Greater Anglia Get It Together
I travel to Ipswich regularly to see Ipswich Town play.
My last two tickets cost me £34.95 and that was made up by buying a Senior ticket from the Zone 6 boundary (Harold Wood) to Ipswich and then upgrading it to First.
Yesterday’s ticket was much simpler in that it was a Senior First Class ticket all the way and back for £32.60.
I’ve just looked it up the 19th of October, when Ipswich play Burnley and I can now buy one on-line for £32.60.
it also looks like that for a Tuesday night match, I can get an Off-Peak First Return to Ipswich for the same price, provided I leave before 16:30. I don’t remember that being possible before. i could of course be wrong. The only returns to Ipswich I can find in my credit card statements are £34.95.
It looks like the price has got down for me and I’ll now be able to avoid the queues at Liverpool Street station on a Saturday morning, by buying my ticket on-line. I’ll also have time for a proper lunch before I travel.
That’s progress.
I’ve never found any fault with the staff on the trains to Ipswich, but today they seemed to have gone up a gear in cheeriness. The steward was also offering more than the usual single complimentary drink with your First Class ticket.
I have no complaints and let’s hope it all gets even better.
For instance, it is known that Herculean efforts are sometimes needed to keep the Class 90 locomotives on top form. As passengers generally like the smooth riding Mark 3 coaches, could a small injection of the new Class 88 locomotives, allow some Norwich services to be extended to Great Yarmouth, as they used to be in the past. Would they also enable proper trains to be run to Bury St. Edmunds and Lowestoft?
The Hospital Test
As I travel around the country, I like to apply the hospital test to all of the places I visit.
Imagine, that a friend or relative has been taken ill or had an accident and is in the local hospital!
By going to the local main station or airport, can you get to that hospital easily using information available there?
Some hospitals are easy to do the last link, but for others, the information is sadly lacking.
I’ve just looked up Barnet Hospital, where both my in-laws died. I did find the nearest station and bus information on the web site, but it wasn’t on a front page link, as it seemed to assume most will drive. On the Transport for London web site, I did find a spider map for the buses to and from the hospital. But not in every case, will I have such good local knowledge!
Incidentally, it seems that most London hospitals have their own spider maps showing all buses around the hospital. The only one I can’t find is one for University College Hospital.
How does your local hospital stack up?
Remember a high proportion of visitors will not be in the first flush of youth and many will have mobility and eyesight problems.
A Reply From Birmingham
After Ipswich played at Birmingham a couple of months ago, I posted an Open Letter To the Mayor of Birmingham. I posted a copy to him and today, I got a substantive reply from someone at the council. This is the e-mail I received.
Thank you for forwarding me the link to your open letter and I am sorry to hear that your recent visitor experience to Birmingham was not a good one.
As you mentioned New Street Station is currently undergoing a major rebuild as part of the Birmingham Gateway project. In April this year the east side of the station complex (the side closest to the pedestrian link to Moor Street station) was closed to facilitate the rebuild if that part of the development. This means that until the reopening of the whole station in the spring of 2015, pedestrians seeking to travel to Moor Street station will have to walk a less direct route around the station from the west side entrance. Whilst temporary pedestrian signage has been put in place which is soon to be supplemented with permanent “way finding” signs, we will respond to your feedback and look at ways the current signing arrangements can be enhanced to improve clarity for visitors.
With regard to the issue of pedestrians crossing at the Bordesley Circus junction I am pleased to say the City Council has recently been successful in securing for the necessary funding from the Department for Transport to carry out whole sale improvements to the roundabout. These improvements will include the provision of signal controlled crossings to help the pedestrian movement you have described and completion of the works is currently programmed by early 2015 at the latest.
That is very fair and it is good to see that progress is being made on the dangerous junction at Bordesley Circus.
The New Waiting Room At Kings Cross Station
I returned to Kings Cross Square to take a few more pictures.
It would appear that the public has got the hang of the new square and is using it as a waiting room.
Everybody seemed very happy with the square and the sunshine.
One of the East Coast crew jokingly moaned about the lack of anybody selling ice cream. But who’d have thought that they’d be selling ice cream in front of Kings Cross station. They don’t yet, but the area today was a good sun-trap.
Kings Cross Square Opens
I went to Kings Cross Square this morning to see the opening.
In the end I had to leave before the actual opening.
I liked the new Kings Cross Square a lot and it is good addition to London. The biggest advantage to me of the square, is that when I’m say travelling from West London to my home in Dalston, it gives me a much better route home. Instead of walking for miles through the labyrinth at Kings Cross to get from the Piccadilly line to the Northern for The Angel and a 38 bus, I think now I’ll surface and walk across the square to a 30 or 73 bus, which will get me more or less to my home. If it’s fine, I can even sit in the sun away from the traffic, while I wait for the bus. If it’s raining the bus stops are much bigger than they were before the development started.
The other thing about the square is that is now a wonderful place to meet someone for a bit of business. Or perhaps to start a date or a visit to the theatre or the cinema!
So that seems to be Kings Cross station virtually finished, with Paddington and London Bridge stations, well on their way.
When do we get started on the terrible dump we call Euston? Or it is Eusless?
Kings Cross Square Is Nearly There
Kings Cross Square opens tomorrow and it’s nearly there.
The buses though are back and I came home on a 476 towards Islington, from in front of the station. The driver seemed pleased too, judging by the smile on his face, when I said it was good to have the stop back.
From Greenford To Ealing Broadway
From Greenford station, I needed to get to Ealing Broadway station, so I used the branch of the main line into Paddington.
From Greenford To Ealing Broadway
Most of these little branches in London have disappeared, but this half-hourly service was useful for me.
Will Crossrail Overload The Docklands Light Railway?
After my visit to the new Canary Wharf Crossrail station on Saturday, I got thinking about the effect of the new line on the Docklands Light Railway.
A walkway will take passengers direct from Crossrail to Poplar station on the DLR. So would commuters from Essex and Kent going to the Bank area of the City, change at Canary Wharf for the DLR?
Only real figures, when Crossrail opens in a few years time, will give the answer.
I do think though that in a few years we’ll be talking about extending the DLR from Bank towards the west. These plans are discussed here in Wikipedia, but nothing has been firmed up yet. I suspect that if anything does get built it will be the link from Bank to Euston and St. Pancras, as this will open up a new route from Canary Wharf to the train lines to the north. But the uncertainty over HS2 doesn’t help in making this decision.
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?
A First Trip To Liverpool
As I went to Liverpool yesterday, I realised it will soon be fifty years since I first went to the Second City. I suppose it must have been in September 1965. I was just eighteen and as I’d had an unconditional offer to go to Liverpool University to read Electrical Engineering and Electronics, I hadn’t even had an interview. I remember, I had a large cheap cardboard suitcase with all my clothes and books and I had digs in Huyton, which meant I needed to lug that case up Copperas Hill to find the H13 Crossville bus to get there. I could afford a taxi, but didn’t take one. I’m still a bit like that!
In those days the West Coast Main Line was only electrified to Liverpool from Crewe, so I suspect they changed engines from diesel to electric there. According to this section in Wikipedia, electric trains didn’t run all the way until April 1966. I can’t remember how long the journey took, but I think it was of the order of over four hours. Compare this to the train I took yesterday, which did the journey with two stops in two hours and eight minutes.
If you think four hours was bad, I have a vague memory of a late night journey from Liverpool to London a few months later, that took five hours and forty minutes. I remember on that trip, I was so tired I climbed into the luggage rack of the compartment train to get some sleep.
One memory of that first trip north, I do have, is of arriving in Liverpool through a very dark and wet cutting that leads into Lime Street station from Edge Hill. I took this picture of the same cutting yesterday.
The Approach To Liverpool Lime Street
But in 1965, it resembled some place from Hell and I wondered hard about what I was getting myself into.
I survived that first day and the rest as they say is history!
The Anonymous Widower 