Recent content by sharpener

Of which maybe half are at Anglia Ruskin (formerly CCAT) where I don't think there are any rules about motor vehicles. It's when autumn approaches that I wonder why the police do not have a one-week blitz on infringements by cyclists to co-incide with the start of each new academic year. This...

Thanks for that, interesting. AI certainly had its uses, I asked it for a gradient longitudinal section and this dating from 1899 is what it found for me. Shows how spikey the summits are esp. Dainton. This Wikipedia entry confirms my OH's experience upthread about ailing HSTs having to skip...

Thanks for that. The line from N Abbot to Totnes goes up a tributary of the Teign, through Dainton tunnel at the watershed and then comes down a trib. of the Dart so not a lot of scope for alternative alignments, the A381 in comparison is terrible! I can't see a route where a longer tunnel would...

Not a good plan. I was seconded for a while to a central goverment office when bomb scares were quite frequent. The evacuation plan (which was never varied) was to congregate in a public space 200m away. I only went once, after that I reckoned the ppl who started the bomb scare were only too...

I think historically the problem with this section has been not enough power to cope with the gradients, not the curves, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Devon_Railway_Company#Route. I can recall OH being due to arrive on an HS125 which had the stop at Totnes cancelled in order to be able to...

I had to remind myself from p1 of this thread that the train in question hit a deer. Presumably with the front. What caused the air leak at the opposite end of the train?

I was thinking of the mechanism in a ratchet crimping tool where it requires several strokes, but the movement is all in one direction and it cannot be released until the final end point is detected. This would correspond to the locking slots in the Princes and Langley sliding plate. The last...

Interesting video. I suppose the lost motion required in any of the "economical" approaches means that the movement of the switch blades only occurs in the middle part of the lever travel, does this mean the levers are correspondingly harder to pull? Was there ever a design where more than one...

Yes from this satellite view you could do it at the expense of some of the car park. Conveniently the crossover is right up against the existing platform so could be left as a loop killing two birds etc. (What is the shiny thing/?structure at the London end of the pic?)

You could chain these local-local codes, it was possible to get all the way from Cambridge to the N outskirts of London for the price of a local call - though the quality was not brilliant. This was the basis of early "phone hacking" which was extensively practised in the late '60s and '70s. A...

What about Creagan on the Ballachulish branch? I am sure somewhere on the W coast of Scotland I have driven on a bridge over the mouth of an inlet like that which was/is a combined road/rail bridge. From the map is is clear the current road follows the original rail alignment but is it the...

And so if the eventual report identifies upgrades that need to be made urgently at other ROCs the Treasury will decide their relative importance vis-a-vis building more prisons or warships. Don't hold your breath. This might happen again without warning.

The yard and stabling to the east of the station at Letchworth is quite big and might have scope for some re-arrangement, but it is a long way from the station proper. I think the cure is slicker operation (as with splitting and joining at CBG), a production engineer or T&M specialist of old...

That would would have a lot of consequences. though I see they sometimes terminate short at Three Bridges anyway. I am thinking that reverting to the relationships in the previous timetable might have fewer ramifications. Don't know where I can find it though. Seems to me the down Cambridge...

And? The ROC was specced in 2012 and opened in 2014 or therabouts. With generator backup. The battery power station technology would not have been competitive or mature at that time and there would be no reason to retrofit it, assuming the genny could be maintained in good order. In any case it...