A Solution To The Tea Bag Problem
In Rochester High Street, I had a very nice cup of tea in a cafe called Dot Cafe. What a good name for a cafe with good internet and wi-fi.
As you can see milk was served alongside in a small wider jug, which was an ideal place to put the teabag. The lady in charge said that was what you did!
A simple idea that solves a messy problem! Perhaps you could put some words on the jug like “Milk – After The Teabag”
Nigel Was Here!
I took this photo outside a pub on Rochester High Street!
Nigel Was Here!
Yuck!
Although the High Street was generally tidy, there were places with a bit of an air of being run-down.
In some ways you can understand, why they voted for the kippers.
Walking Between Rochester And Strood Stations
I took the South Eastern Class 395 and explored Rochester.
I walked along the High Street, visited the cathedral, castle and the museum before crossing the Rochester Bridge to get the train home from Strood.
Stratford And Its Two Stations
I couldn’t resist looking at the map of Stratford upon Avon and its two stations.
Stratford And Its Stations
Parkway is in the top left and the town centre station is marked by the arrow. The centre of the town is in the bottom right.
All this map does is ask a lot of questions!
I think some will be solved, when the main station is complete and hopefully is getting more trains from London and Birmingham.
But this will need some more Class 172 trains to be rustled up for Chiltern Trains and London Midland.
So the question gets more complex!
Return From Stratford Parkway Station
Because I thought time was short, I decided to take a taxi to Stratford upon Avon Parkway station to come home.
But somewhere I’d got the time wrong and had to wait an hour for my train, in a cold, unwelcoming station without a toilet. And then when I did get on the train, the main toilet was broken!
It is certainly a station that was built down to a cost, that would be unlikely to win any architectural awards.
There should be a rethink about how this station operates.
Stratford Upon Avon Station Is Getting A Facelift
Stratford upon Avon station was very much in a state of flux as I passed through.
But as it is a busy station with lots of tourists, I would suspect that Network Rail have got their priorities right.
If you look at the services to Stratford, they are a bit thin, as giving the importance of the town and the nearby parkway station, you might think that more services could be supported.
Perhaps the station improvements are part of a plan to increase the number of trains.
Wikipedia talks about possible future development, which would link the line to the Cotswold Line, thus giving Stratford direct links to lots of other places.
Solihull Station
To get to Stratford, I changed at Solihull station.
The pictures show what an excellent job has been done in creating a modern station, with nice details and what looked like a proper buffet.
The Bicester Chord Takes Shape
I took the Chiltern Line to Stratford upon Avon today and I was able to get these pictures of the building of the Bicester chord.
This will allow Chiltern Trains to start services between Oxford and Marylebone sometime in 2015.
The Bicester Chord is the first idea of several to come to fruition and transform railways in the area between Oxford, Banbury and Milton Keynes.
The East West Rail Link will be built and electrified, to link Oxford, Bicester, Milton Keynes, Bedford, Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich.
The Cowley Branch at Oxford will be opened to passenger traffic.
Marylebone to Birmingham will drop to ninety minutes.
Chiltern Trains will probably want to expand. This is probably just as well, as if HS2 is to be built and Euston rebuilt, someone will have to get the passengers between London and Birmingham.
Gatwick Makes A Pitch For The Third Runway
Canary Wharf tube station is all decked out in adverts for expanding Gatwick.
It’s certainly a tough fight between the two airports about which one gets developed.
On the ninth of October, I had a letter published in The Times, under the title, Plane or Train?
Sir, The closure of Richard Branson’s Little Red airline (News, Oct 7) comes at a time when people in their millions are rediscovering trains, raising a question over the attraction and viability of short-haul air services. Together with the introduction of aircraft that can carry up to a third more passengers, this leads me to wonder whether we need new runway capacity.
Effectively, it is a shorter reworking of some of the arguments in Hot Air Over London’s Airports.
To also stoke up the fire, Heathrow Hub were also advertising heavily in the papers at the weekend.
As I said in Hot Air Over London’s Airports, I quite like this proposal. This liking gets bigger every time I read about it.
One thing their reports and all the other proposals don’t talk about for obvious reasons, is the unpredictability of some of the world’s worst air accidents. Just read up on the circumstances that led to the Tenerife Airport Disaster.
For this and other reasons, I would leave the decisions to the professionals. And they will probably say that some proposals have a bigger safety margin than others!
But I still feel my last statement in the Hot Air post might be correct.
But I have this sneaking suspicion that no new runways will be built or extended and in twenty years time or so, we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.
Passengers will just choose their airports with more care and airports will be competing with us with better and better facilities and more point-to-point flights.
But then some politician might want to add his name to a new London airport.
Squeezing A Bridge Between Working Railways
Crossrail has shown some impressive pieces of engineering to the media. But I’ve seen little about the work that is going on at Whitechapel station where Crossrail goes underneath the Overground, which contrary to what you might think, goes underneath the Underground. These pictures show how one of London’s most delapidated stations is being transformed.
I’m not sure, if the impressive steel bridge is for the Underground lines or passengers. But inserting it isn’t camel-going-through-the-eye-of-a-needle stuff, but something a lot more challenging. Especially, if you’re doing it in the space between two busy rail lines. Luckily for Crossrail, when the East London Line was rebuilt a few years ago, the decision was made not to convert it to overhead electrification.
Look at this section on the Crossrail web site, which shows some images, which help you to make sense of what I photographed. Helpfully, the architect has drawn the trains in the right colours.
The Anonymous Widower 