Recent content by Dr Hoo

I presume that it’s a reference to the withdrawal of the HSTs in (belated) compliance with the Rail Vehicle Accessibility Regulations introduced under, err, Labour, in 2010. Did the scrap metal get exported to Turkey?

Taking this nugget as a case study of possible ‘quick wins’/‘low hanging fruit’ that might be available for GBR; how many drivers are based at Gloucester? How much effort would it take to get Class 170s on all of their traction cards and keep that competence up to date?

Thanks for this. Every day is a school day as they say. Can you advise as to where and when the design was applied? (My reference to the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway was in the context of regular ‘fleet’ main line service.) I believe that some early waggonways had developed an application of...

(Recognising that this thread is strictly about bogie coaches rather than bogies in general.) I was struck by a look in my reprint of Wishaw's Railways of Great Britain and Ireland, originally published in 1842 and with some pretensions of being a standard and comprehensive reference work...

I’ve been that way with CrossCountry on a pre-planned engineering works diversion and an ‘in service’ route retention service late one evening.

I've been knocking together some statistics from BR Annual Reports and Transport Statistics UK for selected years from the end of 1947 through to 1994/5. Although a lot of route closed over that time the 'average number of running line km/route km' seems to have remained remarkable constant at...

@mike57 , a good long list but none of them are what I would describe as ‘simple’ or ‘baby steps’!

Stabbing in the dark a bit here but one might assume that 'convenience to passengers' would have encouraged the concentration of passenger activities at the former GWR station whereas the default for any freight customer was usually going too be 'leave me alone'. There was no concept of a...

Ah, yes. Inter-regional gamesmanship for revenue manipulation. Now, what was that in the Transport Act 1947 about the duty to provide an "efficient, adequate, economical and properly integrated system of public inland transport"? Never mind.

Your work might stop at your workstation. I've always thought of journeys starting at the bus station or train station; similarly (in times when I had a 'desk job' with a computer) my work started when I reached my workstation.

Whilst there is a lot of underlying truth in this, it still begs the question of why British Railways/Railway Executive/BTC had presumably been renewing, extending and granting new inflexible leases 'on the nod' ever since 1948. The best option was to come up with a scheme that had benefits for...

Surely not? Did the GWR, LMS and so on really enter into impregnable 'evergreen' contracts with 'one bloke and a horse & cart' coal merchants to provide a service at a particular location for as long as they wanted it? Presumably these hypothetical contracts had been somehow novated to bind...

In Oxford, Rewley Road was retained for goods, albeit only in full truck loads and not things like livestock. Only needed four staff to work the canal swingbridge. I'm prepared to concede that locations like Wolverhampton may still have been 'too busy' for serious rationalisation but plenty of...

The 'loop work' in the scheme was very largely focussed on making it possible to regulate the longest likely freight trains through the Dore triangle. Any westbound freight from the Sheffield direction can be held in Heeley Loop, now 'extended' thanks to signal re-positioning. Any westbound...

(Having been away from my reference books for a few days...) It does seem to have been general attrition of marginal locations rather than any obvious rationalisations within the same town. There had been a few cases - Whitstable Harbour from Canterbury West had gone in the early 1950s as one...