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The Kent coalfield. Still going until the 80s. Nasty place to work: deep, hot and wet. It was not unknown for miners arriving from other parts of the country to change their minds and jack it in before completing their first shift. All part of the same lot that starts in Wales, goes all across...

Confirmed in MacDermot. Indeed there doesn't seem to have been anything wrong with the boiler's ability to raise steam; it was getting it out without carrying the water with it that was the problem. Of course for a stationary boiler the operating conditions are rather different, and it wouldn't...

Having got hold of a copy of MacDermot I find there is a letter by Gooch on the subject, complete with cross-sectional diagram of the boiler, which explains in some detail these engines' tendency to prime; basically there was very little steam space above the surface of the water in the boiler...

Which suggests that the thing to do is to build them slanting the other way, so the top end is at Covent Garden and the bottom end is at Leicester Square (or Holborn). Whether or not Covent Garden station remains open can then be decided after seeing what difference having those escalator...

Same difference. It's like that because the government said so, and they could say different if they wanted to. That's what people are complaining about, not which particular class of "things the government said" it falls under. I'm sure there do exist railway staff who would like to be...

1/4" is 6.3mm. That's pretty chunky. Much thicker than shelter walls or cladding would be, and eminently standable-onnable. Indeed it's a jolly nice piece of material, and also pretty expensive; it seems rather extravagant not to have just used steel in the first place.

Hard to see how they could have done significantly better without something daft like a tunnel most of the way from Barnstaple, though.

This reminds me of Harold Gasson's tale of the chap with a garden backing onto the railway who set up a chamber pot on a pole at the bottom of his garden to entice engine crews to try and hit it with a lump of coal. This was somewhere on the line into Birmingham Snow Hill, so not exactly remote!

I wondered that but it doesn't really fit. Not enough rude words or Geordieisms, too many PHRASES IN CAPITALS and too much "inside" railway detail (though having said that Viz does usually get railway detail right when it does include it). The typeface is not quite right for Viz either. It...

A railway company whose line happened to pass through a parish otherwise inhabited by one farmer and two crows could easily be the largest ratepayer in that parish as a result, and the total for all such parishes they passed through could be quite a large sum; they were often complaining about...

Nope. Just looked like every bus, and made it obvious where they'd nicked the design from.

The place to build such a thing would be essentially between the northern side of the New Street hole and the Snow Hill tunnel. The Snow Hill lines are at a higher level than New Street and Snow Hill station itself is on top of a hump with steep gradients either side. The excavation would be...

You don't find native alkali metals hanging around underground waiting to react with some water. Nor (in general) do you find substances that release oxygen when heated. Anything that reactive will have reacted long ago. What you do often find, especially mixed with deposits of organic origin...

Who the heck is Olivia Dean? There's one false assumption they've made, straight away - that everyone will actually get their silly joke. Confusing and daft. Put it back. And while we're at it TfL can get rid of the confusing meaningless alternatives for clear and obvious names like "North...

I've always assumed that, since the portals are so very much taller than the height of the train. It's not uncommon for tunnels on lines that were built early to have a gigantic portal that tapers down to a more sensible size inside, Box west portal being a well-known example, so I'd just...

And which does not require a mobile phone or a bank account either to buy or to use. You just hand over ordinary money and get an ordinary piece of cardboard. No third parties involved. I would consider that a vast improvement over the current complex exclusionary mess.

...said trains having approached the junction heading in an easterleigh direction.

Oh, hand-crank and pull-string starters work rather well on diesels :) They confer the huge advantage that you don't need any electrics at all. They're also a lot more reliable than the electric starting systems on machines which make no use of electricity other than for the starting system, on...

Hear, hear. To increase average speed it's far more effective to fill in the valleys than to try and raise the peaks and/or steepen their slopes.

...as described by Gerry Fiennes.