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Yep, that's the one. My copy mentions that a Kingston route was a very early possibility that they considered, but it has no plans of anything that early; all it has is one sketch entitled "Prospectus Plan", dating from a couple of years later when they had abandoned that idea, and showing the...

Eh, I'd build a bridge instead of the tunnel - which is what I think the GWR should have done in the first place. At the very latest when they found they couldn't handle the groundwater pressure if they just blocked the Great Spring off, instead of deciding on a permanent bodge.

There are no plans in my copy. Did Ian Allan miss stuff out when they reprinted it?

The pils coach by Pigeon Rail Systems is described here: http://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/slip-coaches-slipping-distant-signals.225616/post-5521918

Ah, OK... I thought they had maintained some service by that route longer than that. Will have to remember about the availability of old Bradshaws.

Could be that a more productive approach might be to try and work out where that is first and then relate it to the railway, rather than the other way round. Not sure how much I fancy reading the whole book though. He calls it an "ugly little town", but I've seen that description from plenty of...

"Fantasy: If you could re-design HS2 ..." I'd get rid of the high speeeeed. I'd get rid of the contradiction of providing passenger services not between existing stations but between random bits of derelict land because it's cheaper and doesn't involve thinking about difficult problems. I'd get...

Two minutes between Carlisle and Glasgow? Nobody's going to even notice. It makes as much difference which end of the train you get off. Consequently, I can think of plenty of better ways to spend a billion quid. Furthermore, if even that is "better than most", it makes it pretty clear that...

Well, some people did do that, but it was generally considered not to really count.

Oh, don't worry, that all happens in the future in places on the other side of the world, so we can pretend it doesn't exist. Lithium batteries are essentially a laboratory curiosity that has been inappropriately released into the outside world because their advantages are obvious right now...

When the GWR first began tentatively experimenting with sleeper services one of the arrangements they tried was "composite" coaches in the sense not of the same vehicle having different classes of accommodation, but having different types of accommodation, ie. both sleeping and seated. They...

I was invited into Dunhampstead crossing box as a wee lad and the signalman actually demonstrated to me the routine use of an emergency release plunger to overcome some inconvenient restriction or delay imposed by the apparatus - unfortunately I can't remember exactly what - and thereby expedite...

I agree also. Planners and architects and the like seem to think they have a right to surround us with endless sterile expanses of prison-like concrete, brick and tarmac in which we are sequestered and regimented like rats in a maze, and expect us to actually prefer the machine-made deadness of...

That was another possibility which didn't come off, mainly due to the decision to use 7ft gauge. MacDermot's History of the GWR.

When the Great Western Railway was first proposed, they hadn't made up their minds where the London end was going to go, and came up with several possibilities for the route of the approach. One of these involved crossing the Thames somewhere around Kingston and ending up somewhere around...

This, exactly. Who cares? It changes so often anyway and it doesn't make any difference, so the only notice I take of it is to despair at the amount of money wasted fiddling around with such trivial rubbish. It's all one to me. It would never occur to me to register "Northern Rail" as in any...

They did eventually develop injectors that could cope with feed water temperatures up to 60 deg C or so, to allow for a certain degree of heat recovery into the feed water, but they were rarely any use on an engine that did not have some form of heat recovery, so they were not that common...

Well, Google Maps is rubbish. streetmap.co.uk has proper Ordnance Survey 1:25000 and 1:50000 maps, with contour lines and all the other usual OS detail and clarity. So for instance here (if the forum software doesn't mangle the link) we can clearly see the ring road gaining 60m in elevation...

That was actually the one that became a stationary boiler. There was a gap before it was delivered, during which time the problems with the previous two had become apparent, and the arrangement of domes is thought to have been a modification to increase the steam space in response. The ones that...

The word is "referred". The Underground supply is referred to earth via a potential divider between the rails with the tap connected to earth, to sit one rail at +240V and the other at -480V relative to earth (this is from memory, so exact voltages may be different and the polarities might be...