Recent content by Joe D

When I went through Chippenham in the summer there was what looked like a freshly installed shiny clean cable trough, mainly elevated, on the westbound side, between the end of the wires and the junction, disappearing under the station where a narrow strip of fresh tarmac runs the length of the...

Oh god no, the DfT awarding engineering contracts directly? On franchising, timetabling and engineering, everything seems to be converging on the problem ultimately being that the DfT has been cut so fast and so deep that they're incapable of acting as an "informed client". There may be problems...

Yes Templecombe had one, and it is the reason for the platform changes in 2012 -- but it's a bit more complicated than that. Because the track had been singled, and the road bridge just outside the station rebuilt precluding moving the track, they couldn't move over to the westbound. Instead...

People keep posting that Steventon bridge is a problem and "delayed", and asserting the impact this has on the programme, and each time somebody replies that it's not a problem -- at least, not a showstopper -- and electrification is going ahead without dealing with the bridge. e.g. post 4731...

One of the notable things with Crossrail is that they've been paying a lot of attention to design -- the most important part of which is not aesthetics but usability. There may be an established way of doing announcements on the tube, but the designers of Crossrail have been revisiting...

Several years of vegetation growth were cleared all along WCML in London over the winter. Lots of buddleia and the like was shredded and the chippings just left on the lineside. In Queen's Park I watched them just spray it all over the lineside cabinets. <prods the Railforums speculation...

A big part of the hold-up so far had been the piling and the HOPS "factory train" being unable to meet its targets on piles. Perhaps now that the piling is finally out of the way on these sections, the factory techniques are able to live up to their promise when erecting the steelwork and cables?

The Parkway is these days better known as the M32 motorway spur off the M4 into Bristol. So "parkway" means "any station tenuously similar to Bristol Parkway in any of 3 or 4 different ways".

And quite a bit on Borders Railway, at Eskbank and again through Galashiels and Tweedbank. It's almost like every single example of a reopening is proof of the nonsense of the statement.

Can't believe nobody has yet suggested running the 442s to Basingstoke and then sticking a loco on to haul them to Exeter (and then obvs onwards to Plymouth via Okehampton, while we're at it), freeing 159s to ease the DMU demand elsewhere, and reducing diesel running in the polluted capital. I...