Search results

But this is almost always trotted out as a reason for British people not to learn any foreign language. The fact that French, Spanish or German is not spoken worldwide is no excuse not to bother learning any of these. 1715086972 Llanito is fascinating melange of (mostly) Andalusian Spanish...

You may recall a dispute a few years back when Arriva refused to pay for 757 the Green Line Coach to access the bus station and instead operated from the long stay car park bus stop. Eventually, the Airport backed down 1715030331 Because the airport want to make more money?

Indeed, as I recall, one of the sticking points of the previous disputes was a proposal of an element of compulsory overtime. Which, when you think of it, is utterly bonkers.

Probably as tiny as people using the 100 to go from the Station to the Airport. I was overhearing from an Arriva bus driver (so treat this with the lorry load of salt it probably deserves) that loadings on the DART have been less than impressive and that they are considering terminating the...

He’s perfectly entitled to be annoyed, for sure, but needs to point his ire at the people responsible. But the latter costs money. And, in effect they ARE running less trains. The problem being, of course, that there are little or no consequences to TOCs (or specifically, TOC management) for...

To be fair, that generally tends to be the tabloid (and tabloid readers’) assumption that it’s ’lazy train drivers can’t be bothered going to work’.

Er, people wanting to go from Stevenage to the airport in 45 mins rather than an hour?

Shocking in all respects, but particularly with gateline staff.

I suspect you are unaware of just how much the existing railway runs on goodwill and ‘rest day working’. Essentially, people working on their days off, particularly at the weekend. A modern, well-funded rail system would have sufficient drivers to operate without rest day working, but training...

Which is fair enough, as they are not involved in the dispute and have dutifully turned up for work. 1715000248 You’d hope there were as few of these as possible, to be honest

The converse side of this is that journeys from Stevenage to the airport will now take 15-20 minutes longer than previously, when the (100) bus called at the airport before proceeding to the station. It’s not as if there is need for more capacity on the run between the latter two. 1714999936...

It also depends on the closeness of the connection timewise, whether it's a cross platform connection, and the amount of baggage you're lugging. I've also avoided changes where I know one of the trains will be rammed and my reserved seat will be purely theoretical.

Well, maybe a Metro Mayor should have the ability to regulate and "take over" rail services. He couldn't do a worse job than TPE and Northern.

That’s what Civil Servants are employed to do

725 Stevenage to Rickmansworth Arriva Minor changes to timetable for peak times journeys to make service more punctual. It has to be said the timetable as is, is ‘ambitious’. Much as I am in favour of longer distance routes, once of the criticisms of the 300/301 routes was that a rounder from...

Yes 1713272512 It's fascinating, and a product of their education system, which has children learning German at nursery schools, and then Luxembourgish, followed by French at age 7, and transitioning to 50:50 German and French at secondary school (German for scientific stuff, French for...

It's very, very complex, and very tiresome, but there's a certain amount of pigheadedness in Belgium about this. One of the issues is that the Flemish (ironic, given the above) tend to speak better French than the Walloons speak Dutch (ir's rare to find someone in Wallonia who speaks fluent...

The practice and politics of this can be interesting (and wearisome). If you catch a SNCB/NMBS train from, say, Liege to Brussels, you pass through Wallonia, the Flanders, then Brussels. For the areas that are contained wholly within Wallonia and Flanders, you will generally only hear...

If I had a pound for every time I heard "English is the world language", I would be a rich man by now. As I said before, if the train had been an international train, then this could possibly be a relevant supposition, but it was not. 1713039377 ...or German, or Dutch, or Spanish, depending on...

I'm not sure why French staff should be learning foreign languages for domestic routes, to be honest. How many domestic trains in the UK have announcements in languages other than English, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic? That will be zero. That said, perhaps announcements should be made in Alsatian...