All Adventures Start At Stanfords
Stanfords is one of my favourite shops as it stocks my pornography; maps.
Stanfords Travel Bookshop
So I went there last night to get a county map for Lancashire, as this county seems to contain a lot of the difficult teams.
Going Off The Jubilee Line
Today it is reported that the Jubilee line is wasting electricity.
They may be, but that doesn’t explain, why I’m beginning to go off London’s newest deep tube.
Every time I seem to use it, there would appear to some delay. And when it is working well, the gaps between trains seem to be longer and vety much more crowded.
Raising Motorway Speed Limits
There is a lot of talk and argument about raising the motorway speed limits to 80 mph. Read about it here in the Independent, where they say that the limit will rise, but with lots more 20 mph zones in towns.
No-one is raising the fact, that more and more container traffic is being taken off the roads and put on the rails. This will decrease the congestion and increase the speed of the traffic. But they do need to selectively spend some money on rail junctions and road/rail terminals.
Getting To Newcastle Urgently on the Cheap
In my trip around the country, I will have a lot of problems, because I often won’t know, which train, I can catch.
I was in Kings Cross this morning and looked up how much it would cost me to go today, if I bought a ticket. A Super Off Peak Single with a Senior Railcard would have cost me £72.40. But suppose I want to go tomorrow, how much will that self-same ticket cost on the web? I’ve just looked and if I want to travel tomorrow, it’ll cost me £36.20. Or half price.
So just by booking the day before, you get half price on the web. And I can travel on any train after 9:30.
Incidentally, there are no cheaper tickets.
So when I have to return after a busy day, I’ll have one in my wallet, as I can use it on most late trains home.
Rail Ticket Machines
The on-line rail ticket system is good, in that you can pick up your tickets from any machine you want, anywhere in the UK. They do ask you to nominate a specfic one, but I generally use the ones in Kings Cross, as they are convenient for me and are often not very busy, as there are lots of them. They are also slightly more private than some I could name.
The biggest problem is that you need to type in a randomly generated transaction number. I usually text it to my mobile phone, so that when I look at the Inbox, all I see is the numbers of tickets I need to collect, so I can hold the phone in my left hand, whilst I type with my right.
The system could be improved, by allowing you to type in a collection code, when you buy your ticket on-line. So for East Coast, you might use EC and the last four digits of your phone number. As to get the tickets, you’d need to put in the right credit card, that would probably be as secure as the current system. In fact it could be more so, as I’ve seen people take little bits of paper out of their wallet and then read the code, whilst they type it. Some machines have a Qwerty keyboard, which can be difficult for those who don’t type too well.
It would of course mean that collecting multiple tickets, as I’m doing all the time at the moment would be very easy, as I’d use the same code.
So I would end up with a pile of little orange cards, that I’d have to check before I left the station. But that happems now. It’s just that I have to type in several numbers instead of one.
I would also like to see the fact that the ticket had been collected acknowledged to me in an e-mail. That way mistakes and fraud would be spotted earlier.
And why not have a few chairs by the machines so that some like me could sit down and sort everything out.
What Do We Do With the Old District/Met/Circle Line Trains?
Last night, I travelled to and from to Upton Park on some of the old D-stock trains. They may be thirty years old and are to be replaced in 2015, but they asren’t fit for the scrap heap yet. In fact with a bit of a tart-up, they would probably last another twenty years or so, judging by how well most Metro-Cammell trains were built.
Ride to Upminster and back on one and then say that they should be scrapped forthwith. You won’t get the words out, as none of the problems on the line, are the D-stock.
The good burghers of Harrogate, who might or might not live up to that Yorkshire stereotype of being canny have proposed that some of these trains be used between Leeds, Harrogate, Knaresborough and York.
The respected rail commentator, Alan Williams, hasn now weighed in with some south common sense. It might be Yorkshire common sense to, as I think he lives in Scarborough.
- He asks why this system is not being proposed elsewhere, like for the Welsh Valleys.
- He also says that it the thinking is very much in line with the McNulty Report. I suppose one could ask, if the civil servants are in-line with it. They probably aren’t as they never travel outside of London, except by air or limousine! It would be interesting to know how many of the top civil servants, who effectively run our railways have travelled in a Pacer.
- He says too, that they could use a modern protected third rail system, where the electric rail couldn’t be touched by trespassers. This is used on the DLR in the UK and in many places abroad. Perhaps civil servants would be more impressed with the proposals after a round trip of Europe inspecting systems elsewhere?
We could have a competition, where there was a prize for the most innovative use in a railway context of the D-stock trains.
Cash For Scrap
No wonder we get so much metal thefts with big screen adverts like this at football grounds.
Where to Sell Your Scrap Metal For Cash
I took this picture at West Ham last night!
If I was the Transport Minister, I’d get them banned.
Avoiding the Rain on the Train
One of the reasons, I wanted to use the bus to get home, even if it meant a change, was that it was raining hard. If I could have ended up on any one of several routes, I would have been dropped within a hundred metres of my house. Usually when you change buses, you don’t get that wet too, if you choose the changeover with care.
I have three choices of train from Stratford. I usually take one of.
- The Overground to Dalston Kingsland and walk.
- The Overground to Hackney Central and get a bus.
- Central line to Bank and then a bus.
All though would have meant a ten minute walk in the rain. And I didn’t have an umbrella with me.
So in the end, I took the Overground to Canonbury, then back on the East London line to Dalston Junction and then a bus along the Balls Pond Road. Not the simplest, but definitely the driest. It was very wet as this picture at Canonbury shows.
Canonbury in the Rain
To make matters worse, my preferred route via Hackney Central requires a walk over an uncovered bridge and I wasn’t the only person, who on seeing the weather there, declined to get off.
The Overground is one of those modes of transport, that is very good in fine weather, but some stations get you very wet, when it rains heavily.
The amount of passengers using the line is starting to cause problems. I left Stratford in the rush hour and getting to the platforms was difficult because of large numbers of passengers going the other way. I used the lift to avoid them. The platforms also need a Next Train indicator, as is common on many parts of London’s railways, both over and under the ground.
Wot No Spidermap!
In common with many others, I like the bus spidermaps that London uses.
They effectively solve the problem of when you are out of your normal area and need to get someone you know. Often a point on a map will be well-known to you, so you just get the bus that goes there. In East London, there are also well-known points like the Angel, Aldwych, Bow Church, Clapton Pond and Walthamshow Central, where bus routes tend to cross. With the spder maps, which list every stop in a vague geographic way, it is easy to locate the place where your local route crosses one from the place you are.
But there is no spider map for Stratford City, despite it having an impressive bus station.
Stratford City Bus Station
I was told that it was coming and to look on the Internet. All that was there was this piece of designer tosh, that is very useful, if you know the bus you want, but useless if like me, you don’t know your way home. It doesn’t even have the detailed list of places where the buses go, which is common to all spider maps.
So in the end I came home by train.
The Anonymous Widower 