Open Door in Edinburgh
Sunday was Open Door in Edinburgh, which is Scotland’s version of Open House, where historic buildings that are not normally opened, can be viewed by the general public. It is a good idea.
The list for Edinburgh was perhaps what you’d expect from Scotland’s capital, but for me, there wasn’t enough on the industrial and engineering side.
My host and I did have a good walk on Calton Hill with its views all over the city.
In the gallery you can see the National Monument. This is said about it in Wikipedia.
Particularly due to the use of high-quality materials, the project ended in 1829 with funds running out. Local legend suggests that the city of Glasgow apparently offered to cover the costs but Edinburgh was too proud to accept the other city’s charity. As a result, the monument is often given the nickname Edinburgh’s Disgrace or Edinburgh’s Folly.
Edinburgh and Glasgow are just like North and South London or on a national scale, Australia and New Zealand.
Welcome to Edinburgh Waverley
In the last few weeks, I’ve been in and out of Edinburgh Waverley station several times and to be fair it is not one of the best. It always seems dark and crowded, information provision is minimal and unless you take a taxi, you always seem to have to walk up endless flights of stairs. I know there are lifts, but I can never be bothered to wait. How too will it interface with the tram? I doubt without lots of steps!
I suspect though that it’s really one of these cases of the station being built in the wrong place for the 21st Century.
On my trip to Inverness, the Driver Manager told me that there were plans to improve Edinburgh Haymarket, so perhaps in a few years time, it will all be a lot better.
It is interesting to compare Waverley with Glasgow Queen Street, where the station is much lighter and the access into the station seemed generally level.
Doncaster to Edinburgh
I had a few minutes to change trains at Doncaster, before I got on the fast train towards the North. I’d known when I booked that the last part of the journey to Edinburgh would actually be a coach as they were doing substantial work in the Morpeth area. At least though when I got in the Scottish capital, I knew that it was perhaps a ten minute taxi to a comfortable bed in my friend’s house.
Doncaster is a station that has had a serious makeover with most of the facilities modern and up-to-date. But I don’t know, but it just lacks something.
Perhaps, stations should be destinations in their own right.
I know St. Pancras International is in a different league from every other station in the UK and possibly Europe, if you believe some of the statements of the head of SNCF, but I believe all stations should aspire to be a little bit like that station.
If say you are meeting someone in the station, it should be a pleasant place to wait, have a coffee, read the paper and perhaps watch the trains coming and going.
Moving a Train
The picture shows a Southern train from the routes south of London, probably being moved to the works at Doncaster or York for repair or refurbishment. There is a lot of movement at a station like Doncaster.
Stations should also be places for business meetings, so that say if you are based in london and want to meet your managers from say Hull and Newcastle, then perhaps a sensible and productive lunch in the middle would be an idea.
I didn’t venture outside of the station, so I don’t know whether their is a nice hotel or restaurant outside or not!
But why not create a sensible cafe/restaurant, shops and perhaps a hotel high up in the station? Many stations have beautifully structured roofs and the proper structure placed up there would compliment them. In some ways, the engineering involved would be similar to that in some of our art gsalleries and museums, where roofs and mezzanines have been created. Space should always be use to the maximum, and now that trains make a lot less pollution, the roof space might be ripe for development
It might not be practical, but so many of our stations are cluttered and there is nothing more than a Costa and a burger bar.
We can do so much better!
It’s just a small point, but to get it right, you must get all the details right. For instance they’d put in nice new toilets in Doncaster, but the toilet roll dispensers were all broken, as they were badly designed.
Coming up, I would have been able to just walk across the platform, but when going north, it meant I had to use the underpass. Perhaps, we should ensure that as many connections as possible are just a short walk on the level! Doncaster, Peterbough and York aren’t too bad. They would also be a lot better, if people didn’t travel with the kitchen sink on wheels trailing behind them.
I was travelling very light and all I had was just a shoulder bag, that carried a spare pair of knickers and socks for each day I was away and a shirt for every two. I didn’t bring a laptop, as I’ve now come to the conclusion that every gram is something else to carry and more strain on my decrepit body.
We arrived in Newastle on time and whilst others were dreading the bus, I was being philosophical. There was a bit of a scrum at the coaches, but I was on quickly and managed to get a double seat for the nearly three hour trip. I think it could have been better organised with perhaps a few coaches going direct to Edinburgh, rather than having to drop off perhaps one person at Berwick and Dunbar. Some American passengers were getting distinctly edgy, as they’d only got into Heathrow that morning. They’d have probably changed their plans, if they’d known about the coach, but then the information their agent got in the US seemed to be incomplete. Travel agents are to me the lowest of the low, as they always book you on the route that gives them the most commission, so possibly East Coast pays better than Virgin! We are lucky in that we have two equally fast routes to Scotland from London and you should use the one that is more convenient, not the one that is obvious.
Three Good Things About Scunthorpe
Other than the coffee and Raz and his excellent taxi, there is only one other thing good about Scunthorpe. Or should we be polite and call it Shorpe! And that is the TransPennine Express, that gets you out of the town.
TransPennine Express at Scunthorpe
I took one of these trains as far as Doncaster, where I headed north towards Edinburgh.
A Taxi to Glanford Park
As the bus was still nowhere to be seen, I got a taxi from the station to the ground about two. The driver, Raz, was helpful and I booked him to pick me up at 4:30, as I really felt that to spend more time than I wanted in the town was not a good idea. Especially, as I was getting chilled to the bone!
At least by the ground there was a large Tesco, so I suspect, I could have got something there, but as you can see from this picture, the various eating places were not renowned as being coeliac friendly.
Eating Places at Glanford Park
A GLuten-Free-Free Town
So I didn’t search too hard, but a quick walk into Scunthorpe didn’t appear to be very promising, when it came to looking for something to eat.
Scunthorpe Town Centre
I think of all the places I’ve been to in the UK, I can’t think I’ve been anywhere that was so lacking in any place that looked like it might be able to sell me a gluten-free meal. Usually, there is an Indian restaurant and they can very often be relied to produced something more than acceptable. But the only such restaurant appeared to be closed at lunchtime.
So I turned to that other standby and bought an egg and potato salad, a drink and a banana in M & S. In fact this was the first M & S in a decent sized town that I’ve found, that didn’t stock gluten-free bread!
But I had prepared myself and I had some smoked salmon sandwiches in my case.
I would hate to live on a gluten-free diet in the town.
Thorne, Althorpe and Flixborough
One of the places the train stopped was Thorne.
I can remember driving through it on a dark and wet night sometime in about 1970, when it was one of the poorest areas in the UK. C, myself and our eldest son, who was just a baby at the time had been to visit C’s friend from Liverpool University, Sandra Briton and her husband Keith at Gliberdyke.
It still looked pretty bleak from the train, as the wind blew across the flat lands of North Lincolnshire.
It’s not a place I should have ever wanted to live.
Althorpe was another place passed by the train and we used to have friends who lived near there under the shadow of the River Trent. C could remember being woken up by a boat on the river virtually passing by the room where she was sleeping.
Our friends used to tell a story how tourists used to turn up looking for the last resting place of Princess Diana. But of course they had got the spelling wrong. I hope it’s improved with Sat-Navs or do they send those Dianaphiles to the wilds of North Lincolnshire?
But I couldn’t go to this part of the country, without thinking about the Flixborough disaster. I’ve worked on lots of chemical plants and know how dangerous they can be. And the disaster at Flixborough, proved my fears, when 28 people died and many were injured in June 1974.
According to Wikipedia, the cause of the explosion my well have been a badly-designed bypass pipe that wasn’t properly tested. I also heard a contributing factor from an engineer at ICI, was that the design of the plant had been metric as it was a Dutch design and it had been converted to Imperial when it was built in the UK. This had meant that the pipe that broke was the wrong size to withstand the pressure. Wikipedia says this.
The official inquiry into the accident determined that the bypass pipe had failed because of unforeseen lateral stresses in the pipe during a pressure surge. The bypass had been designed by engineers who were not experienced in high-pressure pipework, no plans or calculations had been produced, the pipe was not pressure-tested, and was mounted on temporary scaffolding poles that allowed the pipe to twist under pressure. The by-pass pipe was a smaller diameter (20″) than the reactor flanges (24″) and in order to align the flanges, short sections of steel bellows were added at each end of the by-pass – under pressure such bellows tend to squirm or twist.
I don’t know what the truth was and probably we’ll never find out, but in my view to mix measurement systems in anything as dangerous as a chemical plant is asking for trouble. It should be noted that ICI went fully metric in chemical plant design sometime in the 1950s. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that safety was one of the reasons.
The fact that we still commonly use Imperial measures is an absolute disgrace.
Doncaster to Scunthorpe
Doncaster to Scunthorpe is not the most salubrious of railways. It goes in a pretty straight line through a series of stations, that have seen some improvement over the years. But that can’t be said for some of the trains.
Class 142 Diesel Multiple Unit
I had just missed the Trans Pennine Express, so I had to travel in one of these Class 142‘s or Pacers. I thought that the junk we have on Ipswich to Cambridge was bad, but these seem to be even worse!
Welcome to Scunthorpe! At least the station had had a makeover.
Scunthorpe Station
But it had been said that there was a courtesy bus to Glanford Park, where Scunthorpe United play. Perhaps I was too early, as it wasn’t there. So I decided to explore the nearby town centre and get some lunch.
Simon Calder on the M25
Simon Calder is one of my favourite writers and his piece on Saturday on the M25 in the free Independent, I got from East Coast was excellent.
I particularly liked this bit.
Time for coffee. No service station graces this stretch of the M25, but handily the coffee bar with the best view in the South-east is just a juggernaut’s shudder from Junction 14. The location is on the departures level of Heathrow Terminal 5. As you wander over from the car park, you can look west to Windsor Castle. And a window seat provides you with a view over one of the busiest runways in the world. On the apron below, Airbuses beetle about, while every minute or two a Boeing whizzes past the window, carrying hundreds of people with stories from afar – some of which would no doubt be told as the M25 guided them home with their meeters and greeters.
It sounds like a place to visit. But I suspect Simon’s publicity means it will be very busy!
Little Bits of Cardboard
I took this picture at some time on the journey to Scunthorpe, possibly between Peterborough and Doncaster sitting comfortably in First on East Coast and it shows one of the problems of complicated journeys on trains.
British Rail Tickets
On my trip from Saturday until this morning, I collected eighteen of these little orange tickets. Some incidentally, were marked “NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL”
Surely, those in charge of our railways could do better!
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater and make the ticketing dependent on a smart phone. I am old enough to never need a replacement for my Nokia 6310i and if you can’t do it on that, I’m not interested!
So perhaps we need just one orange ticket per trip,that is the same as the ones we have now,but has a bar code printed on the face, so that it can be read by a simple reader in the conductor’s hand on the train.
The Anonymous Widower 