Recent content by The exile

Am I imagining it, but wasn’t there even one in Paris?

The idea that you can spread demand enough to counter overcrowding by advance pricing just doesn’t cut it while XC trains are the prime mover for so many short and medium distance flows.

Could this be a sign that they have been tipped the wink about a policy announcement?

They are surely there to make the wires themselves more visible and thus prevent birds flying into them - swans being among the few bird species big enough cause damage by doing so. The fact that they make it less likely that they mistake the trackbed underneath for a nice bit of uninterrupted...

They returned to service as 155s though, long before the single car conversion.

Though the reliability point has to be considered in the context of the maintenance run-down that usually preceded the changeover (itself frequently delayed). Yes - in general reliability would have improved, but the improvement wouldn’t have been as great as it actually appeared.

Replacement of North London 313s by 378s - although that was in tandem with other developments and followed a period of (deliberate?) neglect.

The problem, when swans mistake land for water, usually after rain, is that they can’t take off again. They can only take off from water. A swan is large and heavy enough to do quite a lot of damage to a train.

Either we were on the same train or the fault went unfixed for quite a while!

The burglar is the offender - but your insurance company might have something to say about fault in terms of the loss sustained!

One of the gates at Bath Spa does this with depressing regularity.

The W&W 158 operated services did load well (and survived - albeit truncated) until the beginning of this decade. The “ fresh air movers” were the GW HSTs to Waterloo.

Pedant alert - Turbo, not Turbostar!

Exactly - though they were probably worth a punt.

Less successful were FGW’s direct HSTs into Waterloo - partly no doubt precisely because they didn’t tap into any previously non-served domestic market.