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From the BGS site, it seems to have been very close to the WCML too. 10km deep so clearly nothing to do with the railway, but I wonder if anyone on the railway noticed it. Highly unlikely to have had anything to do with something felt in London - the UK doesn't have the kind of long fault lines...

We already have a couple of different kinds of vaccine that work for ferrets and monkeys. Great news if you’re a macaque and promising for people. If human challenge trials were allowed, we could have answered the question of efficacy in humans already. I’m sure people would volunteer.

Exactly - the bridge on its own is fine and not unlike plenty of other bridges on the line. Having two level crossings in close proximity on a busy, fast, electrified railway is the oddity, not the presence of one special bridge. Clearly not a problem with any easy solutions though, or it would...

Traditional terraced houses enable reasonably high densities as well as private gardens, private front doors etc. Blocks of flats excel when you're trying to achieve high density and lots of room on the ground for cars, but if you're building in a place with good public transport and enough...

This would be particularly worrying since measles can effectively wipe out immunity to a wide range of other viruses - not only is it a dangerous infection in its own right but a major epidemic could reduce the effectiveness of many other vaccines and make a non-measles epidemic (maybe including...

I suspect the idea of Brunel designing for 200mph is another one of those urban legends around broad gauge etc. (which technically would be better for very high speeds but isn't necessary), though it might be true given his ridiculous over-engineering. Anyway, I found a presentation (link below)...

There’s an element of chicken and egg here in that it may not be possible to build city centre offices etc. until you can get the people in. In any case, we could waste a lot of time arguing about whether mid-sized cities like Bristol and Sheffield need undergrounds when it’s clear that...

Nowhere near the current continental loading gauge(s) but about average for the UK. Also not a ‘high-speed’ alignment - it’s not really less bendy than comparable lines like the MML and probably wouldn’t ever have been suitable for >125mph (if that). Really the only historic line that was...

Add Cheltenham Spa (2tph XC).

Assuming increased home working will lead to less commuting feels a bit like the assumption that rising wages would lead to people working less. I suspect a large part of the reaction will instead be longer but less frequent commutes. Sure, if you already own a nice house in London your life...

All the evidence I've seen (including the investment cases for new, traffic-jam-eliminating road schemes) suggests that removing traffic jams leads to a net increase in traffic and an increase in fuel burned. That's almost the entire point of building new roads. I see statements like yours...

You wouldn't build a through-station on the supermarket site in any case because it was a terminus and not on the line between Lansdown and Bishops Cleeve. I pointed out earlier that there is space in the nearby cutting for a station. The problem is the limited benefits and large disbenefits...

The old Malvern Road site is now a housing estate and the old St James's site is a supermarket, flats and offices so no space at either of those. There probably is space for a basic station in the cutting between Malvern Road and St George's Road but it's less than half a mile from the existing...

No, since (at least by the present definition of the county) HS2 won't go as far as Lancashire and Heysham is in Lancashire. Warrington is in Cheshire.

If Warrington is anywhere near the top of the list of sites for a new SMR, I'd be incredibly surprised. If one gets built at all (which itself is far from certain), Hartlepool, Heysham and Sellafield are much more likely sites. I'm sure plenty of people in Warrington would be involved, but the...

Not true. Even the government's own analysis (which doesn't properly account for changes in land use and lifestyles due to road investments) predicts that the A417 scheme will increase CO2 emissions. The increase in traffic (which is the main point of the scheme) more than cancels out any...

Maybe it saves wood - tree trunks tend to have round edges.

Isn’t the Alstom offering based on the AGV, which already has distributed traction?

The point about reserving a seat from Manchester is that the service starts there. Reserving from somewhere like Wolverhampton is quite likely to result in someone being kicked out of their seat.

Nothing (or if anything it will increase loading on these trains by reducing journey times and encouraging travel via Birmingham), but a reduction in demand on the northern part of the route would harm the business case for lengthening trains on the southern part. Even with the conservative...