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It's annoying. If it was done well, this could be positive for passengers. A decent online account where you can upload the railcards of all those you buy travel for, The ability to buy railcards with starting date now, on the date of travel or anywhere in between Automatic renewal available...

No one is suggesting that unqualified people should carry out the shunting. That would clearly be unsafe and ridiculous. What is being suggested is that where there is such a dependency on a small group of staff, a number of mainline drivers / guards or managers should have been given extra...

For what it's worth, I love it. Not just as a piece of design but also as a usable clock. Hopefully it'll lead to a standard where doors start to close 30 seconds before departure, which is very clearly visible without a seconds display! More importantly, it shows that GBR are taking branding...

The plan as I understand it is for 158s to move almost entirely to Cardiff - Portsmouth. 175s on D&C mainline local services, Barnstaple and Okehampton. 150s on other D&C branch lines, plus a few 166s on Exmouth - Paignton.

Except that there are 5 cruise terminals in two completely different areas of the docks. Some days have 5000 passenger ships on every berth, some days there ate no cruise ships in port. Each operating terminal would need a departure around 8am with disembarking passengers, and an arrival back at...

Delivery took so long they decided that Uig would be better with two smaller ferries.

Yes it probably would, but at the expense of usage in Newquay. What is better, doubling numbers at a country halt from 20 a day to 40 a day, or for Newquay to go from its current 150,000 a year to the half million plus it should be delivering. Even with the improvements, the service to Newquay...

There is a second berth in Ardrossan that they do fit, but it is currently out of service. But yes, general incompetence is also a good answer. Three smaller ferries would have been so much better in every way.

I think it's great news that there will be limited calls at the villages en-route. A non-stop train ought to be at least 10 minutes faster than one calling at all 5 halts, and none of them see more than 20 passengers per day. Far better to achieve a really decent journey time and frequency to...

You couldn't get a Glen class or anything like it to go at 24kts. She's far too short and fat. None of Calmacs ships are able to go over about 18 knots. In railway terms, you are talking about trying to build a 125mph pacer.

Not nearly a good enough mitigation to actually prevent a fatal incident, or to keep a company out of court. Had GWR actually put up the proper signage that their own risk assessment identified, as part of a plan to remove these fundamentally unsafe* trains, the fatality probably still would...

Finally some good news for Calmac... Caledonian Isles is back in service

New hulls. No chance basically. A short squat displacement hull is limited in speed to its hull velocity, which is probably about their cruising speed. A finer lined and longer hulled vessel with massive engines around 3 times the power of the Glens could probably get up to about 24 knots...

That would be lovely, but it clearly isn't happening. Just build the thing and restore proper service to the long-suffering island!

It's just a matter of distance. Troon is further from Brodick than Ardrossan. The only way to speed up the crossing would be to scrap the Glen class and replace them with much faster vessels. That's clearly not going happen! It can't be more than a few million to fix the Irish berth. At this...

The issue with troon isn't so much the rail - ferry connection, its the crossing time, which is 20 mins longer, which means the overall capacity is lower than a smaller ferry running out of Ardrossan. There's already a free shuttle bus to the station, and passengers coming by vehicle are a far...

A threat of compulsory purchase? I don't really know what the rules are for that though.

I think Ardrossan is the only Peel port that calmac use.

Peel are much more agile than the Scottish government though. I suspect the government would end up losing in court if they tried to do that, as it would probably break planning /public procurement etc rules.

Peel are definitely the worst culprits, but they are well known for their extremely commercial attitude. CMAL were pretty stupid to build two new ships without a completed deal on where to run them. Before building the ships, CMAL would have had the upper hand negotiating with Peel on rebuilding...