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I'm no expert on railhead contamination and adhesion, but I somehow doubt that a (not excessively unreasonably priced) camera mounted on the front of a train moving at speed would be able to record an image of sufficient resolution and frame-rate to really say anything useful about the railhead...

By any practical definition, Old Oak Common is in London, so I'm not sure how this really helps avoiding unnecessary trips there.

You don't have to actually get a human to read each tweet to extract some useful data. There are plenty of companies doing filtering, automated sentiment analysis, flagging interesting tweets based on key-words, etc. In many cases you can effectively just plot a graph of "angry tweets" against...

Regardless of whether it's "the train driver's enemy" or not, it's not going to go away, so you might as well get used to it. At the end of the day it's just another way of gauging customer perceptions, collecting feedback and supplying information, but with less overhead and cost than the likes...

This is not an intrinsically insolvable problem though. If the City could be persuaded to adopt more flexible working hours, I expect that converting some of the nearer urban sprawl to more vertical, land-dense arrangements would not seem impossible by comparison. (I'm not holding my breath...

Even when we've reached at a point at which the return for electrifying the remaining lines has significantly decreased, there'll (probably) still be equipment such as HOOP trains and the like that can't realistically be re-allocated to other endeavours. Even a quite marginal return might be...

I expect you'd soon run out of platforms terminating trains at Stratford.

For me at least (a mainly weekend traveller between London and Ipswich), having trains which ran later into the evening/night would be far more useful than just getting there ten minutes faster. I suspect it'd be easier to implement as well.

Not being specific to railways here, but in general, failover to a new location is in itself a major feature which must be tested and periodically checked before use, and should be as automatic as possible. Just because something works at location X doesn't necessarily mean that it will work at...

The name of the franchise does not necessarily equal what is printed on the side of the train. At any rate, why would the DfT care what colour the trains are? They're not paying for them to be re-painted.

What even is Riz[z]la paper? How much space do you need for the average cyclist? How wide is an emergency exit? Surely the whole point of units is to unambiguously describe some form of physical quantity? If the person you're talking to unbeknownst to you has a hazy or alternative view of what...

If it was easy to rig up a "bouncy castle" system at a moment's notice on a railway line, sufficient to prevent excess injuries caused by a fall from a bridge height, then I might agree with the concept. However, by the time you've found someone to drive the bouncy castle from the depot or...

Don't give them ideas...

This sort of thing is exactly why we need to be rid of imperial units... :/

This would just lead to railway station food becoming more expensive. I rather doubt that food outlets want people coming in with (potentially several day old) rubbish with food remains in either, or for their time to be wasted haggling over £1 for some manky scrap of packaging that they don't...

I would rather doubt that it would make much noticeable difference at all, assuming the rails, wheels and suspension were otherwise the same. Conditions where the increased gauge would help prevent tipping/instability are already *way* outside the passenger comfort zone.

It doesn't really matter which way round you run the current, the issue with LU is that the tunnels are cast iron (if I remember rightly), and the running rails are bonded to, or at least poorly insulated from the tunnel. You'd get galvanic corrosion and other unpleasant issues in the tunnel...

It would be about the same in a free-standing copper wire (ie. not insulated, in air). It'd decrease if the permittivity or permeability were to go up, which it would do (fairly dramatically) in say a ferrous conductor or an insulated/underground cable. At any rate, a grid is not going to be...

This is true, though the effect is not very pronounced at low frequencies such as 50Hz used in mains, OHLE, etc. In most cases the cost/losses of a DC inverter at the far end outweigh the savings. If memory serves, DC isn't any more prone to arcing than AC, but when an arc/short does start, it...

You'd still have higher costs than OHLE due to the need to run the system at a low voltage, which implies the need for more substations, each of which needs more kit in it. If you're going to replace all the contact rails and all the rolling stock shoe gear you might as well replace it with...