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This is what I meant about conductor technology. Original designs were to support Aluminium Conductor with Steel Reinforcing (ACSR), which required a certain set of span lengths / heights / tensions. When aluminum demands for the second world war meant that copper had to be substituted, the...

"Pylon" has become the word in everyday language. Pedants would insist that the six (normally) arms holding the insulators are technically "pylons" (to match the use in aircraft to describe the external mounts for engines, weapons etc.), although most online dictionaries now record the everyday...

The 132kV tower line feeding the Melrosegate substation east of York were run along the Derwent Valley Light Railway formation (which is in cutting at that point), but I think were to one side of the line rather than straddling it. The current Google Earth images suggest the towers have been...

I'm fairly sure BR Class 60 were described when new as using Doppler radar for speed sensing at very low speeds - something like it kicked in below 1 mph in order to allow the creep (limited slip) control to work reliably (on a vehicle with all axles motored of course). If it worked in MGR coal...

So far, so good No, that doesn't follow at all. A locomotive doesn't operate at a fixed speed, it operates at a fixed power (as you said). Power is the product of torque and speed. The more torque the locomotive has to provide (the more pulling force), then the slower it moves. Whichever...

Quite apart from which, it has a significant employment site (Urenco plus Technology Park) adjacent. It doesn't employ the numbers it used to (about 3000 at it's peak I believe) and quite a lot have found they can work from home, but Merseyrail still drops off far more on their way in to work in...

There are still people who works at said refinery (not to mention a University campus on what used to be the research labs). Many more live in the extensive local housing, built to accommodate a large industrial workforce but now working elsewhere (generally in a Wirral or Chester direction). As...

I presume you got this map on your internet-connected smart phone? Or maybe on a computer as you were sitting at home. Where does that leave someone who doesn't have a smart phone? This might be for economic reasons, or it might be someone like my mother, who has an eye condition which means she...

Re: Railpass, this is the rail part of the (heavily promoted) MerseyTravel season ticket offer and is sometimes worse value than returns because of zone borders - the zones are inherited from the bus network, and some make little sense. For example, B2 on the Wirral covers 9 stations (5 on the...

Very much. This seems to be a system design blind spot - if you look into the major outages on the DNO networks (the ones so bad that they get OFGEM to let them off the penalties, and so incident reports become public) then they almost always involve loss of two independent supply circuits (N-1...

Having read all the way through, and as a regular MerseyRail traveller, there are some points I was surprised no-one has raised: Capenhurst, Bache, Little Sutton and Overpool stations never have station staff. Ellesmere Port is only open short hours. This seems to contradict MerseyRail's...