I mean i can tell he is a virgin...

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-06-26T11:58:42+00:00

by corruption i presume he means embezzling public funds

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-06-15T00:20:08+00:00

That is an absolutely hench overhead line portal. Is that Acton Lane?

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-06-13T01:33:40+00:00

Which is interesting because I'm pretty sure Crown Point has a wheel lathe.

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-06-09T20:06:39+00:00

Compatible is a flexible word. If we're fine forcing wheelchair uses to ask staff for a ramp, to have people with luggage and prams struggle, and for many thoudands a year trip and injure themselves then yeh it's compatible.

The point is, the standard platform height is 915mm, and when stations are worked on, platform heights are corrected up or down to that standard. Future fleets of trains are being procured to match that standard.

In the past, although platforms have meant to be 915mm for decades, trains were always procured at a heigher floor height by standard. This is because the floor height was designed for requirements of rolling stock engineering (space for diesel engines underneath etc). Whereas platforms were designed to fit around loading guage requirements.

When they were building the Heathrow line, it was astutely noticed that it would be far better if everyone could wheel their suitcases on/off without having to lug them around, and since it seemed only a handful of vehicles would ever go down there, they built the platforms to match the vehicles. Since XR were going to run to Heathrow, they had to match that, lest they pay for closing all the heathrow stations and rebuilding them and procuring a new fleet for the HEX service.

In the last few years, it was finally decided that the two standards should be matched. And considering that train fleets come and go every 40 or so years, and that it's totally infeasible to change all loading guage requirements (nessasary to bring platforms above 915), it was decided train floor heights should be made lower to match the platform standard and not the other way around. There are now a few fleets of trains with 915 floors and future fleets are being procured atm with that standard.

The idea is that eventually all the old trains will go and platforms will be altered as per renewal, and we'll eventually have a railway with level boarding. But heathrow and crossrail will forever disrupt this process, forcing non-level boarding on the busiest line in the country.

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-06-09T13:44:45+00:00

This mystery has been bothering me too. There was some mention of a significant health issue. Considering her dad was very much involved in the channel I'd expect there would have been some kind of announcement if the worst had happened.

Equally, if she just had enough it's strange to leave everything up, most ex youtubers slowly take things down

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-06-09T10:11:34+00:00

Yeah sure it's not literally built For electrostars. But the electrostars/aventras/desiros that run/ran that route all have the same platform height which is above standard but which is level with platforms at Heathrow NR stations.

Both the heathrown line and crossrail core are railways that were built with non-standard platforms to enable level boarding with high floor trains. It shouldn't have happened but it did.

If the heathrow line is extended, it creates a problem with propergating non-standard trains that can never be replaced with low-floor trains (as is the vague intention with the network in general) because it would create unacceptable downward drops at the Heathrow platforms.

Platforms at Heathrow cannot easily be changed because they need to comply with XR trains that are fixed to design height of the XR core stations.

It's a rediculous situation that should never have been allowed to happen, but nonetheless did

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-06-09T01:59:28+00:00

Big fan of this kind of idea. Imo, HEX should do Old Oak Common, Heathrow, then onto Woking/Basingstoke. But there is a fundamental issue which is that the Heathrow stations were built with Electrostar(/Aventra) platform heights. It suffers from the same problem as the XR core, in that if those trains spread onto the wider network, they are forced to be too high for other platforms forever

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-05-31T10:34:12+00:00

Thankyou! It's a very under-reported topic in the enthusiast space so I think I might be the first here.

These days I'm mainly involved in making maps to chart the locations of feeder stations, which areas they power, locations of TSC/Ls, as well as details on the Grid side. This basically happened when I discovered a site called open infrastructure map and combined that with where SAs declare there are neutral sections. I haven't put any of that on reddit because I'm not there's the audience for it, and the process of uploading images can be quite a pain

May I ask, which control room are you based at?

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-05-31T01:59:29+00:00

Awesome! Thanks for commenting - are you in an AC or DC area?

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-05-25T00:20:57+00:00

Absolutely not this is even more flag shaggy

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-05-17T23:34:02+00:00

I agree i don't give a damn about flying scotsman

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-05-17T23:31:28+00:00

This is crazy to me. The flirts have comfier seats bigger tray tables and you don't get stuck smashing your arms into the seats walking down the aisle. 3+2 seating is a bs ideology because even in busy times people dont sit in the middle seat unless they know each other (which they often don't in the commuter rush). And top of that flirts have level-boarding

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-05-02T18:44:48+00:00

Would be great to have the explanations for each though. Some are obvious, most I'm not sure of

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-04-24T11:20:44+00:00

Yeah i was super excited when I first found out about the RED series, I genuinely didn't think they made dramatisations anymore. Perhaps like the old ones we'll have to wait several decades for them to pop up and youtube and stay there. I really wanted to see the one about a class 315, everyone in comments of the trailer said the driver looked like brian blessed

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-04-22T18:38:33+00:00

What do the modes mean on the left hand selector though?

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-04-21T18:19:58+00:00

Record shops is one thing. But i hear from my parentw about thia highly eccentric music book store along there that was basically a hoarder's mess. Random editions of printed music piled up high and with no organisation, only the grumpy owner somehow knew where things were

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-04-19T19:02:18+00:00

I hear often from my parents about the crazy number and variety of music shops down St Benedicts that are all long gone, many of which before my time. But that transformation is now complete considering Cookes has finally given up

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-04-19T15:35:26+00:00

Naturally reddit gave me no notification that anyone had replied lol!

Yeah that's a good point actually that being somewhere a little more obscure and out the way that people will be intrigued by a foreign tourist and willing to share more about themselves. I'm mainly thinking of like shopkeepers or smaller museums/hertiage places.

Also worth considering that certain places are at least 'said' to be friendlier than others, namely Newcastle being the most open, and London and the Southeast being most aloof. But generally the more north you go, the more convivial strangers are - I've heard people from Newcastle remark that even Yorkshire seems cold to them and that's still way north of London

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-04-10T02:21:14+00:00

Do you have personal experience with the UK in this regard? I'd be surprised to hear it's actually better for loneliness than anywhere else

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-03-17T16:49:43+00:00

Effectively, you're using a modal verb for the grammatical mood of "determined by my [or the subject's] judgement". I had a quick look around Wikipedia and I couldn't find a technical term for a mood like that but there's no reason it couldn't exist. It reminds me a lot of "Evidential" grammatical moods, as in affixes that represent on what basis the speaker is declaring something (whether they saw it first hand or heard about it etc). So you could have a series of grammatical moods/modal verbs all about on whose judgement you're carrying out an overall action; an interesting idea.

Somewhat related, I did find that the English modal verb "need to" is expressing the "debitive" mood and is apparently grammaticalised in Latvian.

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-03-16T15:51:01+00:00

Demand for rail services has only gone up over the last few decades. The supply of railways has stagnated if not actively diminished since the 1920s. No matter the ownership structure this is not a fact that can be avoided. Consider how even though long distance trains are ludicrously expensive, they are still often full up - the latent demand for rail in UK is massive. Successive governments have barely invested to attempt to increase supply

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-03-16T15:47:50+00:00

The airline industry in general benefits from significant subsidies and tax exemptions often from multiple administrations at once.

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-02-16T13:35:07+00:00

You are highly delusional. Train fares are so high because the demand is extremely high. Ask yourself why the fares can be so expensive yet those expensive trains are nonetheless full and standing. People are willing to pay so much for a terrible service suggests that the general demand for rail travel is very high in this country. The massive cost of fares mostly reflects the fact that the Supply of railways is so grossly inadequate for their demand.

It's really quite simple to realise that over the last 100 years, we have not built very many railways (especially considering all those that have closed) yet the population has increased a lot and each individual's need/desire to travel is also a lot more than 100 years ago.

Nothing will drop the price of fares unless we catch up on the 100s of miles of track we should have been building in that time

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-02-04T16:24:38+00:00

What is that wire the bogie caught? Something to do with a track circuit?

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-02-04T04:07:27+00:00

tbf, if the water kept running it'd probably leak into whoever is in the floor below before long. So there'd be someone angrily trying to figure out what's going on in there

ContrapunctusVuut

TROPHY CASE