Recent content by Anstecker

Stanmore has platforms 2, 1, 3 because 3 was added only about 15 years ago and they didn't renumber.

This kind of thing seems an obvious use case for AI, assuming you have at least one working system you can inspect. I know Darktrace have worked on systems to "make sense of" complicated industrial control systems (e.g. power grids) to make it possible to spot hacks, and I've seen a case study...

A lot of it must have been capital access, plus probably how awake the management were to the opportunities. If you were the LNWR around 1906-1922, you probably thought you were off to a solid start: you'd got the NLR giving you a large inner suburban network, you'd created the New Line and...

Definitely Hatch End then H12. It's a pretty fast train all the way from Milton Keynes, the bus service is very frequent (every 10 mins) and it stops just over the road from Hatch End station. And the H12 bus stop in Pinner is a bit closer to the museum than Pinner tube station too.

Actually, apparently we're about to do another one: West Yorkshire local authorities want to build a Thorpe Park station in Leeds. Surely it makes more sense to call it Manston or Austhorpe and not have people book five tickets there for the family day out by mistake? It only takes a few horror...

Thanks for all the thoughts, everyone. I've seen some claims on forums that keeping St. Marks as the only station in Lincoln was at least considered: a comment on this page claims, totally without evidence, that there was a rumour around that they wanted to close Central and concentrate on St...

That's really interesting and thanks for all the information, I didn't realise the St Marks buildings were such a mess. The restoration seems to have been quite extensive looking at photos now. For sure it was a more basic station with no footbridge (it doesn't seem like there was room for there...

Yes, St Marks had two through tracks, which were just terminating sidings in the DMU era. That's sort of my question-given that St Marks was smaller and the land presumably worth less as further from the town centre, how did BR avoid deciding to sell Central off? Right ethos of wanting to serve...

Correct me if I'm wrong because I don't know the era and area well, but my impression is that around the 1980s, Lincoln St Marks was close to becoming the main station in Lincoln: it had the London services via Newark since the traditional route to London via Grantham had closed. How did Central...

I don't think it's a simple one-way street. I've seen British terms go into American English: signal passed at danger in particular: that was once a British term but now I see Americans using it. Perhaps via Wikipedia or other online sources (Guardian? BBC?), or maybe British people being more...

On the tube, but Abbey Road is lethal. There's just no reason to call it that when it's not even a well-known name in London. Name it South Stratford or Stratford Bakers Row or Abbey Mills or something. Oddly, Stranraer Harbour actually isn't far from the town centre, Stranraer Town wasn't closer!

In the 2000s, at Finchley Road, from a Jubilee line driver "and if you'd like to change to the great antiquity that is the Metropolitan line"

In modern business thinking, it's a standard idea that when a company division is underperforming or doesn't fit with your main business strengths you look at spinning it off or selling it to another company who might value it more, and get funding to develop core businesses where you have an...

HS1 to Hastings makes no sense, but given that they were able to keep double track through the Tunbridge Wells tunnels with slab track I wonder if there's any faint hope of squeezing double track through more of the tunnels with modern equipment and a speed restriction to reduce envelope. Or...

I think they need to cut down the price of Tavistock. Getting into the town centre is appealing with the station building completely preserved, but it's a lot of extra track. They should start with a park and ride station on the outskirts of town to prove the idea has legs, then do the town...