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I believe crushed slate waste is now used as an alternative feedstock for scalpings - if so this gives a huge potential to send it all over the country and duplicate many existing aggregate flows.

Good post - I was doing the same thought experiment myself - imagining the scenario you describe and then realising the difficulties in accomplishing it. I believe it requires a world where the railways were still one seamless integrated organisation, so we have to go back to 1997, cancel...

This is good news. I am not sure in what way the Georgemas trial could be deemed successful, as the news article infers. Georgemas demonstrated to interested parties that it was too labour and capital intensive to be viable as an operation, due in part to the need to load and unload from road...

I agree with this. In pursuit of winning (and keeping) new customers we should also start subdividing the non commuter business. Currently almost any non regular journey type is classed as "Leisure" whereas there are varying demand types. Community Rail Partnerships and similar seem to have...

You can't hold on to all of them. THis never works. Yes in theory the employer can refuse certain key workers but across an entire program the calibre of the staff wanting to move on will in general be in the echelon of better performers and those younger highy motivated employees that are...

Yes that's true, though you often turn a highly skilled, motivated ambitious employee into a resentful employee who no longer wants to work for you, and then leaves within a year anyway to work for one of the companies that offered him/her a position conditional upon taking redundancy. I have...

Voluntary severance schemes are a disaster for every business that has undertaken them, as all the most highly rated, able and mobile staff head gleefully for the exit and another job with a big cheque in their pocket and pension top ups to boot. WHen the dust settles and the disgruntled awkward...

I often see car v train comparisons made using just the cost of fuel. London to Manchester and back is a round trip of 400 miles (perhaps in your case a little less, say 350). When factoring in the cost of wear and tear on tyres and engine, servicing, mileage depreciation and so on, the...

Bearing in mind that HS2 trains are "classic compatible" and that people rightly have an aversion to changing trains with luggage, families etc we might still see HS2 trains from Euston running directly to Leeds via the HS2 Phase 1 and then this "quite high" speed link (200kph?) rump to E...

The RMT's stance is always about jobs and/or money. I don't mind this, after all that's what they are there for. It's the hypocrisy and misleading comments to the media I can't stand.

It is not difficult to construct a temporary or even a moving safety barrier. it is not difficult to define a problem so that it can be analysed and resolved - to simply state that a problem is unresolvable without considering it is avoiding the issue. Engineers have resolved far more complex...

I have known this stretch of line for over 50 years (and was a pupil at Brockenhurst when BR ran dedicated school trains). I remember engineering work back then as involving single line working with pilot men, and a set of crossover points were maintained at most stations (certainly at...

I have just travelled to Aberdeen from Southampton. The air option for us would be to travel from Southampton to Aberdeen airports via Manchester, a journey taking around 2 hours. The alternative would be to travel from exactly the same place (Soton Airport Parkway) via Birmingham and with...

Travelled on Sunday from Euston to Aberdeen, and pleased to say the journey went perfectly. Staff were all friendly and helpful. The only issues were 1) received a text two hours before saying there would be no hot food or breakfast( which annoyed and bemused the on board staff who knew nothing...

Wen you consider that it was a Labour Government that cancelled TSR2 and at a stroke destroyed Britain's place at the top of the defence aerospace industry there is no justification in trying to make party political capital out if the running of large programmes. The Common factor across all...

It is ridiculous to imagine that in the entire history of British engineering there will not be plenty of cases of failures here and there so pulling up archaic examples of random past failures on this thread to provide some kind of context (or excuse) for the 8xx units is a fatuous exercise...

Hi Dorking, no I'm not digging at the RMT per se. Its role is to protect the jobs, maximise the wages and improve the conditions of its members and nobody on this thread ( or even this board) should have any issue with that because it does a very good job. Anyone can sympathise with the...

Of course I'm not, and I'm not going down the road of posting competitive URLs when you can find all this material if you look for it. I suspect you know more than enough about railway operations to know where to start! :-) But if not, and if you are interested enough you can start at the Office...

I agree with your first point, but the RMT are not the answer nor the arbiter and the reality is that safety is the responsibility of other bodies of which more than one ruled on this- this has been covered in threads passim, but to summarise, the decisions on DCO safety and the various...

The safety aspect of DCO was addressed many times by competent bodies and was not found to be an issue. There is a lot more of an issue in making passengers including solitary females and elderly people disembark unexpectedly at an intermediate station in the dark on a cold evening and trying to...