Recent content by MontyP

I can't link to it as it is behind a paywall, but surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about yesterday's article in the Sunday Times which says that the TRU project is £1.5bn under budget and will be delivered 4 years early (in 2037)! A load of PR guff which seemed to bear little...

I can't see much similarity between a tree-lined Paris boulevard and the Cromwell Road to be honest.

A real shame???!!! Have you looked at the plans for the ringways that were proposed in the 60s? They would have involved massive destruction in South London and turned it into a dysfunctional car-dependent hellhole

Why do they close the platform 7 mins before departure? I often arrive for long-distance journeys with 5 mins to spare and have never seen this.

Seems to be affecting other local routes as well. I've seen route 57 and 131 services also with paper stickers for the route number and no destination blind. While I'm on the subject of the 57, the service has been quite frankly appalling for months on end now. Often gaps of 25 mins on a high...

I always thought the 8th track was lost when the Eurostar flyover was built.

St Albans to Sheffield via London is no more complex than St Albans to Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol etc - all of which are via London. Ok so it's galling to backtrack but this happens all over the network - living in SW London, I often have to travel "wrong direction" via Clapham...

From autumn 85 until summer 86 I lived in a university hall of residence in Swaythling with a fantastic view of the line into Southampton. My memory is that practically all the inter cities to Poole were air con by then.

41.6% is a mouth-wateringly high net margin, I can't think of any other industry (even professional services, law, merchant banking) where margins would be so high.

The dispute might be legitimate but the travelling public may view the response from the unions (i.e. strike action) to be disproportionate. It appears to a non-railway professional that the unions like nothing better than flexing their muscles and calling a strike. This has been going on so...

A timetabled relief service, just like the old days!

If the 701 rollout doesn't kick up a gear, then the 455s will probably still be around !

The old X26 (now SL7) Croydon-Sutton-Kingston-Heathrow would be a very useful rail route. Totally impractical to engineer it of course.

I'd build a new line (mostly in tunnel) from just south of Leeds on the Woodlesford line (around the M1/M621 interchange maybe) to somewhere near Church Fenton. This would relieve the eastern approach to Leeds and avoid the bottleneck at Micklefield junction. Send all Leeds to York trains that...

That's unbelievable, where did they envisage them all going to? I can see a market for a second Paris train in some hours, a few extra Lille/Brussels plus maybe 6-8 per day in total to Basel/Geneva/Zurich/Cologne/Frankfurt/Munich. Plus seasonal services to Bordeaux, Avignon and the ski resorts...