Chairman Pip's Railway Thoughts

It’s S(Stock)super!!

Chairman Pip — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:13:25 +0000

I made my first, albeit brief, journey on an S Stock train this week, and will say that I was actually fairly impressed. Admittedly I only went from Kings Cross St Pancras to Liverpool Street, and it wasn’t a time of day that meant the train would have been exceptionally busy. But even so, I was pleasantly surprised both by the lovely squishy nature of the seat, which I wasn’t expecting, and the good quality of the ride (which in fairness one should really expect). I actually ended up thinking to myself “Bombardier could be onto a winner here”. This thought was not so obvious as you might think, given that the S Stock is from Bombardier’s Movia product range, as is the 2009 Stock, which I have to say I dislike in the extreme; to say I miss the 1967 Stock is an understatement. How it’s possible to have two broadly similar types that are of such varying quality is difficult to understand. It is admittedly difficult to ascertain just how reliable the S Stock trains are at present, owing to a number of factors:

They are currently only in use on the Metropolitan Line, which has a number of central termini and operates for large parts of its route with up to four running lines (for stopping and fast services), that allow more scope for diversions in the event of a train failure
The entire fleet is not yet in service, with A60/62 Stock units to continue in service until sometime in 2012, so reports of train failures could be either one or the other type.

Nevertheless, when I am on the Underground in the morning, and hear the announcements of delays on this line or that line, it is rare that you hear that the Metropolitan Line is delayed due to a train failure, whereas announcements that the Victoria Line has delays because one of their trains has gone kaput are commonplace. And don’t forget that the 2009 Stock is entirely responsible for the Victoria Line now. Perhaps though I am being overly generous to the S Stock. It may yet turn out to be a total lemon whose faults are hidden by the unique nature of the Metropolitan Line. We’ll see what happens when it starts replacing the C69/77 Stock on the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines, which are just a pair of running lines. So if there’s a train failure here, then there will be problems.

S Stock train - based on a single short journey, the new S Stock could prove a winner for Bombardier

Thinking about the introduction of the S Stock, I then gave some consideration to the idea I had about using the A60/62 Stock on the Lymington Branch Line, instead of the solution South West Trains came up with to replace their Class 421s. Except that the A Stock is the widest mainline sized passenger train currently in use anywhere in Great Britain, and thus would be out of gauge.So then I thought about the C69/77 Stock. Until I learned that they are pretty much the same size as the A Stock, and so would also not be able to run. Le sigh. But, that still leaves us with the D78 Stock, which is due to be replaced by 2015, and which Harrogate Council want to use to improve the service on the Harrogate Line. The D78 Stock are not as wide as either the A or C Stock trains, and so could be used without the need to do major work on the infrastructure. So how about SWT making preparations to obtain some D Stock trains alongside Harrogate Council?

On the road to…the BBC

Chairman Pip — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:04:42 +0000

Obviously this is nothing at all to do with football, or even sport, but me being me I thought it would be fun to include a little trip I took to Auntie Beeb to see a recording done of the latest of the BBC’s teatime quiz programmes, Pointless, presented by Alexander Armstrong.

Date: 27 January 2012
Stadium: BBC Television Centre
Capacity: Approx 300
Attendence: Approx 200
Away Section: Studio 8
Score: You’ll have to see the broadcast
Nearest station: White City or Wood Lane
Local rozzers: Metropolitan Police
Total Travel Cost: N/A (Zone 1-2 Travelcard)

Rail journeys:
District Line - West Brompton to Notting Hill Gate (C69/77 Stock)
Central Line – Notting Hill Gate to White City (1992 Stock)
Central Line – White City to Tottenham Court Road (1992 Stock)
Northern Line – Tottenham Court Road to Charing Cross (1995 Stock)
22:02 – London Charing Cross to New Cross (Southeastern Class 465)

Station to Stadium: BBC Television Centre, as anyone who was an avid watcher of Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Saturday Superstore or Going Live will remember, is on Wood Lane, literally just down the road (and I do mean literally, as in a couple of hundred yards) from White City tube station. Of course, Wood Lane station is even closer, as it is almost right opposite. It’s just less convenient.

Anything else?: Returning to the football theme, Television Centre is just around the corner from Loftus Road, making White City the closest station to there as well.

White City tube station

Splendide audax

Chairman Pip — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:21:11 +0000

There has been little recently in the way of solid news from our friends at Parry People Movers, particularly since the failure of its planned trial alongside GOCO! on the Mid-Hants Railway. However (and not wishing to sound derogatory about it) the company continues to dream, and is also enthusing others with those dreams. Two more ideas to see the use of currently disused or freight only routes by ultra-light passenger trains have made their way into the local media in South Yorkshire and the West Midlands:

Sheffield to Deepcar - the Don Valley Railway is a group set up with the intention to restore passenger services on one of the remaining parts of the Woodhead line that has entered into a partnership with Parry People Movers with a view to obtaining a number of their articulated vehicles.
Stourbridge to Brierley Hill - Centro, the PTE for the West Midlands, has devised a proposal to convert the existing freight only line to Brierley Hill to allow a light rail passenger operation, which would extend the Parry People Mover type product from the Stourbridge line to a point further into Dudley.

Daring, blue sky thinking is important in the Age of Austerity, because ideas can surface from out of nowhere that could prove both workable and inexpensive. Indeed, the Stourbridge to Brierley Hill plan has even received a potential offer of £5m from the government’s Regional Growth Fund in October 2011 to be used to start manufacturing the vehicles. If there is a way to improve local public transport for not huge amounts, as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, shouldn’t it be considered?

“First glimpse at £5m light rail network”
“New trains hope for rarely-used rail line”

Articles from the PPM Newsletter regarding the Stourbridge to Brierley Hill proposal

“I started a joke…”

Chairman Pip — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:07:30 +0000

When you are overseeing the biggest movement of humanity, it helps to ensure everything works. Alas, the Ministry of Railways doesn’t seem to have gotten that far yet. Chinese New Year is the most important of all Chinese holidays, in which people travel to their homes all over China to be with their families. Of course, you’ll probably know that China is quite a big place (traditionally accepted as the third largest nation on earth), and that it takes a while to travel across it. You may also be aware that China is something of an economic powerhouse, because it can source vast supplies of cheap labour. As a consequence, people go where the work is, and so often times you’ll find tens of millions of migrant workers crowding onto cross country trains from where they work in the industrialised and economically developed coastal regions, to their homes in the rural, underdeveloped interior to get home for what is their one significant holiday each year. News reports annually show the enormous queues of people at railway stations trying to buy a ticket, whether it be for a seat or even standing, for the train journey that could end up taking as much as a day. But this year it has been possibly worse. Because the Ministry of Railways decided it would be a good idea to set up an online booking system. Now, I don’t know how many of you have attempted to book tickets online for the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, but that is an interminable process of continually refreshing the page in an effort to get to the booking form. I’ve done it once and sworn never again. Imagine that multiplied by a factor of about 100,000, and you shouldn’t be wondering why the China Railways online booking system crashed. Kaput.

I tried on the Internet for a whole day but I never managed to log on
Fan Zhixin, a worker in the finance department of a web company

Fan Zhixin eventually managed to get a ticket by using the phone line. But she was only able to buy a standing ticket, rather than a seat. She works in Beijing, but comes from the city of Ulan Hot in Inner Mongolia, a 20 hour rail journey. Then there is the case of Ma Anjia, a construction worker from Shanxi Province, a 16 hour journey from Beijing:

I don’t know how to use the Internet. I queued up. I went to five or six different places and waited hours at each one before I managed to buy the tickets I needed.
Ma Anjia, Construction Worker

While one doesn’t want to criticise too much, Given how efficient the Chinese are supposed to be, and given that this is an annual thing, and given that China Railways have to move in the region of 200 million people at this time of year, why haven’t the government set in place a procedure that sees the planning for the next New Year celebrations begin as soon as the current festival has ended?

The limitations of the online booking system are apparent, how are some leaders doing their job?!
Unidentified Weibo user

“Glitch in China’s online train ticket system sparks fury”
“China’s New Year: there be dragons, but not enough train tickets”

People queue at the ticket office of Hefei station in Anhui Province - given this is not a one off event, is it not possible to come up with a plan in advance?

“Wurf it weren’t it”

Chairman Pip — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:59:38 +0000

Bill Shankly once said that football wasn’t a matter of life and death – indeed, it was far more important than that. Or words to that effect anyway. We all know how much of a driving force in the lives of many people in this country football can be. Indeed, Wolmar (for his sins) is a massive fan of Queen’s Park Rangers and follows them all over the place, while (I hope) you’ve all been reading about my travels the length and breadth of England in pursuit of a place in the 2012-13 Premier League with West Ham. So you can understand the desire that overtakes someone when they want to go to the game. However, there are limits. Which is why it strikes me as beyond the pale that ASLEF should ballot their members in Scotland for strike action over the case of a ScotRail driver who thought it would be a good idea to pull a sickie so that he could go and watch Glasgow Rangers play a game away to SV Hamburg back in November. If that wasn’t bad enough, it wasn’t even a competitive game, but a friendly. As a consequence, ScotRail say that the man’s absence led to trains being cancelled and delays for passengers and, as a consequence, have demoted him. ASLEF claim that this will lead to the man cutting a pay cut of close to £20,000, and that this is “his first mistake in 21 years of service”. What precisely is the union saying then? “It’s his first mistake, so give him a break guv’nor”? Taking a trip all the way to Hamburg is hardly a spur of the moment thing, especially when it is for a specific reason. So they can hardly claim that he simply decided on the morning of the game not to go in and instead go to Germany. He has evidently decided some time in advance that he was going to go, and presumably also decided that he would call in sick (for which there are two possible explanations – he didn’t want to use his annual leave, or he had no annual leave left). As a consequence, even they must feel that some level of sanction against the man is justified. Of course though they do not come up with options, which one can only take to assume that they do not believe he did anything wrong. While I can understand that the man might feel aggrieved about it, did he expect his managers to do nothing if they found out? A slap on the wrist and “don’t be a naughty boy”? In a number of organisations this could well be classed as serious misconduct, so he could potentially consider himself lucky to still have a job. Of course, were he to have been sacked, the same outcome would likely have occured – a ballot for strike action. Win win for ASLEF either way. Lose lose for everyone else. And on top of everything else, Rangers ended up losing the game 2-1. As someone often says to me…”wurf it weren’t it”.

“Train strike ballot over driver’s ‘sickie’ to watch Rangers”
“Union threatens strike after driver’s ‘sickie’ to watch football match”

On top of everything else, Rangers lost

Be glad we don’t resort to this

Chairman Pip — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:58:39 +0000

Those of us that use the railway regularly in Britain invariably complain about it. Of course there are different aspects that we moan about, but must often is that, in the rush hour we’re all shoehorned onto trains and have less space than animals. And of course, this is a fair comment, especially for those commuters that are stuck with two and three car trains (unlike me, who is lucky enough to live in London, where at the very least during the rush hour we get eight cars per service usually). But, it evidently isn’t so bad that people resort to what commuters in other parts of the world do, which is travel ON TOP of the train due to lack of space. Of course, this is incredibly dangerous, and most people in the UK would have more sense. But train surfing is prevalent in areas of the world where it proves to be too expensive to buy a ticket to travel on the train, if any space can be found inside. Despite the best efforts of the various operators to prevent this, it continues. The latest wheeze comes from KRL Jabotabek, the commuter operator serving Jakarta and its surrounding area. Having tried spraying the surfers with paint and covering the train roofs with oil, now they are having frames with suspended grapefruit sized concrete balls installed at points that trains enter and leave stations, and at crossing points, in the hope that people using the tops of trains will not risk getting a serious head injury. Given that they risk electrocution or falling off while moving at speed, somehow I don’t think the presence of suspended concrete balls will prove too much of a deterrent.

I was really scared when I first heard about these balls. It sounds like it could be really dangerous. But I don’t think it will last long. They have tried everything to keep us from riding… but in the end we always win.
Mulyanto, 27, who rides daily between his hometown of Bogor and Jakarta

So the next time you complain about how squashed you are when you’re travelling on a commuter train, be thankful you haven’t decided to travel into Manchester Victoria on the roof of the Class 142 you’ve caught.

“Indonesia concrete balls combat ‘train surfing’”

Train travel could be a hell of a lot worse you know

On the road to…Portsmouth

Chairman Pip — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:05:15 +0000

It’s been a particularly heavy few weeks for away games, what with Derby County, then Sheffield Wednesday a week later, and now the week after that a trip down to the South Coast for the game against Portsmouth. Still, it gets me out and about.

Date: 14 January 2012
Stadium: Fratton Park
Capacity: 20,688
Attendence: 18,492
Away Section: Milton End
Score: Portsmouth 0-1 West Ham United
Nearest station: Fratton
Local rozzers: Hampshire Constabulary
Total Travel Cost: £31.60 (1 x Off-Peak Day Return)

Rail journeys:
11:18 – New Cross to London Bridge (Southeastern Class 465 Networker)
11:35 – London Bridge to London Waterloo East (Southeastern Class 465 Networker)
12:00 – London Waterloo to Fratton (South West Trains Class 450 Desiro)
17:37 – Fratton to Havant (Southern Class 377 Electrostar)
17:56 – Havant to London Victoria (Southern Class 377 Electrostar)
District Line – Victoria to Embankment (D78 Stock)
20:17 – London Charing Cross to New Cross (Southeastern Class 465/466)

Station to Stadium: Unlike many other of the stadia I’ve visited, Fratton Park is an old, outdated one full of character, that is also, mercifully, easy to walk to from Fratton station, thanks in no small part due to the footbridge entrance/exit that takes people across the railway line rather than having to walk all the way from the station building. Out of the footbridge it’s just a seven to eight minute walk down Goldsmith Avenue.

Anything else?: Fratton Traincare Depot occupies the site alongside Fratton station, with two of the sidings right next to Goldsmith Avenue.

Fratton railway station

For God’s sake, MAKE SURE!!!

Chairman Pip — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:35:07 +0000

I’m not sure whether I’ve ever told you the story of the one occasion I ended up on the wrong intercity train. I was making my way home from Nottingham on what I believe was a Monday evening. Owing to my unending desire to get the cheapest possible price, I was not making my way to St Pancras but was instead on the roundabout route to King’s Cross via Peterborough. Of course, whenever you need to take more than one train you run the risk of missing your connection. As it was, my train was late getting to Peterborough, and so I flew off it, up the stairs onto the footbridge and across to the train waiting at Platform 2. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs onto the platform, the doors had started beeping (for it was a GNER Mallard), so I (almost literally) threw myself through the door just as it was about to close, and thanked my lucky stars. Until that is I noticed it had started pulling out in the wrong direction – specifically the direction I had just come in. Obviously this was a source of some panic, as the next stop could potentially have been Doncaster or even York. Thankfully, it was only Grantham, but even so, it was a hairy experience.

Of course, there was also the time I committed a complete epic fail by ending up on totally the wrong train when I had plenty of time to determine whether or not I was on the right train. I also recall the time I was on the other side of such a conversation, watching and imparting knowledge to try and ease other people’s misery. Well, one person’s misery – but that was alright because I couldn’t see him. So of course I had to enquire further when the following tweet flashed up from Tom Harris MP, the Honourable Member for Glasgow South and a junior minister at the DfT in the last government:

Feel sorry for the poor bloke who shouted “I’m on the wrong train!” but couldn’t jump off in time. Next stop: Preston.

Upon me making further enquiries, it turns out that the train had just departed from Euston. My reaction to this was “Holy crapsie doodle!!”. According to the Honourable Gentleman, these were:

Not exactly the words he used, but quite.

I’d imagine that the words our mistaken passenger used were more likely to be closer in both tone and volume to Fenton’s owner, though likely with even more colourful language. I guess this proves that you should always check the displays on the station concourse, and on the platform and, if you really aren’t sure, ask somebody. Or you too could end up on a train from London to Preston when you probably only wanted to go to Milton Keynes.

Respect the railway

Chairman Pip — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:22:39 +0000

It’s always tragic whenever someone is killed “before their time”, and there’s no doubt that the railway, with big heavy trains going fast, and electricity at high voltage running either through a third rail or OHLE, is responsible for a fair sized proportion of such deaths. However, it is hard to feel a huge degree of sympathy when a person is killed who, for whatever reason, doesn’t pay the railway the respect needed to stay safe. On Sunday, following Chelsea’s home game against Portsmouth, a young couple who had been to the game were at Wimbledon when, for whatever reason, the young woman found herself on the track where she was hit by a South West Trains service from Waterloo to Exeter. According to news reports, the young woman, Charlene Pickering, had managed to drop her phone onto the track and had clambered down to retrieve it. There has been a suggestion that perhaps she had been having an argument, as I have seen written that CCTV had shown her ducking beneath the lip of the platform. I don’t know. But whatever the reason, that is no excuse to have clambered down from the safety of the platform onto the line. There is no indication that she was unable to control herself, as the woman from Barnsley was when she fell off the platform under a stationary train. So no matter what her reasoning was, she didn’t respect the railway. If you lose your phone and it gets run over by a train, sure it’s inconvenient, but you can always get another one. If there is a more sinister reason (and I’m not saying there is), then run for the exit – platforms are wide and frightened people are strong, fast and loud. But for heaven’s sake, don’t make this mistake, because it will cost you more than a mobile phone.

“Charlene Pickering killed trying to get phone from tracks”

Leaving, on a jet plane…

Chairman Pip — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:05:10 +0000

The announcement of the government’s approval of High Speed 2 has naturally led to the ratcheting up in noise level of protests for one reason or another. There are the obvious protests, from those people that don’t want it built at all, and would prefer to throw good money after bad trying to make the existing network do the job that HS2 is intended for. Then there are the protests that the money shouldn’t be spent on a brand new railway line, but on a massive improvement to the speed of the broadband network (obviously the people who can’t be arsed to actually go to meetings, and would rather videoconference everything). There are the people that think the current two stage proposal is too safe, and believe that the whole network as far as Leeds and Manchester should be built in one go. There are the Scots, who want Edinburgh and Glasgow to get high speed rail right away (although it may well be that soon that will not be the concern of the British government). And there are those who believe that Heathrow should be included directly on the route. And it’s this last one that I’d like to concentrate on for the moment.

As published, the first stage of HS2 will include a stop at Old Oak Common in West London, where high speed trains from Euston will interchange with, amongst other services, Crossrail. Crossrail can then be used to take passengers into Heathrow itself. During the studies done by HS2 Ltd, this was determined to be the most cost effective way of allowing access to the airport from HS2. But, many people have looked to the Heathrow Hub concept advocated by Arup as a better solution. This would entail the route of the high speed line being diverted in tunnel directly underneath Heathrow, where an underground station would be built to accomodate high speed services. These would continue then back out and onwards to the north. The problem is this would add several billion pounds to the cost of the project, as well as adding time to the journey, for little passenger benefit – the estimates are that out of every 100 passengers travelling on the route, two would disembark the train at Heathrow.

The government have not discounted direct access to Heathrow entirely. One of the plans for stage two is the construction of a short southbound spur off the main line that will allow high speed trains from the north to terminate at Heathrow, which will give better access to the airport from Leeds and Manchester. But why do people in London itself need a high speed service to Heathrow, when Heathrow Express can get you there in fifteen minutes? At present there are two separate rail routes from London to Heathrow:

The main line out of London Paddington used by Heathrow Express and Heathrow Connect (which will be turned over to Crossrail)
The Piccadilly Line service that runs through Central London, and gives a connection to both London Kings Cross and London St Pancras

Assuming Wandsworth Council can make their Airtrack Lite proposal work, then Heathrow will gain a third rail connection, this time from the south, which makes one wonder even more of the purpose of routing HS2 that way. Surely it would be better to go with something along the lines of the one developed by Greengauge 21. This would see Heathrow as a through station, like the Heathrow Hub plan, but rather than trains from the north running through Heathrow and then eastwards into London, instead they would head west towards Bristol and South Wales. This would genuinely turn Heathrow into what people want it to be – a hub – as it would be served by rail from all four directions, while being precisely what it should be, which is a destination in itself. After all, what generall do you do having alighted from a train at an airport railway station? I certainly wouldn’t look to get back on a train.