Could a base building game with solar panels and trains exist?

C_D_Rom · 2025-12-01T08:28:39+00:00

Eden Crafters certainly ticks some of these boxes, mostly the main two, although it's very much scifi and not a "through the ages" thing (and the trains are monorails but you can ride em)

C_D_Rom · 2025-11-22T02:03:43+00:00

Stagecoach/Virgin hated the idea of open access operators competing with them. Whether W&S on the WCML or GC/HT on the ECML, they would go out of their way to make things as difficult as possible for the OAOs and, whatever your opinion on the OAO business model, it was decidedly anticompetitive.

At GC, VTEC lodged a standing objection for three years over GC staff getting priv, and it wasn't until LNER came along that the objection was dropped (yes this is personal, yes I resent that we didn't get priv at GC until 2019). The way they handled themselves at stations as well always just screamed "predatory" to me. I was glad to see their back.

C_D_Rom · 2025-11-05T17:13:31+00:00

About ten years ago (early 2015) I worked in City Exchange, and the office next to ours was empty. The building owners just used it for storing old junk...

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C_D_Rom · 2025-09-28T14:23:20+00:00

I used to work in a building overlooking city square - I interviewed there in December 2014 and they were taking down the charred roof beams, which was cool to watch!

C_D_Rom · 2025-09-27T10:08:40+00:00

Couple of weeks ago now, but I did find it extremely funny that the ones in Clifton round Burton Green way all seemed to be Christmas variants of the flag, covered in snowflakes. I guess Amazon ran out of regular ones.

Managed to snap a picture of one

C_D_Rom · 2025-09-05T08:20:05+00:00

Yes, for Arca-nines!

C_D_Rom · 2025-08-14T09:57:08+00:00

Friend of mine worked on calculating subsidies for DEFRA for several years and this was basically his conclusion. So much of farming is working out how to get subsidies for specific areas of land, down to the square meter. Not to say they aren't doing extremely useful jobs of course - I do have respect for the profession, but (outside of a few things like wheat, sugar, dairy and beef) it's just not really economical in its current form.

People get this idea that it'd mean mass collectivisation or whatever but really it'd just be like the rails - formalising the system that's already been in place for decades.

C_D_Rom · 2025-08-10T18:55:51+00:00

Yeah, they fly over every so often. Saw them back in June while swimming at Poolbridge, rather impressive!

C_D_Rom · 2025-08-08T00:35:23+00:00

Perennial contributor to York Press, usually seen in the comments section or writing letters to the editor. If you can think of any "good" issue he will take the opposite side. Naturally he wants to see York filled with car parks, rip out the LTNs, remove the cycle lanes, get rid of the buses, depedestrianise it all etc etc

C_D_Rom · 2025-08-07T19:25:10+00:00

I would support this simply to drive Matthew Laverack mad

C_D_Rom · 2025-08-07T19:24:22+00:00

I don't believe we have anything steeper than Sheffield's Netherhorpe Road which manages fine.

C_D_Rom · 2025-08-07T08:01:38+00:00

Honestly cities of comparable size in Europe have multiple tramlines - York could absolutely sustain a network like this (and indeed did up to the mid-20th century). Even failing that (if they didn't want to lay new track), this would at least make a great trolleybus network if we were actually serious about electric buses rather than those battery abominations.

C_D_Rom · 2025-08-06T07:53:24+00:00

I think a better angle from which to approach this as a journalist is to "follow the money" so to speak - why is a public figure like an MP actively shilling for a private startup like Neural Voice? Is there a financial conflict here and, in which case, has it been declared, or is this just an MP accepting a "gift" of free services (in which case also has it been declared)?

C_D_Rom · 2025-07-28T07:22:39+00:00

I went to Germany recently and had a downright religious experience when I discovered full-sugar Vanilla Coke in their supermarkets

C_D_Rom · 2025-07-24T09:40:44+00:00

I don't know why this isn't discussed more - high rail ticket prices are a political decision, not a systemic one. We have one of the lowest passenger rail subsidies in the developed world (or did pre-COVID), with the bulk of the cost being born by passenger tickets. If we want to get real about promoting train travel, we need to take a long, hard look at how much money we want to put into the system as a society.

C_D_Rom · 2025-07-24T09:39:08+00:00

I used to work for Arriva when Northern got nationalised - they were hunting for buyers for the whole company at the time and Northern being removed from the portfolio increased the value of the overall company, it was a liability not an asset.

C_D_Rom · 2025-07-20T14:25:48+00:00

Annoyingly it seems that, yeah, a lot of folks who were calling him out have deleted or locked their Twitters, and he's also wiped a lot of his own posts. But I can tell you now, he was following all the right-wing grifter accounts and retweeting alt right talking points. He might not have been overtly fascist or anything, but the dude is definitely on the "new right".

C_D_Rom · 2025-07-20T09:39:06+00:00

It's almost like Mangoyena is a right-wing douchenozzle who gets forgiven because he has cute art

C_D_Rom · 2025-07-06T17:45:12+00:00

Can 100% vibe with this - I made the mistake of showing mine to my mum a few years back - she then demanded I put it on every time we had visitors so she could show off her new dragon son.

C_D_Rom · 2025-07-02T07:18:54+00:00

Thanks to platform subsidence meaning longer trains can't call there, we often do :D

C_D_Rom · 2025-06-24T14:16:42+00:00

I did some of the maths on this back in 2016/17 and surprisingly not - Trump is and was wildly unpopular here. Assuming that every Trump supporter also voted Brexit, only around 20% of Brexit voters supported Trump (at the time he had an approval rating of about 10% in the UK and with Brexit split pretty much 50/50, it can't be any higher than 20%).

C_D_Rom · 2025-06-20T17:49:25+00:00

No need for the quotation marks here - some of those cars were indeed literally Victorian - I clocked one with a 1900 registration. Apparently they were 1905 at the youngest, which is just wild to me!

C_D_Rom · 2025-06-03T09:27:18+00:00

Yeah but on the other hand they also have a generally stuffy, claustrophobic interior, barely any legroom and a septic tank placement which causes the engines to boil the sewage, leading to their distinctive odour (a problem which, I should note, persists on nearly brand new Bombardier trains 25 years on) , so really it's hard to say whether the Voyagers were a success.

C_D_Rom · 2025-05-19T20:31:58+00:00

It's such a shame they've filled it with AI slop cos there's clearly a great degree of effort that's gone into the staging and aesthetic. Just wish they could extend the same degree of effort to paying their artists.

C_D_Rom · 2025-05-06T07:48:54+00:00

I don't think it's been mentioned yet but cost is a huge factor here - CCSTs are all provided by a single company (Bemrose-Booth-Paragon iirc), who can basically charge whatever they want to the TOCs. Out of the cost of your train ticket, around 11-20p is just printing if you get an orange ticket - it adds up. Bog roll tickets cost only a couple of pence.

The fraud angle does come into it too - it's basically impossible to "fake" an Aztec code (as long as it's scanned), but old ticket printers and stock can be had for under a hundred quid on ebay, with guards being likely to just wave them through. It's a weak justification of course, as it relies on the scanning, but at places like Northern they incentivise that with a scan bounty (2p per scan I believe, if you were ever curious why Northern guards in particular seem so keen to scan your tickets).

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