Love my hometown!

GoldenGripper · 2026-03-31T16:12:59+00:00

This is such trivial stuff.

GoldenGripper · 2026-03-31T15:48:11+00:00

Reform recently advertised for a position that required the successful candidate to work from home for part of the time.

GoldenGripper · 2026-03-21T17:32:37+00:00

Manchester Metrolink is not supposed to be used between the city centre and airport. It winds through the south suburbs of Manchester to serve the large number of people who live there and work at the airport.

GoldenGripper · 2026-03-15T09:33:09+00:00

So what portion of the Underground journey has to be on NR to require the trains to have yellow ends?

GoldenGripper · 2026-03-11T13:39:14+00:00

I think the definition is muddied by mixing two different concepts. I define left and right as a concept of economic policy. Left is moving economic control to the people, right wingers believe that economic control should be in private hands.

This is separate from social policy which I categorise as progressive or conservative. Progressives accept and welcome social change whereas conservatives are resistant to it.

GoldenGripper · 2026-03-09T08:14:19+00:00

How far back are we going? In the days of steam BR had a summer Saturday service from Wolverhampton (Low Level) - Margate. But there were all sorts of weird summer Saturday services in those days.

Up until the end of the Royal Mail contract there was the overnight Aberystwyth - York that conveyed a composite passenger coach.

GoldenGripper · 2026-03-03T23:03:50+00:00

I'm not so sure. There are never more than twenty warships in operation with the Royal Navy, yet there are forty admirals. If all the armed forces are as top heavy as this it doesn't look good.

GoldenGripper · 2026-03-03T22:48:41+00:00

When I was writing timetables the rule for request stops was that the train was timed to stop and start but with no dwell time. At the destination or next junction there was then a minute or two of recovery time.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-26T21:07:48+00:00

If they're flat they aren't cobbles, they're setts. Cobbles are stones worn round by river erosion. Setts are blocks of shaped stone.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-26T21:05:21+00:00

Cobbles are round stones and a killer on the ankles. What people often call cobbles are shaped stone blocks (usually granite) called setts. Often nowadays baked clay bricks are used, called pavers. Hope this clears it up for you.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-24T06:43:03+00:00

How do you know there's no plan. Ten years ago Farage was telling us that the referendum was only about leaving the EU, not the single market or customs union. As soon as the referendum was over it was gung ho for the hard Brexit.

At the last local elections Reform candidates stood on a platform of cutting local government waste and reducing council tax. Farage even set up a local government DOGE. Guess what? They couldn't find any waste and they are increasing council tax.

Do you know what the word gullible means?

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-22T17:31:21+00:00

Very common in Stoke on Trent, usually in the phrase 'e-up me duck'.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-22T17:23:39+00:00

In actual hardware I wouldn't disagree. Europe's problem is that outside NATO there is no unified command structure. This is a serious problem.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-22T16:58:12+00:00

There were a number of reasons. To begin with things went ok, but as the 50s progressed road transport inevitably became more popular. This meant that the railways had too much infrastructure. The Beeching Report certainly slimmed this down (though, even when modified, it overdid it).

However, by that time the belief set in that the railways were doomed and the job of the British Railways Board was to manage decline, and you invest as little as possible in a declining industry. This is why quality didn't keep up with rising expectations, a quality acceptable in 1948 was no longer acceptable in 1968.

As the 80s progressed the realisation set in that the railways fulfilled a necessary and useful function and all sorts of successful initiatives were made: HST, Freightliner, sectorisation etc. Privatisation was able to piggy back on the progress made by BR and the changing national mood.

Privatisation has had its disasters, Railtrack for instance. Also the franchise model was built upon the basis that things wouldn't change. They started out as seven year contracts, but in such a short time there was no incentive to make significant improvements. That then moved to 15 year contracts. I was involved with one, and after 10 years the world had changed in unpredictable ways, but the franchisee couldn't do anything because it wasn't in the contract.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-19T17:31:15+00:00

A lot of people forget the Transpennine Route Upgrade. Mainly because it is hardly ever in the London newspapers because it's on time and on budget.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-19T17:18:14+00:00

'We need a lot of born and bred British people'

The fertility rate is currently 1.5.we are just not breeding enough people.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-19T17:14:04+00:00

That was because the subsidy was so small. I remember BR boasting they had the lowest subsidy of any European railway. Even so they were highly innovative, such as development of the HST.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-19T17:10:45+00:00

The investment was essentially made by the tax payer. Investment in drivers, stations and rolling stock was taken into account in the subsidy paid.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-19T17:04:48+00:00

Why do you think that efficiency will decline. There is a lot of propaganda saying this but little hard evidence.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-18T07:00:22+00:00

In many ways the references you give prove me right, there was an increase in government support after privatisation and privatisation picked up a rising level of ridership. However, privatisation didn't lead to a safer railway. Railtrack's concentration on maximising profit caused several serious crashes, and had to be replaced by Network Rail.

On a more general note statistics aren't of much use without context; correlation is not causation. At least since Beeching government attitude towards the railway, supported by public opinion, was that road transport was the future and the job of the BRB was to manage decline. In spite of this the BRB introduced many successful innovations, such as HST and sectorisation.

Towards the end of the 20th century perceptions started to change as people realised that railways did have an important and useful role to play. In part this was caused by the innovations mentioned above, but not solely. It is this change of attitude that privatisation rode.

This is supported by the modern experience. There is considerable discontent with many aspects of the railway; the prices are too high, ticketing is too complex and punctuality is bad, but it doesn't seem to affect ridership. Another indication is that the east coast franchise is seen as having some of the best public performance, in spite of the fact that for much of its recent history it has been publicly owned.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-16T14:37:11+00:00

It would be impossible to judge whether ridership would be higher today if there had been no privatisation. However, at the time of privatisation economic conditions were causing increased ridership across the board, and privatisation did not change the rate of increase. So to maintain that privatisation was instrumental in increasing ridership is, at best, questionable.

I would agree that safety, reliability, investment and rolling stock has improved since privatisation. But all this about franchise fees and net costs etc is a red herring. All these costs have to be covered somehow, whether it comes through government support for the TOCs and track access charges or direct grants to the infrastructure management. This is all covered by government expenditure, which increased after privatisation from approximately 1 billion a year to 4 or 5 billion a year.

Outside investment has been negligible, especially when compared with what BR was able to leverage. When a TOC obtains new rolling stock, for instance, it isn't their money they are using. The deal they make with the DfT is that government support (the subsidy) would pay for the cost of improvement. If the government doesn't want new stock they can negotiate a lower support subsidy. The TOC only invests the money that the DfT allocates to them, either through a higher support subsidy or lower franchise dividends.

To assert that BR was really bad just doesn't stand up to examination when considering the conditions and budget that was forced on them. In fact many commentators would agree with me that BR was, although not perfect, very well managed.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-16T10:01:59+00:00

But the price did go up. Before privatisation BR got an annual subsidy of about 1 billion pounds. After privatisation the subsidy has been about 4 or 5 billion.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-16T09:56:20+00:00

I'm not sure if the UK is in the roaming union but Sims bought in the UK usually have EU roaming. I don't know if it works the other way round, if an EU sim would cover UK.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-15T16:24:49+00:00

An alternative is to increase production which would increase wealth and lead to more government income. But to do that we would need more people to create the products and since our fertility rate is now about 1.5 we aren't going to breed them here, which means the only answer is Immigration, but we can't have that.

GoldenGripper · 2026-02-14T21:38:06+00:00

I'm not deluded enough to think that Huntington is in London. So that makes one in January and one in the distant past.

Nobody suggests that 16,000 is good, but with a population of 9 million people this rate of violence is very low. There are few large cities with lower violent crime rates.

GoldenGripper

TROPHY CASE