Recent content by Pigeon

They must be jolly clever sheep to be able to tell which plants are indigenous and which are not. Do they scan pictures of the leaves and look them up on the internet? I suppose that's the idea - to breed up a strain of super-intelligent sheep that can learn to stand in the cess when a train...

Stations with 80% of the platform pointlessly barriered off and gradually disappearing under moss and bushes while the railway insists that you can't have more than 2 carriages because the platform is "too short". Bits of live main line where the drainage is chronically knackered so the train...

Mistol Bremple Teads.

...and the way to do that is to build a freight line. Not a line with the connectivity of a freight line but with a grotesquely overblown specification and then using it for passengers while still using the passenger lines for freight.

So what is the relevance of the "busiest piece of individual track"?

It's a vertical cliff with tracks placed directly on the surface, facing vertically themselves, so any train trying to use them will immediately fall off.

I have this vision of graves in a dark churchyard at midnight bursting open and zombified LSWR directors issuing forth.

Great, cheers for that. Many thanks for that, most interesting. I haven't read all of it yet but the important bit for the purposes of this discussion seems to be right at the start: That's very good, and clearly does give a good margin against interference by mains harmonics even with the...

There will almost certainly be a switching stage on the input side as well, for power factor correction and the like, which necessarily does see the raw 50Hz, so it is reasonable for the operating frequency and duty cycle of that stage at least to be directly affected by variations in the input...

I think they were introduced, or at least heavily plugged, by Gerry Fiennes for keeping East Anglian branch lines going.

The bearing shells were located by a locating pin in the bearing cap which engaged with a hole in the shell. The shells were installed using a tool which was essentially a "dummy" bearing cap on the end of a pole which you poked in through the hatch in the side of the crankcase. There was only...

Not with only one train every 2 hours, certainly. If they would be doing quite well then that is what justifies putting them back. The "cost" is simply the penalty incurred for the mistake of removing them in the first place. It is a separate thing, and not something that has to be "justified"...

One obvious answer would surely be to supply each socket through an individual self-resetting circuit breaker, which trips if you try and draw >1A and then delays for 5 minutes before it tries to reset itself. Another one would be to only provide sockets where they may fulfil an actual need...

This thread does neatly demonstrate the loss of sense of proportion that arises in situations such as this. If the timetable really requires not only that the stock be capable of such ludicrously excessive acceleration as to burn out of York station hard enough that it has to back off before...

I've noticed that as well. Pain it is, peering out of the window through brown gunk smeared all over the outside. The units look reasonably clean from the platform, but getting on board and trying to look out of the window soon reveals that they're not. I thought we'd left this behind years and...