White Van Gentlemen
I saw this van in the Holloway Road.
White Van Gentlemen
But they are parked in the bus lane on an Arsenal match day.
The Damage To The Overground
Judging by these pictures I took, the train crash on the 15th caused quite a bit of damage.
You do wonder what would have happened if the container had fallen into the park below during the day. Luckily the wall held it on the track. But it did happen at three in the morning.
Let’s hope this accident is not a foretaste of the future, when a lot more freight trains from London Gateway will be using the North London Line.
There doesn’t seem to be any news about when the line will reopen.
Fall Out From A Train Crash
On the fifteenth of October, there was a train derailment at Camden Road on the North London Line. It still hasn’t been fixed fully yet, as the train brought the overhead wiring down in a very difficult place.
It’s reported here in the Camden New Journal. Some of the comments are priceless and fairly paranoid and speculate about it being a nuclear fuel train. It was actually, a load of containers going from Birmingham to Felixstowe.
Probably the good news is that this derailment has caused great inconvenience to freight train operators and they will be thinking harder about using the direct routes via Nuneaton and Peterborough, thus avoiding sending freight trains through Central London. This will of course get easier once the Bacon Factory Curve is complete at Ipswich.
Hopefully We Won’t See This Much Longer
Whilst waiting for a train at Canonbury station today, a Class 70 diesel engine went through with a long train of intermodal freight.
Hopefully We Won’t See This Much Longer
They are noisy beasts and hopefully, they will be replaced by more environmentally friendly electric locomotives soon. Note the overhead wires used by most trains on this line.
An order has been placed for Vossloh Eurolite engines, which are effectively electric locomotives, with the ability to work off the electrified network, using an on-board diesel engine. They will be called Class 88, when they are delivered.
There’s more about the Class 88 order here.
The Class 88 increasingly looks like a very good design to solve one of big problems of freight on UK railways; the need to use diesel engines on most trains, as there is not a large enough continuous electrified system.
If we take a simple example of a freight train from Felixstowe to Manchester via London, which at present needs a diesel engine to Ipswich and then an electric one for the rest of the journey, this could be Class 88-hauled all the way.
I think we could see a lot of Class 88s and similar engines in the future.
It won’t just be on freight, as the engine has a top speed of 200 kph, when working passenger trains. Could they be used on difficult services like Euston to Holyhead, where much of the route past Crewe is not electrified?
Surprisingly, the electro-disel concept is not new, as the old Class 73, which dates from the 1960s, was also an electric engine with an onboard diesel, designed for the third rail lines south of London.
Some of the original 49 engines are still in use.
Does this show that you can’t keep a good idea down?
Felixstowe v. London Gateway
With London Gateway receiving its first ship in November, the war of words between the port and its rivals is hotting up.
There’s a report here from the Daily Telegraph, which says that Felixstowe will be a cheaper port to use. But it was produced by the port’s owners, so we should probably add a shovel of sea salt.
As a man of Suffolk, who has seen Felixstowe rise from a small dock to the giant port it is today, London Gateway should probably look at the lessons of history, where Suffolk has a proud record of taking on invaders. Boadicea’s descendents will give London Gateway a very strong and probably dirty fight.
london Gateway makes a lot about having the land for a large logistics park by the port, but then you’ve still got to get the containers to the market and can London’s roads, the M25 and the railways cope with getting the boxes away? The Gospel Oak to Barking line may be being electrified, but will the residents of North London put up with container trains at all hours? Felixstowe is at the end of the line and electrifying the line to Peterborough and beyond, with a certain amount of double-tracking would help that port cut costs further.
We live in interesting times!
It Wasn’t A Good Trip!
The objective was simple, which was to get to Felixstowe from Liverpool Street in time for a dental appointment at 14:10. I worked out I’d leave on the 11:30 from London and then I had fifteen minutes at Ipswich to change onto the 12:58 to Felixstowe. I would arrive at 13:24, which gave me plenty of time. Coming back, I had plenty of time to catch the 15:28 after my appointment and after a change at Ipswich I’d be back in London for 17:19
But things didn’t work out as expected! The train crawled out of London and we were thirteen minutes late at Colchester, so I felt I’d miss my connection. But that was late too, so I caught it easily!
But I don’t like being late.
After my appointment, I walked back to the station and as the train appeared to be on time and it was only15:00, I walked back to the bar in Felixstowe station to see if they had a nice glass of cider.
But they didn’t so after fiddling about, I walked back to the platform and sat and read my paper for a bit.
There was then a bit of commotion and on checking the display I found that my train to Ipswich had been cancelled just a few minutes before it was due to arrive.
I thought about taking the bus into Ipswich, but then I realised I’d have to get from wherever the bus dropped me to the station.
I did think about waiting for the 16:28, but who was there any guarantee that wouldn’t be cancelled as well. After all, as I went to Felixstowe, a driver had told me one train had already been cancelled in the morning.
So I walked back to the taxi rank opposite Tesco and took one to Ipswich station for £25.
I eventually got back into London at about 17:30 and was dropped right in the middle of the rush hour.
Not one of those inconvenienced by this cancellation heard any advice from Greater Anglia.
Discussing it all with the taxi driver, who took me to Ipswich, he said it happens all the time, because they give the freight trains priority. Let’s hope that when the Bacon Factory Curve is completed, things get a bit better. However, it would help if more of the line from Ipswich to Felixstowe was double-tracked, as the Docks said they would be.
This line sets a bad precedent for the row that will happen between London Overground and the freight operators, who want to use the North London and Gospel Oak to Barking Lines to and from London Gateway. I think we’ll see one hell of a row over that conflict, especially when Class 66s thunder through all night keeping the residents awake.
Putting The Cart Before The Horse
The Standard is reporting tonight, that Lord Mandelson has changed his mind over the building of HS2. Here’s a flavour.
In an extraordinary public U-turn, he confessed the costings were “almost entirely speculative” when Gordon Brown’s Cabinet backed the idea.
Ministers wanted a “bold commitment to modernisation” after the financial crash, he said, and ignored the potential risks of what now looked like “an expensive mistake”.
But then as Gordon Brown didn’t have the financial acumen to run a whelk stall, what do you expect?
I’ve always been slightly cynical about HS2 and feel if it ever gets built, it won’t be as is now envisaged.
But one thought struck me, as I read the article and it gave rise to the title of this post.
My background is in Project Management, which is all about getting things build the right way and in the correct order. Judging by all the arguments about how Heathrow Airport will link in to HS2, it struck me as strange that we are deciding the route of HS2 before we decide if we’re going to build a new airport for London.
Look at any option, with the possible exception of a third runway at Heathrow and we’ll have to revamp the railways around London, to create links to the North.
Strangely in a few years time, when the Midland Main Line is electrified, Sheffield will have the best links to a London airport, of any northern city. I suspect they’ll be running trains from Sheffield to Brighton, which of course will stop at Gatwick.
That just shows how well politicians plan transport networks.
They haven’t really done anything to solve the North-South problems we currently have and what will happen to construction methods in the near future.
HS2 is initially planned to go from London to Birmingham, but that route has one high speed 200 kph line and a convenient slower one. As I found last week, when I went to Birmingham, it’s a good service and a lot of the problems are on their way to being solved. I wonder what amount of traffic, an upgraded and electrified Chiltern Main Line could carry, thus delaying the need for HS2 to Birmingham!
But go North from Birmingham to Manchester, Liverpool and ultimately Scotland and there is a real lack of capacity. Admittedly, Virgin’s lengthened trains and a few new ones will help, but that line will probably be the first part of the West Coast Main Line to get totally overloaded.
So perhaps we should build it from North to South as some have proposed.
A very real problem is the cess-pit at the London end of the line; Euston. It was built on the cheap in the 1960s and needs a complete rebuild. Rebuilding Euston and building HS2 at the same time, would be a recipe for disaster.
And then there’s the problem of freight capacity, which is going to get worse, as some idiot decided to build the UK’s largest container port at London Gateway, in a place which is difficult to get to by rail,as most trains will have to fight their way through London. You could argue that the proposal to run freight trains on the old Grand Central Line by a company called Central Railway, should have been built as a freight spine first.
Building this line, would probably have taken a lot of the freight off the West Coast Main Line, so giving us the extra passenger capacity we need, at least as far as Manchester and Liverpool for a few years.
As with many things in Project Management, you don’t let politicians be involved in the design or choose the order you do something!
I always remember the building of the Lewisham Extension of the Docklands Light Railway. The contractors were told it had to link various holes in the ground and cost under a certain amount. The politicians then stood back and it was delivered on time at an acceptable price. Not like the Jubilee Line Extension, which was built at a similar time and suffered endless interference from politicians.
One of my laws of project management states that the more political or board level interference in a project, the later and more costly the project will be. If however those at the top lay down a feasible specification with rigid time and cost limits, the project will more likely be delivered successfully.
A Decision Day For HS2?
HS2 is a project that I think will never be built.
I was listening to the debate on Radio 5 this morning about George Osborne’s £11. 5billion public pending cuts and one guy phoned in to question, why with the obvious need for cuts, we are going to spend £33billion on HS2.
There is so much opposition to HS2 amongst the Nimbys, that I suspect that at some time parliament will chicken out and vote the project down.
I have never heard so much opposition to a project, in my lifetime. But then the general public doesn’t want new railways, they want new roads on which to drive their gas-guzzlers.
I also think HS2 is probably going about things the wrong way, but as to what the right way is, I do not know.
But we do urgently need the following.
- More capacity on passenger trains from London to Manchester and onwards to Scotland. The case for Birmingham may be less important, especially, if services to Marylebone can be improved.
- More freight capacity through London and to the North, especially after London Gateway becomes fully operational.
- A rebuilt and more efficient Euston station.
The freight capacity cannot be increased without creating a substantial new railway.
It will be interesting to see the way that MPs vote.
The Anonymous Widower 