Recent content by KieronQuinn

Sounds like that station has a pet fox, and is part way to domesticating it fully!

Until Northern got their Class 195s TPE used to provide a Class 185 and presumably driver for a few rush hour services from Manchester to Barrow and back, you'd also get occasional announcements on them for Transpennine, before being quickly corrected. There also used to be the well known and...

Can't be, there's overhead lines in the photos but the line at Sandwich isn't electrified. Maybe it happened again at Sandwich?

Not a station, but in 2009 Springwatch awarded the "best weird location for a bird's nest" to a pair of blue tits nesting in a level crossing barrier, complete with it rotating every time it opened or closed. Can't find any photos or videos of it sadly, just mentions on other forums and their...

Personally I use one of the National Rail maps from the official source here: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations_destinations/maps.aspx I've got an outdated version that seems to have changed design, but the same will still work: Open the PDF in Adobe Illustrator (or Inkscape will do it...

Quite possible the platform is being fed to the "staff" API* (which the NRE app and some third party ones use as well as the boards - I think), and the other third party apps use the "public" API. The staff API also has a field for a platform being hidden, so some apps might be ignoring this...

New Northern have been saying since before they started that they were going to deep clean the trains. This is probably that.

Because they use it a lot. If you have loads of services cancelled for it a day, you either have a serious lack of stock (which is actually the case, due to the Pacer issue) or are lying (which is what the public think) Edit: Just counted 39 services across Northern that yesterday (Thursday...

This isn't the first time they've been down either I don't think, iirc they were down like a week or so after it opened or something ridiculous like that. But if you have a faulty train, there's not much you can engineer to avoid it I suppose.

On that note I think Manchester Oxford Road and possibly Deansgate too have Transport for Greater Manchester in place of the normal Northern logo (or white tape as others have pointed out is more common). I'm fairly sure Northern manage the stations so they obviously don't care that much

On the Metrolink trams in Manchester there are multiple alarm buttons that are constantly being activated accidentally, because someone decided that putting them at shoulder height by the doors where people lean when it's sardined was a great idea. The system in place on the trams is different...

Here's an amusing one: Someone within the Houses of Parliament (or at least with access to the IP via a VPN or something) anonymously edited the HS2 Wikipedia page to say "was" rather than "is: https://twitter.com/parliamentedits/status/1220754335161896960 Now I know politics is all weird...

It got some use, just not every train from the Airport or Euston turned there, most used Preston instead. I guess some is better than none, removes some of the need for a shuttle bus.

The reason TPE were giving to passengers on Twitter asking why Lancaster wasn't being used to turn around rather than Preston was that it gets congested easily, whether that's true or it was just the reason they were told to give passengers I'm not sure.

Personally I just use http://realtime.nationalrail.co.uk/ldbcis/departures.aspx?u=039B1CD1-14D4-4CB9-83B1-A84CC3AEDF83&crs=man&H=6000 in a browser (replace "man" with your required station CRS) for quick departures. Anything more I dump the from/to into Trainline but don't actually buy a ticket