A Very Unhappy Bunny
Whilst travelling from Crewe to Lancaster on Day 21 on the very overcrowded Glasgow train, I came across a very unhappy bunny. She had booked the previous Glasgow train, but had then missed it because of a tube journey that took twenty minutes longer than it should. So to get to Glasgow, she’d had to buy a new ticket at £130 and stand all the way. She was saying she wouldn’t use the train again and would fly next time. But what would have happened if she’d turned up late for her flight?
The trouble is that many expect that when they use a train, they just turn up, buy a ticket at a good price and go. If I’ve bought a cheap ticket, I always make sure I get it, although in a couple of trips, I’ve bought a new ticket to get home early. It has cost me, but I’ve got to bed a couple of hours early.
I have read that a lot of people get to the station early for their trains. The trouble is that most stations don’t cater for those, who do and then have a coffee, buy a paper and have a read. It’s why you get so many people standing in front of the departure boards at stations, blocking the path for those hurrying to get on a train. So as more people travel by train, it just means that stations will get more and more congested.
I do wonder whether this congestion, meant that the unhappy bunny, deliberately delayed until the last minute to avoid the crush.
I’m lucky in that I’m a 30 minute or under bus ride from Liverpool Street, Kings Cross, St. Pancras, London Bridge and Euston, so if I watch the buses on-line through the Countdown system, I can usually have a better experience than most. It also means, I can catch the very early morning trains before six in the morning, when everything is less crowded. But if you live more than 30 minutes from the main station and there is no all-night bus, this isn’t possible in London. that it is like in Manchester or Birmingham say, I do not know.
But to return to my unhappy bunny. She was at fault for missing the train. But in her support, getting to stations early, is often not the best experience.
Virgin Trains Glasgow Services
Inevitably in the last couple of weeks, I’ve ended up on some of Virgin Trains services that have started at or are going to Glasgow. If I take Day 21, where I went from London to Milton Keynes and then from Crewe to Lancaster for Morecambe, before going from Lancaster to Carlisle, all on trains going to Glasgow. The early train had plenty of space, although, a lot of people use it to commute to Milton Keynes, but the other two were very overcrowded. I didn’t have a seat reservation on either leg and although I got a seat from Crewe to Preston, it was stand up for the rest of the way.
It almost seems that there is a division, where trains are bearable south of Warrington, Wigan or Preston, but often unbearable to the north. More capacity is urgently needed, both on the Pendolino and Super Voyager services. I think the problem is compounded, by the fact, that the trains get used by locals, travelling just one or two stops. I met one guy commuting from Lancaster to Carlisle.
There are a few TransPennine services from Manchester Airport to Glasgow that use the route, but they are short 100 mph trains, which at best add a few seats to the route and at worst make it more congested. I experienced one going south and detailed it in this post. Perhaps, there is a case for a couple of High Speed Diesel Trains to replace the small Class 185‘s on this route until the line is fully-electrified and electric multiple units arrive.
It has been announced that extra Pendolino trains will be available soon, but some seem to have been put into store, rather than service. Surely, if the sums added up four years ago, and we’ve had an increase in passengers since then, that they are better earning revenue rather than getting rusty.
Remember that my particular expertise is resource scheduling. I just think, that someone’s objective function is not comprehensive enough or there are some dark politics involved. If nothing, adding extra seats to the Glasgow services might encourage people to use them rather than flying, which would reduce our carbon footprint.
Given the overcrowding, something should be done as soon as possible.
At present all I can advise, is make sure you have a seat reservation when you travel anywhere between Warrington and Glasgow.
But the real problems of the West Coast Main Line are historic, as Wikipedia states.
Because of opposition by landowners along the route, in places some railway lines were built so that they avoided large estates and rural towns, and to reduce construction costs the railways followed natural contours, resulting in many curves and bends. The WCML also passes through some hilly areas, such as the Chilterns (Tring cutting), the Watford Gap and Northampton uplands followed by the Trent Valley, the mountains of Cumbria with a summit at Shap, and Beattock Summit in southern Lanarkshire. This legacy of gradients and curves, and the fact that it was not originally conceived as a single trunk route, means the WCML was never ideal as a long-distance main line, with lower maximum speeds than the East Coast Main Line (ECML) route, the other major main line from London to Scotland.
And this still means that for long distances north of Crewe, that only a double track is possible. So this limits the number of paths available, which means that running say a slower connecting service from Warrington to Carlisle, is just not on, even though it would remove the one or two station travellers.
And then you have the freight trains!
So perhaps the problem is not actually about trains, but is more about tracks and paths. The only way then, to get more through, would be to increase the size of the trains from nine to eleven coaches, for which many of the carriages have been built and are in store.
But at some point, the West Coast Main Line will have to have extra tracks, especially if more and more freight trains need to run to and from Scotland from the south. As I believe has been shown around Ipswich, the more freight trains you can run, the less trucks use the roads and you get greater capacity for cars and coaches.
I add the latter, as there is now a London to Glasgow coach service with sleeping berths.
The Solution’s Behind You
The BBC were interviewing Ed Balls today at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. He was pontificating on the solutions, that he would do to could Britain out of the financial mess, that largely his party got us in.
Who is right or wrong on the solution is a matter for the future.
Butb I think, that the solution to our problems was behind Ed Balls in his BBC interview. But then politicians never look behind themselves, except to see where the knife is coming from.
Over the last twenty years or so, Liverpool has been transformed, from a basket case, to one of the most vibrant cities in the world, by developing the city in a professional and quality manner. Liverpudlians will point to the European City of Culture in 2008, as a catalyst for a lot of the change, but in some cases it just gave developers a reason and possibly an excuse to invest.
London too, is changing and has been greatly improved over the last few decades. The development of Docklands started it and now the Olympics is pushing the city to new heights.
You could also argue, that Manchester got a kick start from the 2002 Commonwealth Games, but just as with Liverpool and London, the process was going to happen anyway and perhaps these events were just advertising for the place on a wider scale. Wikipedia says a lot about how the Games got Manchester moving after the 1996 IRA bombing. One might even say now that Manchester’s driving force is football.
Liverpool is getting a lot of publicity over the next couple of days, and how many will think about going there for a weekend break? When I was there last, I met a plumber who had come to the city for the day to ride his bicycle along the Mersey. Liverpool is almost becoming a seaside resort!
These three cities have benefited from a process that could best be described as Infrastructure for All.
I could also add how Newcastle has benefited from the waterfront developments along the Tyne. Other cities, like Leeds and Birminghamhave also been improved to everybody’s benefit.
I should also ask, if Glasgow is seeing the benefit for the 2014 commonwealth Games yet.
We must do this more in our run-down cities and districts.
Even on a local basis, Dalston has improved a bit in the year I’ve been here, mainly because of the opening of two new railways, that got built early because of the Olympics. But even if the Olympics hadn’t happened, they would have still gone ahead.
So we should look at all the infrastructure projects on the stocks and do those that are most valuable as soon as finances allow.
Priorities should obviusly go to those that give the greatest benefit. I would start with.
Housing, which would provide homes for our ever increasing population. It should be energy efficient and hopefully built, so that people who live there, don’t need to own one car per person, as we must wean ourselves off our own personal travelling spaces, they cost everyone else dear.
Selective rail projects, to remove bottlenecks and level crossings, improve stations and add a few new ones. In Suffolk, they are adding a new loop at Beccles so that more trains can run from Ipswich to Lowestoft. How many more Beccles-like problems are there out there, that need urgent removal. Many of these projects would have positive knock-on effects in other areas. Some level crossings, like the one in the centre of Lincoln, would have enormous benefits to road traffic, if they were removed.
Rail freight projects, which remove trucks from the roads. This would mean a few more interchanges such as Radlett, but the benefit to roads like the A14 and M1 would be high.
Personally, I would add a better bus network, with much better ticketing and disabled-friendly, information rich two-door buses, like you have in London. I have a free pass for buses, so why do I have to be issued with a ticket when I use a bus in Cambridge. It should be just touch in on all buses.
And of course, it’s important that we create interesting places for people to go. Some sports clubs have been trying to build new grounds for years and this process should be speeded up. And we don’t want any more stadia, like Coventry, Scunthorpe and the Rose Bowl designed solely to be driven to. They should be built near the transport hubs., which in itself would probably make them more financially viable.
You will notice, I’ve missed out new roads.
In many ways they are not infrastructure for all.
Some may need to be built or widened, but our priority should be to get unnecessary traffic off the roads.
I believe that we are seeing a drop in the number of trucks from the roads, as more and more container traffic is diverted to the trains. But this process needs some selective action at rail junctions, and it also needs more rail-based distribution centres near large conurbations. But the Nimbys don’t like these. Some also object to freight trains passing through at night.
There has been talk for years about taxing foreign lorries in this country, just as the Swiss do. The last time I drove the southern part of the M25, it was full of trucks registered aboard. We have the Channel Tunnel and goods to and from Europe should go through it on container trains, just like most of the freight goes in and out of the ports at Southampton, Felixstowe and Liverpool.
Every truck removed, is an increase in road capacity.
We also need better interface between the roads and rail. How many cities build large car parks in the centre, when perhaps building them on the outskirts and providing a tram or rail link to the centre? Cambridge was very much derided by doing this with a guided busway, by many including myself, but they now seem to be making a success of it.
Phil Mac Giolla Bhain
With all of the death threats and bombs in Glasgow over the last few days and the statement from Paul McBride, I decided to search the Internet to learn more. After all, anybody who is less than a hundred bricks short of a full load, would want the problems to be sorted and be stopped for ever.
I found this excellent web site from Phil Mac Giolla Bhain. Read this post about a tax demand from HMRC and note some of the associated comments.
Tomorrow is another battle in the Glasgow Premier League. It will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 5 Live. Rumour has it that Jeremy Bowen has been asked to commentate.
The Two Faces of Football
This morning the news of the threats against Neil Lennon broke.
This evening, I’ve just watched a marvellous display of football as Tottenham and Arsenal fought out a three all draw.
Now, when I was young and growing up in North London, the rivalry between the two North London teams was fierce and probably on the same level as it was between Rangers and Celtic in Scotland at the time.
The rivalry is still there in North London, but it is still at a fierce but fair level. I would doubt there have been any more than a handful of arrests tonight. How many will we see in Glasgow on Sunday?
What has gone so wrong in Glasgow?
The Glasgow Premier League Has a Long Way to Go
Celtic and Rangers may have played an ill-tempered match this week, but apparently there is a report of a match in Argentina where 36 red cards were shown.
The Glasgow Premier League
Who’d be a real football fan in Scotland, as the system is such, that unless you’re Celtic or Rangers no-one else gets a look in.
They will play each other seven times this year and if the other matches are like last night’s ill-tempered affair, how long will it be, before Scottish football fans turn to other sports or the television set in even greater numbers.
But then Rangers against Celtic is not about football. I live close to the Emirates and do we see any trouble, except for a bit of traffic congestion on match days. So peaceful, well-attended matches can be arranged without either an overwhelming police presence or trouble in the UK. So a few clubs do cause the odd problems, but the troublemakers are usually measured in hundreds at the most. And we rarely get matches in England with three players sent off.
One thing I object to is that the BBC, give Rangers/Celtic matches a lot of coverage on both TV and radio, when often there is a more important match or another sport that would be preferred by most people in the UK. If I want to see a fight, then I’d prefer to watch a decent boxing match.
An Edinburgher Makes Peace with Glasgow
Gavin Mackay successfully makes sausages in South Korea. He had a bit of a problem with the seasoning and eventually found one in Glasgow. This he admitted is very unusual for a man from Edinburgh, as ne’er the twain shall agree!
Airdrie to Bathgate
Modern Railways also has an article about the opening of a new electric railway between Airdrie and Bathgate, which effectively creates a fourth link across Scotland’s central belt between the two main cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
I’ve read the article in detail and it states that a new station is being built at Drumgelloch to serve just 3,700 local inhabitants. This really shows how different rules starve East Anglian stations of money. Bury St. Edmunds for example has a population of 35,000 and the best thing that could be said about the station is that it compliments the Abbey Ruins. Haverhill has a population of 22,000 and no train station at all.
I think East Anglia could take a leaf out of Scotland’s book and reinstate the line between Sudbury and Cambridge. But that will never get done in my lifetime, despite the fact it could probably be done for a lot less than Airdrie to Bathgate.
The only thing we get is other areas’ hand-me-downs and a virtual busway.
Of Egyptian Halls and Steam Lorries
My main purpose in going to Glasgow, was to see an old mate, John, and his son, to reminisce about old times. Now John had been with me, when I went to the Queen’s Award party at Buckingham Palace in I think, 1981.
We had coffee in the hotel in Queen Street station, which made my point about stations as destinations for business, pleasure or sin! I’d also told John that I wouldn’t mind seeing the Sentinel Works, the first building designed by Archibald Leitch, the man responsible for so many sports stadia in the British Isles.
In some ways visiting the Sentinel Works had become more important to me, after reading about sorry state of the Egyptian Halls in Glasgow, in the latest Private Eye. I’m certain that if these two buildings had been in Edinburgh, then solutions would have been found for both!
Sentinel manufactured steam lorries amongst other things and to see one still going strong is a sight to behold.
Sentinel Steam Lorry
I saw this one in 2007 on the A505 near Baldock.
If the Egyptian Halls are in a sorry state, then the Sentinel Works are only held up by the integrity of Leitch’s design.
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- Sentinel Steam Lorry
The Anonymous Widower 