Recent content by mpellatt

Comment from someone (presumably an insider) on the Facebook SWR Passenger Group - "expect further disruption as the train planners aren't able to come up with amended staff diagrams until the end of August. This means they will be cobbled together at the last minute leading to all sorts of...

"The balance between operational resilience and passenger convenience is a tricky one....." Not if you ask yourself what the purpose of the railways is. Is it to get trains from A to B or to get people from A to B? Once it's fully realised that it's the latter, then the delays caused by...

But they will have separate P&L accounts, so expenditure has to be properly allocated. But, yes, this is a "just pay and argue the toss later" scenario, passenger comes first, etc. Which "should" have been the case even under privatisation, if it had been done "properly" 1747988790 Oh how I...

This. So much this. Which ("slightly" hijacking the discussion) is why skipping stops to try and get back to the timetable (even if it actually makes no difference at the end station, as often seems to be the case) annoys passengers so much. It so often seems the railways think they're solely...

There's going to be "news" about the 158/159 replacement on the West of England Main Line at the forthcoming Salisbury Exeter Rail User Group annual meeting. I'm not holding my breath.

If I read (and remember) the Fisherton report correctly, better communication over railhead conditions and management of human factors re: driver assumptions and driving style would have been sufficient to prevent the incident. Other mitigations could have helped too. In other words, the causes...

When is the message going to get through that in the modern railway, an ASC having any SPOF (Single Point Of Failure) is just, well, insane. Hot standby master-master. configuration Interlocking, being safety critical, by 3-way voting. So I suppose that would have to be a 3-way master hot...

The issue is the UK's broken energy market, more than the cost of electricity production. It's "perverse incentives" writ as large as it's possible to write it

And down lines blocked just before Worting Jn too? Not a good day.