Recent content by mikeb42

The minimum connection time at Paddington is 15 minutes. Enough time to briskly walk from Marylebone... Abiding by this means the railway wastes the amount of your life it takes to drive 18 miles on the M4 at quieter times of the day essentially every time you use the station - handsomely...

They can't, for the very good reason that it's impossible to reliably pick a winner. As the thing they're betting on isn't really random since one horse or football team or whatever really is better than another, if they're competent enough they will likely be able to predict winners on average...

Accepted, this is a valid point. In which case, the 360 can only be said to have been less than or equal to 150 yd from WH152 at 49mph making it more likely that the only reason it didn't inevitably pass it regardless of aspect is because it hit the 810 first. This was the remark that led here...

Is there some confusion about the definition of "next" here? According to the RAIB: "RAIB’s preliminary examination has found that train 1B67 was standing next to WH152 signal when the accident occurred." The point of impact was thus ~5*26m from WH152, at which point 1H46 was (according to the...

Depending on how advanced they went in your school you may have been taught about things like the standard error in the mean and t-tests and the like. These are only meaningful subject to a whole lot of assumptions (the underlying probability distribution of the data, stationarity etc) that...

You can only "prove" anything you want with statistics to people who don't understand statistics. E.g. the railway was only statistically less safe after the Bedford incident at more-or-less the 0% confidence interval, and the first question any statistically competent analyst would be asking...

The first problem you've got is that the answer depends a lot on how you define "safety" and that isn't clear cut. The thing that matters from my point of view, as a passenger, is: I get on a train and go somewhere. What's the probability of stepping off at the other end having been neither...

If you're going to pay any attention to model output at this distance (unwise, other than e.g. to raise risk awareness for the likes of contingency planners) the very least you need to do is look at something like this: ECMWF Scatter for London 2m Temps, 50 model runs + average + operational...

Is it not just that in this specific instance there's a way to continue to provide a service that gets people where they're going, while managing the risk of a points failure down? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks to me like they're providing a shuttle service between Heath Low Level and...

Ok, so to be properly pedantic, consistent with my posts referring consistently to Rover/Ranger except where my pedantry slipped and I stated only Rover once... There is indeed only one Rover - although to be pedantic there are 3 and 7 day versions. There are several Rangers. The importance...

At least 6. One of which I use many times a year, as a regular punter not a rail enthusiast. Maybe more I don't know about. Why do TfW refuse to sell *any* Network Railcard discounted tickets? (Or at least did for several years until a year or two back after which I gave up?) Surely they're...

It's a pity the Rover/Ranger problem seems to have no solution. Try buying one which is eligible for a Network Railcard discount, with that discount, from a TfW booking office. Next to impossible in my experience and this is something I've had cause to try on numerous occasions. Multiple...

The best news in rail ticket retailing from the informed passenger's point of view for some time. This will be especially useful in overcoming the practical difficulties created by the likes of Avanti and LNER and their fake compulsory reservations nonsense. Falling back to ticket machines (or...

Yes, even during the festival the last Carlisle train is pre 19:00 on Saturdays and Sundays and weekdays are little better with a last train circa 20:00. Completely useless. On weeknights at least, last year TPE put on a train to Carlisle during the festival which left Edinburgh at about 22:00...

Recently on GWR mainline services (mostly Bristol-London, either route) this practice seems to have gone from almost never to sporadic. It creates a theoretical paradox for me as I do multiple manual splitting wherever possible and journeys on this particular route go through phases of being...