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Recent content by sharpener

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    Failure to lower pantograph

    Given the expensive consequences of failure to get it right, a process like this in industry would be have been fully automated decades ago. When I was a boy in the 50s I remember going to Earls Court where one of the exhibits was sorting all the black balls down one chute and the white balls...
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    GWML / Elizabeth line disruption due to OLE down near Paddington

    Seems ridiculous to me (an electrical engineer) that as mentioned upthread there are no motorised breakers so you need to send out men in vans to do this, given that I have been able to control my central heating over the web for more than a decade.
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    Power drain at terminal stations

    What voltage is used for the connections from Wimbledon to the various sub-stations? It must have been at AC as they had transformers(!). I recall as a child noticing that the humming noise from the one in Dukes Avenue, New Malden got louder the more trains there were nearby. Notorious example...
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    Storm Ciarán: Weather related disruption 1/2 November

    Is that at Cowley Bridge again? I thought there was a multi-million project only a few years ago to put a much bigger culvert beneath the tracks whcih was going to solve the problem for all time.
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    Totnes Internet issues

    Hardly a "short while" if it takes well over a week to fix it. Also Post #6 upthread seems to imply it took until the 23rd to deploy someone with a portable ticket machine, not much of a Plan B. Certainly there was no such individual there on the 16th, wife had to get her ticket issued at...
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    Totnes Internet issues

    Most sensible businesses would think providing essential information to their customers to be mission-critical.
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    Totnes Internet issues

    Seems pretty hopeless, it's been going on for a week now, my wife encountered it on Monday 16th. Doesn't NR provide the comms over railway-specific infrastructure? Failing which, if it is over the public network why are there no redundancy, no fallback plan, no mission-critical contract terms...
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    A bit more about Dawlish

    AS the other thread is now locked can I use this space to point out that continuing to send a fleet of trains into conditions which it is already known they cannot cope with is complete folly. Have we learned nothing at all from the "wrong kind of snow" debacle on the Southern Region in 1991...
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    Confirmed : HS2 West Midlands-Manchester line to be scrapped and replaced with other projects.

    To say nothing of the fact that although the various papers on .gov.uk look like the work of schoolboys they would still have taken a good 48 hours to work up.
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    Signalling Failure WCML Oxenholme Penrith Fri 29 Sep

    Where I used to work there was a backup genny which was tested monthly. On one occasion the maintenance manager thought he would be clever and put the starting battery on boost charge afterwards. The week after there was a real power cut and nothing happened, the battery had boiled dry.
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    Unused Infrastructure around New Malden Junction

    I grew up in New Malden and went to Elm Road school but have to say I don't remember the disused underpass bore. I used to play with my friends on the Golf Course between Cambridge Avenue and the rly, IIRC there were two 36 in pipes which were very visible where they and the rly cross Beverley...
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    Maximum speed for a train over a failed level crossing with barriers raised and a hand signaller controlling road traffic?

    On the one hand I would be loth not to comply with a police officer directing traffic. OTOH no way would I drive onto a crossing where the red lights were flashing. How would he know the nature of the fault? At Foxton which I use reasonably often you cannot see in either direction because it is...
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    Cambridge South new station construction progress.

    But perhaps it was originally built like that with the possibility of 4 tracks in mind, otherwise it seems an unecessarily long and expensive structure, ditto the wide formation. A bit like Letchworth station which AIUI was intended to accomodate 4 platform faces, hence the false "islands"...
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    Cambridge South new station construction progress.

    Sorry, I was under the mistaken impression there were going to be two island platforms, and four tracks into Cambridge Central. I now see the track arrangements are described in post #605 upthread. So AIUI there won't be more tracks either N or S of Cambridge S until EWR arrives. A while back I...
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    Cambridge South new station construction progress.

    Yes, watched it last night. Just a political photo-op; with the work already well under way the "announcement" clearly serves no other purpose. With this mix and frequency are we going to have a DDUU track arrangement, so that ppl travelling to Cambridge Central can wait on the one platform and...

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