Search results

The tunnel forks off the tunnel up to Kentish Town and runs under St Pancras forecourt, parallel to the Euston Road and the original Met tunnel, then stops at the boundary of the Midland's land on the east side of the road that runs up the west side of St Pancras station. It was built at the...

...and reminds me of Winchester Chesil. Moor Street was given a super-massively-GWR-esque makeover by BR. Some call it a pastiche. I like it a lot. Moreover, as a station on the national network it provides a standard against which all more modern "refurbishments" can be measured and found...

There is certainly some bizarre stuff in the official data both horizontally and vertically. This is Dainton as from railwaydata.co.uk. The blue line is the gradient profile as quoted by the site, with samples at regular x intervals. The red line is the gradient profile in "conventional" form...

Yes, but the reason they wanted to do that was that the local north-eastern ore contained too much phosphorus for the acid Bessemer process, and needed to be mixed with purer ore from the Cumbrian side. So the need didn't arise until the Bessemer process had been invented and then taken up in...

I don't think capacity had become a problem yet; after all the LNWR did offer reasonable terms in the end, and the Midland took it seriously enough to go back to Parliament and seek an abandonment. I can't see that being decided unless both of them reckoned there would be enough capacity over...

If you search for "Mining subsidence" as a thread title you should find a thread from a couple of years back containing all the detail I managed to dig up on this mini-saga. As far as routing is concerned, occasional trains would still randomly use the Cudworth route in the 80s right up until...

I did that, but the ticket collector put me straight, telling me that I could use the same ticket for my onward journey and giving it back. Whereupon I realised that having once got onto the Underground system, with a 10p ticket, I wouldn't need the ticket again until I came out of the system...

Paxman were trying to push their diesels for railway use before they were quite ready for it. The V12 engines used in D830 worked pretty well, but the V6 version worked pretty badly, and for some reason the V12 worked less well when used in other locos than it did in D830 - I think D830's...

I remember a period in the late 70s when the 17:20 SuO WOS-PAD kept being formed of DMUs rather than a hauled set as usual. I think Hereford was failing to provide the stock or locomotive, so they cancelled it between Hereford and Worcester and ran the remaining portion using a bunch of DMUs...

No, it was live steam, from the boiler. It was for use when the engine was stationary, and the heat/pressure of live steam was what you wanted anyway. You could, therefore, pass it through a loop of copper tubing immersed in your tea can and rapidly boil the water; but only when you weren't...

More or less, although the S&C was seriously intended to be built, as the Midland had already been through the available repertoire of less drastic solutions and seen them all fail through the LNWR's intransigence, so they finally concluded that no plan that involved the LNWR's cooperation was...

Surely much of the reason for this is that it terminates in a cruddy hole in the middle of nowhere, instead of going through to somewhere useful. A line should connect two places that people want to go to, via places that people want to go from; if it only does half of that it's inevitable that...

Try reinstating Stratford-Honeybourne and run it through to WOS. :)

The whole point is that you need to know when the train's still a mile or two from the station, in order to have time to manoeuvre to the doors with a clear road. (And he isn't waiting, either the guard has to go and fetch him or else do it himself.)

Agreed. It takes a minute or two of shunting to get my mobility scooter out of the designated area and turned round to line up with the middle of the doors. The shunting usually involves some encroachment on the passenger area because there basically just isn't enough room, and because the...

Cheers for that Don - much appreciated. Hope you had a good Christmas. Question: what is the terrible bell that sounds passing Dallam?

I disagree with basically everything about that report. To stick to railway-related aspects, it makes me fear for the chances of any possible future service improvements for Worcester; it is likely to encourage regulators, operators etc in the belief that merely to stop at Worcestershire...

It'll be a whole lot more depressing if this blight of additional urban sprawl goes ahead. The M5 is a natural boundary to the concrete cancer and they should not be trying to cross it.

Yes, pretty much. And to make things worse, often the English versions of names for Welsh places are somewhere between poorly representative of the correct sound and just plain wrong. It gets particularly awkward in South Wales where so many names are written in a bastardised mixture of English...

I would far rather make a regular long-distance journey by train (as long as there's a half-decent service) than by car. Avoid all the stress and fury of rush-hour traffic on increasingly crappy (and deliberately encrappified) roads, and just doze off for a bit instead. (Especially if it's at a...