Recent content by Kaydee

View of work on Saturday afternoon of 7th September seen from Hague Bar road bridge, first in down direction towards Marple then in up direction towards New Mills. A lot achieved, a lot still to do!

Interesting to see that according to Real Time Trains today's Saphos steam special ran as scheduled up to Carlisle via Shap in the morning and back via the S&C this afternoon. But TPE and Avanti can't get there!

A bus option would struggle to run reliably to any timetable on busy weekends, especially bank holidays, when roads into Buxton can be slow moving. Beating these queues would be an attraction of the rail option. However to access Buxton station it would need a reversal in the sidings north of...

I mentioned in my previous post that a lot of work was done at the site about 5 years ago, so Network Rail have done maintenance here in recent times.

As I live not far away, I took a walk down to the line this afternoon. The location of the slip is where the River Goyt is at its nearest to the line, maybe 20m away. About 5 years ago there was significant work on the line at this point, the work compound took over the nearby car...

In the late 50s an 8P Pacific was rostered for the Friday evening up "Comet" 5 45pm Manchester London Road to Euston, returning on the Saturday 11 20am (or thereabouts) ex-Euston, arriving about 3 30pm. Both ran via Crewe and were heavy trains - the Comet would be extended from the usual 11...

For information, in 1989 when Regional Railways introduced the Norwich - Nottingham - Liverpool route a few trips used the Dore curve to avoid Sheffield. Typical Nottingham - Manchester Piccadilly timings via the curve were 1hr 45mins - including a detour via Derby (fastest journey time Derby -...

I can shed some light on the early dmus on the Stockport - Stalybridge line, both as a trainspotter at Stockport and because my primary school at Heaton Chapel overlooked the line! A batch of 4 Metro Cammell 2 car units (later class 111) were delivered to Longsight on April 1957 numbered...

Bought a return to Manchester today from Stockport using a Virgin machine - heaven! less than 1 minute including entering card PIN etc.(and selecting which of the 12 or so available tickets, but that's another story) Previous time using Northern machine - 3 minutes and considerably raised...

I wholehearted agree, having the same experience at Disley last week. It took me 3 minutes to buy a return to York, and that was with some experience of how the wretched interface works. As a retired IT professional who once worked on system usability I feel qualified to venture the opinion...

So to make a 15 minute journey on the train I now have to arrive 10 or 15 minutes before in case there is a queue at the TVM? I'm talking about small stations (of which Northern has many) where usually only a handful of passengers are joining the train. In my case there is a simple solution -...

But if I'm stuck behind three girls separately trying to buy tickets and my train is coming in, how do I quickly get a Permit to Travel? This is exactly what happened to me a few weeks ago (and before the TVM software at my local station was updated) How in a matter of 10 seconds or so do I...

I certainly do not believe the changes are an improvement for an occasional traveller such as myself. Last week I tried to book a simple off-peak day return from my local station on the Buxton line to York to find that the TVM had been "improved" with the latest software. Not being familiar...

Current typical schedule Leeds - Manchester Piccadilly or Victoria is 51 minutes with one stop at Huddersfield. Some Sunday terminators at Victoria take 49 minutes. Why should new trains take longer?