Before Overground – Stamford Hill
Add Imagination Here And You Might Get A Station! – Rating 2/10
Stamford Hill station has potential, as estate agents love to say.
Although not as bad as Bethnal Green, that misery station gets twice as many as this one.
The shelter on the Up platform needs reopening, perhaps new window frames could replace the bricks, but the biggest short-term improvement could be made by doing a bit of gardening.
And also, as with many of the stations being taken over by the Overground, the step-free access is the major problem.
It will be interesting to see this particular station two or three years from now! I suspect because of its low number of passengers, not much will have been done except deep cleaning and application of some orange paint and logos.
Before Crossrail – Abbey Wood
I was at Abbey Wood station today and took these pictures.
Note the terrible stairs down from the bus stop. Certainly this is a station that shows all the worst design features of the corporate British Rail non-architecture.
If you look at the design for the new Crossrail station, you can see the new footbridge in the images.
So could this footbridge be one of the first pieces of Crossrail infrastructure that passengers will use?
A Walk Along The Thames From Erith Station To Crossness
This afternoon I enjoyed the sun and walked along the Thames Path from near Erith Station to the Victorian Pumping Station at Crossness.
When looking at these pictures, you can see some of the places that I also saw on the cruise down the Thames.
I haven’t fully annotated the pictures yet, as finding out what some of the buildings are isn’t easy.
There’s some good technology at work in Crossness and they should tell people about it.
Fracking For Freedom
In this post, I said that Iceland can help us overcome energy shortages, caused by the problem of Putin.
Today in an article in the Sunday Times, Jim Ratcliffe, the boss of chemicals giant Ineos is saying that he would pay landowners and communities £2.5billion. Here’s what the Sunday Times says.
ONE of Britain’s richest men hopes to trigger a shale gas boom by giving away billions of pounds to landowners and communities affected by fracking.
Jim Ratcliffe, the 61-year-old Lancastrian who founded chemicals giant Ineos, has promised to hand over 6% of the revenue from oil and gas wells — 4% to landowners and 2% to local communities — in an effort to jolt the moribund industry into life. The offer would equate to £375m for a typical exploration area of 36 square miles, and goes far beyond the 1% giveaway to which the industry has committed. Ratcliffe estimated the offer could be worth £2.5bn in total.
I would never be affected by fracking here in Central London.
But if we could get all our energy supplies without resorting to those basket cases of Russia and the Middle East, we wouldn’t be in bed with some of the nastiest regimes in the world.
My Worry About Islamic State
I believe that Islamic State are possibly the worst organisation I’ve seen in my lifetime. Even such as Pol Pot in Cambodia and North Korea now, are nowhere near them on a scale of evil. They are in some ways more extreme and violent than Hitler and the Nazis at their worst.
But unlike Hitler, who had virtually no supporters in this country, there are quite a few in the UK, who think that Islamic State have got the right idea.
So by voting to attack Islamic State in Iraq, have we made ourselves a target for these crackpots and religious nutters?
After all, it is really ourselves and France, of the countries against Islamic State, who have significant Muslim populations.
My worry though, is not what terrorists might do, but the reaction of the UK’s population, if another attack like those of July 7th 2005 were to happen.
Before Overground – The Step-Free Access Problem
If you look at stations on the London Overground, where a million or so has been spent on installing lifts or ramps to give step-free access, it would seem that the station needs over a million passengers a year before it is updated.
Some of the stations without step-free access on the Lea Valley Lines, like Bethnal Green, Cambridge Heath and Southbury, have nowhere near a million passengers a year.
But then we don’t have before and after usage figures for stations like Camden Road and Hampstead Heath, where lifts have recently been installed. If say lifts and new and longer trains, do raise traffic substantially, it might make the installation of lifts more likely.
One of the problems with these lines is that in many stations the train lines are way above the street, so some of the simple ramps used at stations like Hackney Wick are not possible.
In some places, London Overground might not make the station step-free. Edmonton Green station will soon be step-free and as White Hart Lane is going to be rebuilt in all of the work to create a new ground for Tottenham Hotspur, would it be possible to improve the buses, which are already step-free to serve Silver Street and the North Middlesex Hospital.
It certainly is a complicated problem, with many people not wanting to be down the queue.
Match Nine – Ipswich 2 – Rotherham 0
My friend, Ian, must have felt disappointed with this match as he turned up a few minutes late and missed the two goals, which were scored in the first five minutes.
In the end, Ipswich held on to a scrappy win.
Before Overground – Bethnal Green
London Overground Have A Difficult Problem Here! – Rating 1/10
Bethnal Green station is probably why a doctor I know, left the area.
It was reasonably clean, but some of the things that passengers would like weren’t even there. In common with a lot of stations, there was no step-free access, but on the up platform, there wasn’t even any seats or a shelter.
Do London Overground really want to take control of this ruin?
Probably not, but on the other hand it does get a surprising number of over 700,000 passengers a year. And if the ones I saw today, struggling with kids and buggies on the stairs are typical, the station is a total disgrace!
To make matters worse, unlike Cambridge Heath, useful bus stops are not near the station.
Before Overground – Cambridge Heath
A Pretty Run-Down Station! – Rating 2/10
Cambridge Heath station has little going for it. The only positive thing that can be said about it, is that is not as much of a dump as Bethnal Green station.
It was reasonably clean and unlike one platform at Bethnal Green, the station did have seats and shelters. But the stairs were even worse!
One point about this station is that it is served by a reasonable number of buses, as this map shows. So if you have difficulty walking, have a baby in a buggy or are carrying something heavy, it may be easier to take a bus to a station with better access.
As it is not the busiest of stations with only 300,000 passengers a year, will London Overground bother to improve the access?
The Properties Of Turmeric
I’ve often thought that curries seem to perk me up and I posted about it two years ago.
Now there’s this report from Germany, entitled Brain Repair May Be Boosted By Curry Spice. Here’s a flavour.
A spice commonly found in curries may boost the brain’s ability to heal itself, according to a report in the journal Stem Cell Research and Therapy.
The German study suggests a compound found in turmeric could encourage the growth of nerve cells thought to be part of the brain’s repair kit.
I think, I’m off for a curry tonight!
The Anonymous Widower 