Recent content by mikeb42

The most succinct and accurate response availabile. The only person on a train in recent years with reasonable prospects of an entire journey surrounded by basic civility is the driver. I'd love to have a steel wall between me and my fellow passengers a lot of the time. It seems even this...

Serious question: Is anyone/anything even considering the arrangement of 10 car sets on a moment by moment basis? There are 4 possible arrangements and trains turn up randomly in all of them. How they end up seems to be a fluke determined by ad-hoc events. Meanwhile, set swaps, particularly at...

At morning or evening peak, yes, it's terrible. The rest of the time, not really. Sometimes you'd be better off going up the A46, along the M4 and back down the M32 than the direct route. More generally, Bath must be one of the few places that's  worse to try and drive in and out of or to park...

Do staff rely on the public displays or at least the underlying data they present re formations? If so, one factor multiplying confusion may have been that 10 car formations on this route are often backwards/jumbled up/random/delete-as-appropriate. At the same time the formation displays...

Is there an emoji for hollow laughter? What they actually routinely do is put a 5 coach half-excuse for a train on some of these services instead, in full knowledge of the consequences. The 2249 Swansea in particular is frequently absolutely rammed and a quite disgusting excuse for a service...

I'd have thought it's going to be very difficult to do this without opening a whole can of worms. Is there any accounting mechanism by which GTR can accept random sums of money without conducting a proper investigation? This in turn may leave you open to various risks. Experts here may know...

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...