Artwork At Bowes Park Station
Bowes Park station is one in my old haunts around Southgate and Wood Green.
I found a story that there had been some artwork put up at the station, so as I’ve never been to the station, I went to look.
I wasn’t that impressed with the artwork. But we do need some stations to be brightened up.
The station itself is of a rather unusual layout, but is clean and tidy, although the disabled entrance is possibly one of the worst in London. However, adding a lift, wouldn’t necessitate a major rebuild.
In fact, the station is one of those, where a clever architect could turn a bad station into an extremely good one, as it has spacious platforms and walk up access from both sides to the footbridge across the station and the tracks.
According to the latest news, the line which currently uses Class 313 trains, is going to be provided with new trains in the next few years.
A good disabled-friendly station coupled with the new trains and good cycle parking might almost make make the station improvements self financing, through more traffic.
Later when I returned to London from my visit to New Southgate, nearly all the passengers who got off the train at Highbury and Islington, crossed onto the Victoria line for trains to Central London. So would an upgraded Bowes Park station take customers away from Bounds Green tube station, which will probably never have lifts?
BT Broadband Is Like A Whore’s Drawers
All day yesterday and for much of today, BT’s Broadband service has been terrible, going up and down like the unmentionables in the title of this post.
This a typical report about the problem from the BBC.
I do wonder if the problem lies in some of the historic exchanges. I’m connected to CLIssold and as the problem seems to have occurred in all sorts of random places, perhaps it is down to some equipment that is common but not universal on the network.
It’s a blpoody pain in the BuTT.
Does My Roof Make Me Ill?
Read this article on the BBC web site and then look at the pictures of the roof that Jerry built.
The BBC article says this.
He said there were simple measures anyone could take – whether living in a well-insulated home or not – to keep heat levels down, such as keeping windows closed during the day to trap cool air and opening them at night.
Fitting shutters to windows and painting exterior walls white – both common sights in Mediterranean countries – would also help, but were unlikely to be widely adopted in the UK due to the relative rarity of heatwaves.
Couple this advice with the actions of a friend, who lives in her house with a flat roof and gets it painted silver every few years.
My roof, is virtually matt black and is therefore a wonderful heat absorber, which it then just radiates into the house.
I will be doing two things.
In the first place, I’ll be getting the roof fixed and then painted in a reflective colour.
But the most radical thing I’ve going to do is put up a sunshade over all of the flat roofs. One roof is probably about 4 x 7 metres and the other is about 4 x 5 metres.
They will of course help to pay for their own installation, as they will be solar panels.
As the roof is flat and they will be invisible to everybody except the police helicopter or the Air Ambulance, I don’t think anyone has any grounds to object.
If the roof is making me ill, it should at least help to solve the problem.
The Magic Pudding
One of C’s favourite books was the Magic Pudding. This is a description from Wikipedia.
The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff is an Australian children’s book written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay. It is a comic fantasy, and a classic of Australian children’s literature.
The story is set in Australia with humans mixing with anthropomorphic animals. It tells of a magic pudding which, no matter how often it is eaten, always reforms in order to be eaten again. It is owned by three companions who must defend it against Pudding Thieves who want it for themselves.
It had been published in 1918, but she had come across the book, when she was a mother’s help to a family in Norfolk. She read it to our three boys.
When I sold out from Metier, I put some money for safe keeping into a fund managed by TA Associates in Boston. The aim was that in a few years time, it would all be liquidated and the money returned for C’s pension fund.
But other things didn’t work out too well, due to a recommended investment in an office block in Bsasingstoke, which lost us about nine million and nearly everything else as well.
However, we kept going on our earnings, with a bit of help from the fund in Boston, until an investment I’d made, which everybody else said was worthless, paid most of the money I’d lost back.
The fund in Boston had been a good investment and I made a decent return, when everything was liquidated. But then the fun started, as some of their investments in the category of living dead started showing signs of life and for perhaps we had income from a fund that supposedly had been fully distributed.
C and myself nicknamed the fund the Magic Pudding, especially after we got a cheque for several tens of thousands of dollars.
Eventually, it all came to an end and C and myself were back on an even keel financially. So we sent the fund managers a copy of the book in thanks.
It was appreciated and we all parted company on the best of relations.
I have been looking since then for another Magic Pudding investment.
In an ideal world, you could put a sum of money into a bank account and you can get out a sum every so often, that you need for emergencies, like a new boiler or a holiday for your partner on a big birthday.
You would also want the capital sum to stay intact.
But to do this with a bank, you need a decent interest rate. So you can’t!
I have a sum invested in Zopa, which is around a hundred thousand. This has been built up over the last six years, by putting any spare money into the account. I started it with the money I got from selling C’s Porsche and now I top it up each month with what I have left over from my pension after I’ve paid all my bills. Typically, this sum is a thousand or so each month.
Zopa is very much a rolling fund and in addition to the interest each month, you get a proportion of capital of your micro loans repaid.
So if I look at the lsast couple of years, I usually get something like five percent of my total investment available each month.
If I don’t need any money in a particular month, the money goes back into the pot for reinvestment.
Obviously, the account doesn’t turn into a Magic Pudding Investment, until it has been running for a few years, when a proportion of your micro loans start to mature.
I would never recommend anybody to jump into peer-to-peer lending. But if you are unhappy with what your bank pays, then you should perhaps research some of long established peer-to-peer lending companies of which Zopa is one.
Think of the process of choosing a peer-to-peer lender as as you would choose a new car or house. You pick one that suits your lifestyle.
Will The Updated GNGE Affect Lincolnshire?
I ask this question because my Crossrail Google Alert picked up this article from Geoff Ford in the Grimsby Telegraph. He starts by saying this.
Have you noticed that most major transport projects are concentrated in the South, the West Midlands and the North West? And then berates the Chancellor for leaving Lincolnshire off the list of those getting big transport projects!
He has a point
If I have a bone to pick with Geoff, then it is that he doesn’t talk about The Great Northern and Great Eastern Joint Railway (GNGE) , that I talked about in this post. But then I hadn’t heard that such a large project with a value of £330million was taking place in Lincolnshire, until a couple of weeks ago.
The project is certainly an unexpected place to bury that sum of cash.
But the project will be completed before the end of the year and will hopefully stop most of the freight trains on the East Coast Main Line from imposing lower speed limits on passenger trains on the line.
People in Lincolnshire, should be asking the question of “What will the GNGE do for us?”
I’ll start with a negative, as all those freight trains will create noise and also increase congestion at some of the level crossings on the route. Lincoln will still be a problem and there are probably a few old British Rail employees, who cautioned against the closing of Lincoln St. Mark’s station and the associated by-pass line in 1985. But hopefully some clever engineers have got an affordable scheme that will help get the endless camels through the eye of Lincoln.
If I was a Logistics Manager for a company that was importing loads of stuff from China, that was destined for my company’s shops in Scotland and the North and I needed a distribution centre, then Lincolnshire is now on the list of acceptable places to build it. Especially, if the site is close to the GNGE and a decent road to the M62. But that is rather hypothetical, until the first company takes the decision and I think I know a lot more about project management, than I do about logistics.
Some things that the upgraded GNGE will offer is faster journey times for both passenger and freight, through higher speed limits, fewer level crossings and much improved signalling. So will these improvements allow more passenger trains up and down the various parts of the line from Peterborough to Doncaster, via Spalding, Sleaford, and Lincoln?
Currently, on the southern part of the line from Peterborough to Lincoln, there seems to be about one train every hour or so, which takes about ninety minutes to do the trip.
Perhaps more interestingly, is that it takes two hours from Lincoln to London if you change at Newark and thirty minutes longer if you change at Peterborough. So if nothing else is done, with judicious timetabling, the upgraded GNGE might even give extra two hour train journeys to London from Lincoln via Peterborough. It might even open up the market for an easier route for a direct train to London from Lincoln, which has been promised for years.
In one area though there may be an improvement. Wikipedia says this about Sunday services between Peterborough and Lincoln.
The line has a regular weekday daytime service but is closed between Sleaford & Spalding in the evenings (due to the high staffing costs associated with the large number of manned level crossings on this section) and has no Sunday service.
So as there will be fewer level crossings, will the line see an evening and a Sunday service?
Going between Lincoln and Doncaster seems more difficult, but hopefully after the line is finished, journeys will all take the quickest time achieved now.
Those that work out the timetables are going to have a complicated problem on their hands.
Did Jerry Wear His Underpants Backwards?
A couple of days ago, I decided to fit a new lock on my bedroom door, as when I bought the house the keys were non-existent. It was then I noticed that the escutcheon was on the inside of the door.
Hence the title of this post!
A Supper Of Odds And Ends
Supper tonight was one of those made up from what was left in the fridge.
A Supper Of Odds And Ends
The quiche was cold and half of one of Marks and Spencer’s new gluten-free ones. It’s funny, but going back, I think I’ve always preferred quiches cold. Are other people the same?
The tomatoes were delicious and had come via the De Beauvoir Deli from the Tomato Stall in one of England’s South Sea Islands. There were no air miles involved, if you’re worried!
The beetroot was a late-in-the-day reduction special at Waitrose and the asparagus was from Worcestershire and although it was tasty, it’ll probably be the last English we’ll see until 2015!
The gluten-free beer was German via Beers of Europe at Kings Lynn.
Note that I passed on any lettuce. I’m not a rabbit!
My Poor Roof
Jerry wasn’t the best roofer, as these pictures show.
He also seems to have created a roof to absorb heat into my house, which probably explains why it gets so hot.
The man was an idiot.
Now That’s What I Call A Turkey
The title is Kate Muir’s headline for her film review in The Times of Walking On Sunshine, which she thinks is worth just a single star and could be a strong contender for Worst British Film of 2014.
I shall not be going!
What Do We Do With Four-Four-Two?
I’m not referring to the formation used in football, but the Class 442 trains used on the Gatwick Express from Victoria.
At nearly twenty years old they are still comfortable trains in which to travel and I’ve used them a couple of times to get to or from Gatwick Airport and Brighton from London. As far as I’m concerned, they are not my preferred way to get to the airport, as they leave from Victoria, which is not as easy to get to as London Bridge from Dalston.
But there is nothing wrong with the Class 442 as trains, especially as they are based on the legendary Mark 3 coach and they hold the speed record of 174 kph for third rail electric trains.
The fact that they are third-rail only electric trains, is one of their two main problems. The other is that they weren’t designed as airport trains and are fairly unsuited for loading and unloading heavy cases.
It should be noted, that all of the third-rail electrics trains, built in the last few years are either dual voltage trains or they have a pantograph well, so they can be easily modified, so they can work with 25kV overhead electric lines.
The renewed franchise holder for Gatwick Express is reported as going to acquire a new specialist fleet of trains for the service, which will be delivered in 2016.
So we have the problem of a set of twenty-four five coach trains, with no service for which they are suitable.
They are fast trains, which means that only the suitable lines on which they could run are from Victoria to Brighton and Waterloo to Portsmouth, Southampton, Bournemouth and Weymouth. But they are unsuitable for the Victoria service, and they are not needed on the Hampshire services.
They are probably too old and too difficult to convert to overhead electric. It would seem to me with my engineering hat on, that to convert trains from third rail to overhead, unless that was in mind in the original design, is not a job with a small budget.
So conversion is probably a complete no-no!
So does the scrapyard beckon?
I would think so, but then a new coach costs around £1.5million and there are 120 coaches.
On the other hand, rail engineers have been living off scraps from the government for so long, that they are not short of innovative and oddball ideas. As an example read this article about how the previous Gatwick Express trains, the Class 460, were split up and used to lengthen the Class 458.
There are only two places where the Class 442 could appear to find a home.
The first is the two Coastway lines; East and West, which run from Ashford in the East to Portsmouth and Southampton in the West, via Hastings and Brighton. It would release other trains for use elsewhere, but I doubt it would need many of the twenty-four trains.even if the frequency was increased significantly.
The only other place where they could be used is on an electrified West of England Main Line to Salisbury and Exeter. I found this letter from South West Trains on the Network Rail web site. It states a whole list of advantages of electrying fom Basingstoke to Exeter.
So could the Class 442 find a home here on a third-rail electrified railway to Exeter?
It would probably go against policy to electrify such a long line in the archaic and incompatible third-rail system, but the upgrading does come with a set of fast affordable second hand trains in good condition, with an increasing reputation for reliability.
Another factor is whether Network Rail build a new route to Plymouth, as is outlined here on the BBC. If they do, I would suspect they would electrify it with overhead wires, so to have third rail to Exeter from Basingstoke, wouldn’t be that sensible.
So I still think that the Class 442 will go to the scrapyard.
But I wouldn’t mind being shown to be wrong and that the trains find a good home on somewhere like the West of England Main Line or the Coastways.
The Anonymous Widower 