Recent content by jimm

I think they were being a bit optimistic there for vintage traction - the final 34-minute timing seems a bit more like it - but the two-car Turbo on the 05.10 from Oxford to Worcester on weekdays is booked for a 25-minute non-stop run, with a minute or two usually shaved off that. A couple of...

Try asking people living in Gloucester, Cheltenham and station-less Cirencester why it needs a 'large highway'. This work is nothing to do with encouraging traffic from the Midlands to go that way. It's about tackling what has been an obvious problem ever since the A419/A417 was dualled between...

Corrrect. It has always run non-stop from Oxford to Moreton-in-Marsh to make sure it is able to get to Worcester quickly enough to be through Norton junction before the 05.23 from Hereford needs the single line to Evesham. And there isn't a lot of demand for westbound traffic from the...

Can I suggest you get out a map and ask Google to find more recent figures before posting this kind of stuff. Kingham station sits between Kingham village (to the east and its population is right up at the top of the range you give) and Bledington to the west. Then there is Churchill just to...

Pulhams, wich runs the 801 buses between Moreton-in-Marsh and Cheltenham pulled out of the scheme (originally set up with support from the Cotswolds AONB, now National Landscape Area) as it felt GWR was taking too much of the income and while ownership of th firm has changed from the family to...

You need to stop thinking about 'relief' lines. Current operating practice between Oxford and Wolvercote is that container trains use the central pair of tracks as much as possible and are held there while passenger services run past them on the outer tracks. You keep going on about 'huge...

There was definitely a train around that time earlier in the 1980s - 17.40 off Queen Street rings a bell, as I am sure I travelled on a service departing at that time on a Saturday to travel to Corrour, where I got off in in pitch darkness, as it was late October. My family had rented a cottage...

The current situation is that, as noted above, GWR got the nod from the Department for Transport to bid for the paths needed for a two-houry frequency on weekdays and Saturdays. The application is with the ORR but its decision is still awaited. Plus as many 175s as possible need to be in...

On what planet would Heyford station be of any value in this, considering what is planned for the completed version of Heyford Park? It is at the bottom of a road that winds down through the western end of Lower Heyford village and is wedged in next to the canal, with a couple of dozen parking...

The post I quoted is yours, with your name on it. Surely it was obvious that what I wrote was in response to this line at the end, which does not appear to refer to anything that ep09 had said in the post that you had quoted. And to be clear, I agree with the points...

From late 2004 to 2008 the 180s were used pretty much in line with the 2005 diagram list posted by TurboFintan - Paddington to the Cotswold Line and to Cheltenham, with HSTs covering the heavily-loaded peak trains in and out of London on both routes.

Plenty of people use Cotswold Line trains to get into Oxford (or connect for Culham and Didcot) and Reading for work - and for other reasons. The current signalling arrangements would only allow a train to turn back in the high level platform if nothing else is on the line between Norton...

According to your profile, you are in Bath, so how are you paying council tax in Oxfordshire? If you are in Oxfordshire, then I am surprised that you are not aware that something like 3,500 new homes are slated for the Culham area in coming years, which might just have something to do with the...

Are you referring to extra trailing vans being added at Perth if required? There were obviously BGs running from and to Glasgow and Edinburgh to carry post (and the newspapers printed in the two cities on the northbound runs) as no other brake vehicles were included in the formations of the...

There was such a thing as a Mk1 SLEP. According to British Railways Mark 1 Coaches, by Keith Parkin, published in 1991, they were created by the Eastern and London Midland regions in 1971 by modifying 33 second class Mk1 sleepers so that the upper berth could be folded back, allowing them to be...