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To quote myself in another thread... The mileage from Mallaig to Kyle of Lochalsh is 421.6 miles by rail. As the crow flies, it's 19.4 miles, for a difference of 402.2 miles. Is there a pair of stations with a greater difference between the rail distance and the 'as the crow flies' distance?

I've been contemplating what a Scotrail order of Hitachi IETs in place of the HSTs might have looked like. The original IEP tender documents stated a requirement for 29 trains for Transport Scotland - four of these were to have been electric, presumably for cross-border services, but this could...

It seems to have been accepted fairly quickly by British Rail - certainly after the London-Birmingham-Manchester electrification was completed, and possibly earlier - that electrification of major railway routes was economically desirable. But thereafter, electrification was carried out...

This reopening was proposed in 2008 as a follow-on to the extension of Argyle Line services to Larkhall but seems to have disappeared off the map and the feasibility study not published. Looking at Altnabreac's criteria for successful reopening, it seems to do fairly well. Population of 10,000+...

Seeing as we now have the 25-30 Railcard, and the Veterans Railcard is just launching (and I expect on the basis of that that lobbying for an Emergency Services Railcard can't be far behind), the number of railcards is multiplying. I don't think there's much doubt that this is because people are...

Say a passenger is travelling from Station A to Station B, over a reasonable distance, on a train which continues to Station C. Advance fares from A to B are not available, but they are from A to C. The relative levels of Advance and flexible fares are such that it is cheaper to get an Advance...

In a continuation of my efforts to figure out what was going through the minds of British Railways management before Beeching, I've discovered the following BTC memorandum on their financial position from 1956 - which, understandably, puts a lot of attention onto the railways and the...

This makes me think.... Glasgow Queen Street is small enough, with long enough platforms, that one could see 1 vehicle in Platform 1, two in Platform 2, and so forth up to seven in Platform 7. Has this ever happened, either at Glasgow Queen Street or elsewhere? Obviously it's trivial with...

Having a quick peruse of Network Rail's Network Specifications (as one does) I noticed something odd about Route Availability 10. The only sections of line they claim to have RA10 are: High Speed 1 The Selby Deviation on the East Coast main line Virtually all of Central Scotland That seems...

I've heard of some shorter InterCity routes being branded as 'Shuttle' in the later BR era. Does anyone know which routes were involved, and was there any change to the service offering other than just a new name?

The underlying principle here is that we break down the network into segments. Each segment runs between two adjacent stations (1) and has a single base fare applied. For a journey over more than one segment, which of course most will be, the base fare for that journey is determined by summing...

Much has been made on various threads about the change from traditional 'closed' stations to 'open' stations, and the more recent reintroduction of ticket barriers at formerly-open stations. Was the only difference between open and closed stations the presence (or otherwise) of manual ticket...

I've just discovered a fascinating 1955 article from the Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, which they (now the IEEE) have been good enough to make available free of charge, on the Manchester-Sheffield-Wath electrification...

Looking down the specifications of the English Electric Type 1 (Class 20) and Type 2 (Class 23), it seems to me that the two are practically identical in terms of traction characteristics, with about the only difference being the addition of a steam heat boiler on the Type 2. Meanwhile, the Type...

The excellent railcar.co.uk website hosts copies of BR's London Midland Region Lightweight Trains Committee minutes. Reading these in sequence, one can get an insight into the evolution of the Class 124 Trans-Pennine multiple units. Interestingly, they weren't originally planned for the...