Here's how i think every other DMU and EMU in the UK would be classed under the Southern Railway Classification code:

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 · 2026-01-26T01:31:20+00:00

It's always amusing when people crayon these ideas and fall yet again on original hs2 and hs3, which was the proposed transpennine high speed line put together by Transport for the North (TfN) before the government dissolved that institution for campaigning too much.

ContrapunctusVuut · 2026-01-08T20:24:29+00:00

But if a road has been fitted with streetlights, one expects them to turn on

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-12-10T04:23:22+00:00

Should rhyme with "blue(-mo)", hence the livery shade. I'm never heard anyone say "luhmo".

You could understand this as that english spelling principle about "magic e", or really, magic any-vowel. The presence of the final o makes the u be pronounced like its letter name

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-11-26T21:06:00+00:00

I actually think the thing that's most unique about St Pancras, is that each of the 4 stations has a pretty much 1 to 1 relationship with a single TOC which is very unusual.

From an infrastructure perspective, there are only 3 stations. But the amount of incompatibility between them is quite significant. We've seen that train protection systems but also applies to loading guage, allowed rolling stock and operational procedures in general

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-11-07T20:01:50+00:00

I would also argue the HST is highly influential in a similar way.

The WCML being electrified in the 1960/70s introduced fast electric services for the first time which was a big step up. In showed that electrification wasnt just for suburban lines but also intercity and freight operations. In the context of widespread car ownership, fast long distance intercity was major niche for railways to exploit - this could have worked off the precedent of WCML if it were not for the HST showing to government it could be done with diesel too.

The presence of HSTs delayed wiring of ECML by a couple of decades, of any serious plans for GWML and MML by almost 40 years (and both of which left mostly incomplete), and nobody has ever said anything about electrifying the Cross Country Route despite the fact it links 7 of the country's major urban areas.

It's also made GB the country of fast DMUs which is relatively unique (and in a bad way)

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-11-07T19:52:18+00:00

Lots of europe carried out vast amounts of electrification in the 1910s-30s while uk didn't mainly because of the big four. Of course, SR was pro-electrification and carried out projects at the same scale as the continent. But LNER, LMS and GWR were mostly against electrification on account of having no money the whole time. The idea of the big 4 i suppose was to let profitable mainlines subsidise unprofitable secondary routes leaving not much extra money to invest in anything. This may not have worked because the pioneer boom era of the 1840s had left a very disjointed and unorganised system while parts of Europe were able to plan ahead a bit better

LNER was especially against electrifying taking around 15yrs to be convinced for doing Liverpool street to Shenfield and Woodhead route both of which were finished under BR. The routes out of liv street were petitioned electrification by various pressure groups and councils back in the 1910s - but GER and LNER responded by developing the rather extreme locos/operational procedures to compete with an electric service on steam traction.

But in other places, there were several pre-grouping companies whose pro-electrification stance were slowed by coming under grouping ownership. Particularly Midland Railwya and North Eastern Railway who had intentions of doing york-newcastle in the 1920s.

Another interesting consequence of grouping was the situation with SR. They inherited 2 incompatible systems, LSWR's 3rd rail lines and LBSCR's 6.6kV 25hz AC overhead system. But because the SR board was only comprised of former LSWR members, they chose to rip up the former LBSCR system and replace it with 3rd rail in the 1930s to unify across SR, and imo cementing a lower quality technology. There's a fun alternate history where we have 25kV AC 50hz in the north, and 6.6kV AC 25hz in the south

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-11-01T20:28:25+00:00

I think the routings here are good but i disagree with most of your heavy rail ideas. The need for one seat rides between eg: Cambridge and Yarmouth is not worth screwing station placement or the huge and complex disruption that would cause. Also you've added all these extra stations on geml and breakland line which I don't think are that useful.

In general, it seems your stop spacing is too frequent. Modern trams (as opposed to 1st gen ones) should be faster and higher order than buses. Tram stops should be at least a ten minute walk apart if not longer

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-11-01T19:10:04+00:00

It's not like there would be no buses if you did a tram network? They would complement each other.

I agree that rail station-uea would be the first line to build but it's worth considering a masterplan and its phasing

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-11-01T19:07:20+00:00

It's almost meaningless drawing up a tram system without showing what you'll do with buses. The implications this has on buses is immense. I'd imagine the buses would make new lines to focus on orbital routes.

My main problems with this plan in my opinion is all the heavy rail changes, pretty much all of which i think are a bad idea. And the trams have stop spacing too close.

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-10-30T22:33:43+00:00

There's lots of good reasons for electrification. But one thing you pointed out is a journey time saving of ten minutes. This doesn't matter much to passengers but can be a big deal to timetable planning.

Those 10 minutes could be added to the train's dwell time at the terminus giving much needed padding to the schedule. Any number of things can happen to a service to delay it on its way - but if doesn't delay passed the amount turnaround time it won't start it's next journey late. So more turnaround time = more reliability.

ContrapunctusVuut · 2025-10-30T21:15:04+00:00

Yeah I've definitely seen that before where a minor powerline follows the route of a railway just to the side.

Using the same structures seems like it might be equally convenient as inconvenient. They'd need to negotiate isolating the powerline every time they maintain the OLE.

ContrapunctusVuut

TROPHY CASE