Recent content by 4973

Went for a trip to Bristol on Saturday - via the B & H of course with the Swindon blockade. At Reading the West curve and Westbury lines were incompletely wired to between Oxford Road Jn and Reading West station. Also some wires missing on the relief lines West of Reading station. There was...

On the subject of reservation cards - I was on a GWR service the other day and saw a number of seat cards giving the seat number and no other details. I've never seen this before, even whole journey reservations state the joining and leaving stations usually. Does it mean anything special or...

To go off topic a bit ... and if any members are from the Irish Republic and can add to/correct this please do so. I was talking to an IE driver late last year and he told me about the situation there. A major part of the problem is that the Irish Government introduced a scheme similar to our...

They are not just cancelled - they have been deleted. It's a different transaction, but what it means I have no idea.

If I remember my history correctly that would be the first passenger station ever for that line.

Interesting row brewing. I've not seen it mentioned in the GW thread and it probably deserves one of it's own anyway. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-40000763

The national Air Traffic computers are IBM mainframes and (very wisely) do not run MS Windows, hence would not be vulnerable to this particular attack. However any computer can go down in hardware fail situations and NATC has a carefully designed redundancy configuration to prevent on box...

Approached along the Marches this time so nothing about Filton - Newport. The work on cutting back the canopy at Newport is progressing and the new stuff is in keeping with the earlier style. The main work left is the canopy adjacent to the old footbridge which is all glass with a hipped...

Sorry my experience is just the opposite. However some TOCs (ISTR Chiltern are one) don't always issue a collection receipt. Had a really rare one once with a Southern Daysave. Ticket printed with a date 3 days earlier, I didn't notice but a gripper did (he also noticed it had the correct...

Seems to vary with TOC, however some of those who do have made a mess of it and parts get overprinted, especially if a railcard is required. Quite difficult to read.

Part of the reason it was more common in mixed steam/diesel days was the risk of meeting a kettle over water troughs. If the kettle's fireman didn't wind the scoop up soon enough and 'swilled out' lumps of coal (potentially quite large) could be washed off the tender. If the positions of the...

So have I - and its a dilly -- claiming I'm booked to travel with them on 28th/29th. Actually while I booked through them I'm actually travelling with Chiltern + FGW !!

Not strictly on-topic but I was chatting to a VTEC driver at Peterborough during Monday's disruption and he claimed that there were going to be major staff scheduling issues once driver training for the new stock started as they were tight on numbers as it is .

Platform 3 has catenary but no contact wire. Platforms 10-12 are either no wire (with some SPS missing between the platform end and the flyover) or catenary only.

You need to get expert advice on this one. My understanding is that the NOx production is due to the higher combustion temperature in compression ignition (i.e.diesel) engines and that is what makes them more fuel efficient than petrol ones. A change of fuel is unlikely to affect that.