Bison to Bedlam or How To Make Friends
CrossRail is the biggest project in Europe and sometimes I get annoyed with it, as the works in the City around Liverpool Street do cause a lot of diversions to the 21 and141 buses I use to get to a lot of places. Sometimes, I call the project AngryRail as that’s how it makes me feel.
But they know the problems they are causing and they do their best to mitigate them, be it by green walls or other means.
I have just received an e-mail from the company about the staging of their pop-up exhibition; Bison to Bedlam for a month in October.
They are giving talks on the Wednesdays and offering prizes for visitors.
Prize 1:
A Young Friends pass from the British Museum – includes annual YF Membership (the child receives magazines, a birthday card etc), two tickets to sleepover in the museum, two tickets to attend an activity event organised at the museum.
Prize 2:
An annual family membership card that covers entry into the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House Kensington Palace and Kew Palace.
They don’t seem to me to be bad prizes.
My only worry about the exhibition is that if the numbers who turned up at the pop-up version is anything to go by, is a month long enough?
When they have completed the railway, and collected a lot more valuable finds, they all need to be properly displayed, together with displays about the engineering. Perhaps there should be a CrossRail museum at Whitechapel?
The Hackney Stations Link
The councillor involved in transport has replied that Network Rail and Transport for London are actively pursuing plans for a possible pedestrian link between the two Hackney stations, similar to that, that existed before the Second World War, with the aim of completion in 2014. They included this old photograph, taken in 1928.
The amount of steel in the bridge was probably the reason it was taken down. After all there was a war on!
This could be the same bridge today.
The Bridge Taking The West Anglia Main Line Over The Overground
The track layout is slightly different and there is no trace of the footbridge. Judging by the modern-looking support at the right, it could have been rebuilt.
The Inter City 125 On BBC4
There was a documentary last night on BBC4 about the legendary High Speed Diesel Train or Inter City 125. It described how the politics, finances and some clever thinking produced a real icon.
Catch the documentary before it disappears from the BBC iPlayer!
The programme said that they’ll still be running in the 2030s on some routes. I wouldn’t bet on them still being running long after that.
Because of their speed and acceleration, they have proven that they can mix it on lines with both slow and higher speed traffic, so unlike heritage units like steam trains, they don’t cause pathing problems. Since they have now been updated with new engines, they produce a lot less noise and emissions too.
It is still proposed that they will be used for services to the far south west for many years, as electrifying the route from Exeter will be very difficult and expensive. They even did the journey from Plymouth to London in well under three hours recently. I reported it on this post.
But if they did a bit of marketing and perhaps uprated the catering, they could create a line, that would be a must-ride one for all visitors to Cornwall from London.
I have believed for a long time, that these trains will never go quietly. They’ll be like Routemasters and even if they’re not in main line service, they’ll turn up in the most surprising of places. The ghost of Jimmy Saville will see to that!
More CrossRail Green Walls
I visited two more of CrossRail’s green walls today, in Hanover Square and Park Lane.
They certainly seem a good way to improve the look of a building site.
Do We Learn From Football Crowd Tragedies?
In my lifetime, there has been three football crowd tragedies; Ibrox in 1971, Bradford City in 1985 and Hillsborough in 1989.
We may have dealt with the problems inside the grounds by better stadium design and rebuilding, but have we properly dealt with the problems the tragedies create for the emergency services and especially the paramedics.
Sadly, I think that it took some time for the message to get through. For example, with the latest news on Hillsborough, it becomes apparent that the paramedics couldn’t cope and this was probably the case at other non-football-related disasters in recent years. The attacks on the London Underground on the 7th of July 2005 come to mind. In that attack, how many lives were also saved as one bomb went off outside the Royal College of Surgeons?
We have to accept that tragedies and disasters will happen. But are we prepared for the worst, when they do? This week for instance there was a coach crash on the A3 at Hindhead, where three died. Did the emergency services of rural Sussex cope well?
Knowing the A14 well, what would happen if a coach crossed the dual-carriageway at say Newmarket and hit another head-on going the other way? The nearest hospitals are in Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds, almost twenty miles away. Do the emergency services train for such an emergency? Or do they hope it won’t happen?
What I feel sorry about the past couple of decades is that Bradford was the wake-up call and everybody ignored it! There was a mixture there of a dilapidated wooden stand with rubbish underneath it. Just one stray cigarette was al it took.
Doesn’t that sound a lot like the wooden escalator at Kings Cross, that caught fire in 1987. It probably wasn’t that simple, but surely the engineers in London Underground must have thought about the danger, after the fire at Bradford.
But the modern safety culture may be just that. Modern!
In the 1970s, I worked on a chemical plant and an instrument that the section I worked for, found that the plant was going into a regime, where it could explode. The plant manager immediately shut the plant and informed the makers. They informed him, that what we had proven, couldn’t be measured and we should keep the plant going. Two years later their plant buried itself in a hillside, killing a number of people.
So we were right! And they were wrong! It is not a nice thing to say, as people died, because of the blinkered thinking of others.
Even today, on my travels around the UK, visiting all the football grounds, one stood out as a place, where a bad accident could happen again! Not I hasten to add in the ground itself, but in the railway station, which brings large numbers of supporters to the ground.
CrossRail’s Living Walls
CrossRail has been using ivy to hide their digging sites in Central London.
This protographs were taken at Finsbury Circus.
There’s more here on the CrossRail web site.
Cyclehoops
I hadn’t heard of Cyclehoop until I saw a piece about how they have got a large export order from Vancouver, on the strength of their presence at the Olympics.
I like them, as hopefully, they’ll tidy up bikes on the streets and we’ll get less clutter that I’ll walk into. Admittedly, I do it less now, as my eyesight may not be perfect, but I’ve learned how to use it properly.
One thing I like about the design is that they are compact and can be very bright, so they aren’t among that large class of street furniture you trip over.
I’ll be looking out for some in use.
On another matter, their web site is very professional.
They also fulfil my theory, that there are many ways to redesign what we already have.
Looking at the gallery on the web site, you see too that it’s not a one-product company. They’re more a solutions company, that you go to when you want to park any number of bikes, from one to several thousands.
Bicycles On The Emirates Air-Line
Although, they say it’s possible on the web site, but I’d never seen bicycles being carried across on the cable-car before today.
As you can see, the seats tip up and the bikes are strapped in by the attendant.
I was in the gondola behind and there was no hold-up at all.
CrossRail On Open House
Whilst finding out about the archaeology, I also found that some CrossRail sites are to be thrown open to the public on the Open House Weekend. Here’s their summary.
On Saturday, 22 and Sunday, 23 September, we will ‘open the doors’ of the Bond Street station work sites, the Canary Wharf station work site and the Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy (TUCA) to the public as part of the Open House London weekend.
TUCA is an interesting one, as it is a legacy of CrossRail and is effectively a European University of Tunnelling. I have talked about it before.
CrossRail’s Archaeology Exhibition Is Back By Popular Demand
I saw CrossRail’s pop-up archaeology exhibition; Bison to Bedlam, a few month’s ago and it was one of the most interesting exhibitions I’ve ever seen. Especially, as it was put together at short notice.
They have now decided to bring it back by popular demand. Here’s an extract from their press release.
The exhibition will be held at the Crossrail Visitors Information Centre at Tottenham Court Road from 2 October to 27 October on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 11am to 7pm and Saturdays from 10am to 5pm. Crossrail’s Tottenham Court Road Visitor Information Centre is located at 16-18 St Giles High Street, WC2H 8LN.
It will be worth going again.
I suspect this exhibition could run and run.
The Anonymous Widower 