What Do You Get When You Cross Good Engineering With Good Financial Skills?
February’s Modern Railways magazine has an interesting article about how a whole new lengthened set of trains are being created to work the South West London services for South West Trains.
Currently these services are worked by 4-car Class 458 and Class 450 trains.
For various reasons South West Trains want to go to a 10-car railway, which would mean the simplest solution would be to lengthen the Class 450s to 5-cars and run them in pairs as required. But this would require upwards of about a hundred new carriages and typically these cost about a million pounds each.
But then Porterbrook’s engineers and managers got involved and suggested using the redundant purpose built fleet of 8-car Gatwick Express Class 460 that were surplus to requirements to lengthen the Class 458’s to 5-car trains. This is possible as both sets of trains were built by Alstom to a common design.
So South West Trains will get what they want at a lesser cost and probably earlier too.
The irony is that Porterbrook, is basically a train leasing company and not an engineering one.
So next time you ask, what have bankers done for us, look at a clever piece of work like this. But then it was probably led by engineers who understood money, rather than bankers who understood engineering.
All of the best engineers I’ve worked with always understood the monetary implications of what they did! Some also understood marketing too!
Peston on RBS Bonuses
Robert Peston at the BBC is a financial commentator I respect. His post today, in response to the news that the Chairman of RBS, Sir Philip Hampton, has turned down his bonus, should be read by all. According to Peston, Sir Philip didn’t actually request a bonus in his contract.
Well, the additional reward for Sir Philip was always something slightly unusual, which – as it happens – he didn’t request when he took the job three years ago. This shares incentive had already been agreed in negotiations with another candidate to chair RBS (Lord Davies, the former Standard Chartered chief executive, who ultimately turned the job down), and Sir Philip just attached his moniker to a contract drafted for someone else.
That sounds like a cock-up by the previous government to me.
Peston goes on to have a dig at the lack of talent available and also headhunters, whose interest is best served by high salaries. The first point is proven by looking at how many banks the world are in trouble and the second is well-known to anybody who’s ever hired anybody through a headhunter or an agency.
I think we’ll only know how good Hester and his co-directors are, when RBS is sold off.
More on Stehen Hester and That Bonus
He is a rich man in his own right. If I was him, I’d tell the stupid politicians I didn’t want the bonus, resign and tell them, where to put their job. I would know that I’d done a good job and could take my pick of a lot of well-paid jobs out there.
If that happened, it would cost all the UK Taxpayers even more and who would most politicians blame. David Cameron and the Tory members of this current government, who have nothing to do with this mess. RBS was such a state in 2010, that it should have been liquidated. But Gordon Brown needed the votes! Especially in Scotland!
Will the French Presidential Election Throw a Big Spanner in the Eurodeal?
The front page article in The Times is all about how Francois Hollande will change the economic direction of France when he becomes President. I said when rather than if, as the polls are strongly in his favour. He also said he would rip-up the EU’s fiscal treaty.
The psaper gives a detsiled analysis of what his policies will mean and I suspect David Cameron, Angela Merkel and anybody in France, who earns more than the average wage won’t like it. A lot of his proposals would also be against the rules of the single market.
Having read what Hollande said, I think it will be good for Britain and especially London and the City, as his proposed rules will drive entrepreneurs from France. Not that they have had many since Mitterand.
One thing I suspect that he won’t like is foreigners, who keep a house in France. I suspect thery’ll be taxed heavily and a pleasure will suddenly have become a nightmare.
Around Chambers Wharf
Chambers Wharf has made the news recently, as Thames Water want to make it one of the sites from where London’s Thames Super Sewer is to be built. So I went and had a look round this lunchtime.
I couldn’t actually see much of the site as it is surrounded by blue fencing. But it strikes me that if they do any serious digging from here, that because the site is so close to the Thames, any serious engineer would take the spoil out that way. If Thames Water don’t do that it will probably cost them a lot more, as lorry journeys through a city like London are always delayed by traffic and only carry a few tonnes, whereas a proper barge can carry many times more. If we look at the Olympic site, a lot of materials like concrete and spoil were moved in and out by rail. Also go to Pudding Mill Lane and look at the portal for CrossRail, which is for two much larger tunnels, where the spoil will probably be removed by train. So opponents of the use of the Chambers Wharf site, who say there will be thousands of lorry journeys are not talking engineering sense. The site is also quite large and the hole is only going to be under thirty metres wide, so there should be quite a lot of space for machinery to move the spoil to the river.
I have no direct interest in whether the sewer is built, but I have a friend, who used to live in an area of London, that flooded badly every ten or so years. The sewer will hopefully stop all that.
Although I should say, that as someone who has spent a lot of time around project management and managers, I will say that what gets built in the end, will be quite unlike what was originally proposed. That’s what good project management is about. It makes a project better, cheaper and less disruptive. Hopefully, because of the sensitivity of this project, Thames Water will follow the example of Transport for London on the East London Line and hire the best people and contractors to build the sewer.
I was upset though to see the bench that had held Doctor Salter’s statue is now bare. A picture of it is in this set of pictures.
Dami Killers Should Have Been Hanged
This was front page headline in the Evening Standard and it is the words of Damilola Taylor’s father Richard on the release of the two Preddie brothers who killed his son. Read the story of the case here.
I of course don’t agree, especially as the brothers were just 12 and 13 when they killed his son. They actually got eight years youth custody for manslaughter.
I know what it is like to lose a son, but I can’t help feeling that the Death of Damilola Taylor was avoidable, if the various agencies and parents on both sides had taken more care and stood by their responsibilities.
But what I object to, is that newspapers are increasingly going on that the death penalty is the solution to the problems of violence and knife crime. But we all know sensationalism sells newspapers.
One point we should always remember, is that the Taylor family relocated to the UK to get treatment for Damilola’s elder sister’s epilepsy. Surely with all it’s wealth Nigeria could do more to look after the people rather than descending into endless criminality and religious violence.
Harry ‘Forgot Secret Monaco Account’
This was the headline on the front of last night’s Evening Standard and it refers to a claim by Harry Redknapp at his trial for tax evasion.
I have a simple question. If he couldn’t remember this, what hope has he got of remembering how one of the players he is interested in buying has played?
So why would anybody bother to employ him?
Babies At The Olympics
There was a right-old cat-fight on BBC Breakfast, this morning about whether babies should be allowed in free with their mothers at the Olympics.
I can understand the problem, as what do you do, if you’ve bought tickets and your baby has now arrived.
I am a season ticket holder at Ipswich and I’ve never seen a baby near where I sit at Home matches. There are a few ladies of child-bearing age around where I sit, and I can remember a few youngsters of about five coming in and being a bit bored. But babies no, as I suppose if you have one, you leave it at home. Which in Ipswich’s case is probably less than an hour away or so, as most season ticket holders are probably fairly local.
But when it comes to away matches it is rather different. I’ve seen several, often dressed in an Ipswich baby suit. No-one has been bothered, but then although Ipswich usually take a fair number of supporters, there is often quite a few spare seats, so the stewards don’t mind if an extra one is used for a bag with all the baby things. The local effect probably comes into play too, as you might be an Ipswich fan living in say Bristol and this is your one chance to see the team every season.
I should also say, I’ve never seen a baby behaving as to annoy anybody, but then football is a game of two forty-five minute halves with plenty of time before, in the middle and at the end to attend to the baby.
You could also argue it’s good for the baby, as they get used to being in a crowd.
Remember, too, I’ve been to a lot of horse-race meetings. Babies are generally welcomed and all children under 16 are let in free. However, this may not apply to the biggest of meetings like the Derby, although when I went this year, there were a few prams about in the cheaper enclosure I was in.
But the Olympics will be different, as some events like the athletics are quite long and you wouldn’t want to inflict that on a baby and the people around you.
On a personal note, I would prefer to sit next to a woman with a baby, than say someone eating popcorn or a burger, as I can’t abide the smell of either.
Or they could take a leaf out of horse racing’s book and have a free creche.
Magnetic Soap
You might say so-what as there have been magnetic soap holders for years.
But Bristol University have come up with something special, if it can be used to say clean up oil spills or waste water.
There’s a more technical explanation here in The Engineer.
Could it be that the next ten years will be decade of chemistry, as micro-electronics have ruled for too long? I have also heard that some of the new techniques used in chemistry owe a lot to chip fabrication methods. After all you could argue that a lot of chips are just a three-dimensional array of atoms.
Are the Bishops Right to Vote Against a Benefit Cap?
To me it’s what the statistics say, but then we don’t have access to full figures. I would like to see a database on the Internet of all those who get benefits of over the £26,000 level. It would obviously be anonimised completely. We would then see how many people lived in a particular town, who got more than £50,000 for example.
But I’m interested to see John Bird, the founder of The big Issue has written in The Times, this morning.
The title of the piece is These bishops are not so Christian after all and it has a sub-title of A benefit cap is needed. You don’t help the poor by making them dependent on handouts.
You should buy the paper today just to read this article on page 20.
The Anonymous Widower 