True. But if passengers move further down inside the car on a 701 because the wider gangways make that easier to do, does it become more difficult for alighting passengers who have been sitting down to make their way to the vestibules in order to get out? I guess the way to test this would be...

Yes, when we lived in the Chilterns estate agents selling both existing homes and new builds made a great thing about "brick and flint" finishes. Sometimes there was a substantial area of flint, but other times is was just a few token square feet.

My wife has had two phone calls this week. The first claimed to be from Amazon, and the caller said that two gift cards totalling £750 had been bought on her account. He wanted her to log in on her iphone (which she doesn't actually have). She tried to follow his instructions on her Samsung...

It's been happening for decades on the Underground. Many people move only a short distance from the point where they entered the platform. In a few cases that might be because it's also near the exit at their destination station, but mostly it's just inertia. Similarly, people ignore the...

Yes, I'd noticed people saying they were muting the system. Their logic is amazing: because, in their expert opinion, it wasn't necessary for the system to have been used in this case, they will make sure they don't ever receive an emergency notification in the future. Then they start...

No, it wasn't a rant, it was a completely justifiable response to some of the selfish and narrow-minded posts on this thread from people whose little world was interrupted yesterday evening by a reminder of the risk of a small and normally innocuous fire getting out of control and leading to...

Actually it was yesterday, when my older granddaughter got her A level results and confirmation of a place at Exeter University to read Medicine.

In the 1970s and 1980s, (and probably earlier, but I don't have experience of travellers' cheques from then), those in US dollars could be used in some parts of the world in much the same way as if they were cash. I recall being asked to show my passport, as a check that I was the genuine...

Reading your post reminded me that during WW2 my parents referred to WW1 as "the last war", and I remember an occasion when I was talking about that to my mother and she said "I suppose that when this war is over, we will refer to this one as 'the last war'". It's many years since I last...

This happened during Covid. The xx.20 from Overton arrived at Basingstoke platform 2 (normally a down platform), waited there for eight minutes, and then took up the normal xx.37 path to Salisbury. Before Covid, when occasionally there was some disruption to the normal service, trains from...

Having been born in 1939, a few weeks before the Second World War began, I have a different perspective. No, I don't in any way feel as if I might previously have lived in an earlier age. I do find the 1930s very interesting in transport terms. There were the planned Underground extensions...

The area in which they are most uneducated, unfortunately, is the existence on the internet of plausible downright lies and the lack of effective (or perhaps any) regulation there. The story about one or more engineers using their expertise to develop a new form of air conditioning is...

I'll be interested to see whether you get responses indicating any pattern relating to religious trusts. Some parents do believe that standards of behaviour are higher at schools which have a religious connection. I've known parents make token appearances at church in order to qualify their...

I looked at the website for one of these devices, purportedly developed by a British engineer and made at his father's engineering works, keeping a number of local jobs in existence. Clicking "contact us" led to sherum.com in Kowloon.

So here is Farage trying to redefine the world, by saying that if he gets re-relected in Clacton, then "the people of Clacton" will have judged that he didn't do anything wrong in not disclosing certain gifts, and therefore it's OK, he didn't do anything he shouldn't have. If no other serious...