A Trip To Huddersfield
Yesterday, I took the train to Huddersfield to see the two Towns share a goal-less draw.
I went via Manchester Piccadilly, as I wanted to have a decent lunch in Carluccio’s at the station, where I know the wi-fi is also excellent, as it incidentally was on Virgin’s trains and in their First Class lounge at Euston. The same can’t be said for their food and drink offering on the trains at the weekend.
It was very cold outside and as I passed through Highbury and Islington station to get to Euston, it was actually trying to snow.
It may seem strange to get to Huddersfield via Manchester, but then there are four trains about every hour on that route. They are new trains, but are only three coaches and often are completely full with standing everywhere. It was a classic case of the Treasury deciding how many coaches should have been bought for the Trans Pennine route and then dividing it by three to fit their budget. It’s a pleasant enough half-hour route though through the Pennines as this picture shows.
Manchester To Huddersfield
Although, the cleaner at Piccadilly was a bit slapdash.
Slapdash Cleaning At Piccadilly
I feel right to blame the cleaner, as he actually came into the carriage whilst I was waiting to sit down.
I should point out that these Trans Pennine trains, illustrate some of what is wrong with the layout of Piccadilly station, which was probably designed by a Scouser with a bizarre sense of humour, to get at their rival city. These trains turn up at all sorts of places in the station and are often the second or even the third train on the platform, counting from the concourse. I think it was the third yesterday. It must be a nightmare for staff to get passengers on the right train. But I’ve changed trains at Piccadlly so many times now, that I know the traps the station sets for you. Hopefully things will get better with the Northern Hub works. But this won’t be fully implemented until 2018.
At present. there are two solutions for passengers to avoid the problems; allow plenty of time and have drink or a meal in the station or take another route. For Huddersfield yesterday, I could have gone via Leeds, but that would have meant a walk up the hill in the cold to get a meal, as Leeds station doesn’t have a restaurant only snack bars.
The journey on to Huddersfield was enlivened with one of those bizarre incidents that seem to happen to me. A screw fell out of the bottom of my camera onto the floor. In crawling around the floor looking for it, I was assisted by a retired lady doctor from Hull, who like me had gone to Liverpool University. We must have looked an odd pair. I’ve now got the problem of finding a screw for the camera. Or should that be an independent camera shop?
Huddersfield station is not your ordinary drab station, as the picture shows.
Huddersfield Railway Station
It is a Grade 1 listed building and actually contains two pubs. Pevsner described it as one of the best early railway stations in England. The statue by the way is Harold Wilson. The football ground is a twenty-minute walk downhill from the station and despite Huddersfield Town not being on television very often, the ground is well-known to viewers because of Rugby League.
John Smith’s Stadium
The John Smith’s Stadium was one of the first modern grounds to be built in recent years. As the picture shows, the view is good and I’d rate it one of the best seats for visiting supporters along with Barnsley, Burnley or Wolverhampton. You would never describe it as pokey or restricted like Charlton or QPR, although the stewards were complaining of the cold. So that must have been bad!
A steward incidentally told me that Ipswich had attracted a thousand fans. This must be quite a lot considering the distance from Suffolk and the weather. But on the other hand Ipswich, Suffolk and the football club must have one of the largest diaspora of any part of the UK.
Children In Trouble
I’m just watching a recording of the BBC documentary; The Railway.
In one section, they have to go and tell a mother, that her son has been hit by a train and killed.
I might not have been a saint, but one incident in my life made my mother think the worst.
I’d been driving back to Liverpool University in my faithful Morris Minor; VKX 156, when just before Peterborough, a guy in the slow lane of the northbound A1, decided he needed to turn right. But he missed the turn and was hit fair and square by the car in front of me. I would have gone right into him, but for the quick thinking of another driver in an Austin 1800 in the slow lane, who slowed and waved me through in front of him. I then pulled directly on to the verge as I thought things would now go seriously wrong. They did, but not around me, as the car that caused the accident bounced across the central reservation of the dual carriageway and then hit someone going south.
The Police turned up some minutes later and I gave a detailed statement about what had happened.
Nothing further happened until that summer, when I was on a boating holiday on the Thames, when a Police Sergeant turned up at our house around midnight and said I was wanted in Court in the morning to give evidence about the accident.
Seeing him there, had given her an awful fright, as she thought I’d fallen in the Thames or a lot worse.
Obviously, that hadn’t happened, but it does show the sort of reaction expected, when something serious happens.
I know the heartbreak of losing a child, so we should all take care.
I certainly do, as best as I can, after all I’ve been through in the last few years.
Work Starts On Crossrail’s Victoria Dock Portal
I went and had a look at this important work earlier in the week.
The Victoria Dock Portal will give access to a short length of tunnel connecting this part of Crossrail to the site at the Limmo Peninsular.
As the tunnel will be bored from Limmo to Victoria Dock and the site is alongside the DLR and overlooked by the bridge at Royal Victoria station, you might get a chance to view the tunnelling machine as it emerges.
There is a very good time-lapse video of the construction here.
Crazy Ticket Prices
Yesterday, I went to the football at Ipswich. I’ve always found evening matches difficult and expensive, as I’ve never really found a sensible gluten-free restaurant or cafe in the town and usually I have to pay through the nose, to come out of London in the rush hour. Yesterday though, I decided to come early on the four o’clock train and then go to Woodbridge to have a curry in the Royal Bengal by the station, before getting a train back to Ipswich for the match.
I’d expected to have to buy two return tickets, one for Liverpool Street to Ipswich and return and another for the short journey between Ipswich and Woodbridge. But I was sold a return from the Zone 6 Bounday to Woodbridge for just £20.95. This compares with the two tickets I bought on Saturday to get to Ipswich for a total of £18.25. So the extra journey to Woodbridge cost me £2.70. An Off Peak Senior Day Return would appear to cost £2.80 bought on the Internet.
So it would appear I got a bargain. There was also no problem using the effectively one ticket to do two journeys.
I also saved twenty pounds by not travelling in the rush hour, which was enough to pay for the meal.
It would be nice to have a decent gluten-free restaurant somewhere between Ipswich station and Portman Road.
Container Ships Are Getting Bigger
i always trawl the BBC’s web site in the morning to look for thought provoking articles. This one about the latest generation of container ships is fascinating. Describing the capacity of the ship it uses this paragraph.
Each will contain as much steel as eight Eiffel Towers and have a capacity equivalent to 18,000 20-foot containers (TEU).
If those containers were placed in Times Square in New York, they would rise above billboards, streetlights and some buildings.
Or, to put it another way, they would fill more than 30 trains, each a mile long and stacked two containers high. Inside those containers, you could fit 36,000 cars or 863 million tins of baked beans.
It also talks about the knock-on effects of such large ships for ports.
Ship owners also want vessels to be unloaded and loaded within 24 hours, which has various knock-on effects. More space is needed to store the containers in the harbour, and onward connections by road, rail and ship need to be strengthened to cope with the huge surge in traffic.
Felixstowe, which handles 42% of the UK’s container trade, has 58 train movements a day, but plans to double that after it opens a third rail terminal later this year.
Have we got the capacity on the railways to move that large number of boxes?
No!
The next big complaint from the public, will be the noise of freight trains rumbling through their neighbourhood at all hours of the day. The standard freight engines, the Class 66, are not the quietest of beasts.
So for a start, all of the freight routes, like Felixstowe to Nuneaton and Gospel Oak to Barking must be electrified.
But that will only be a stop-gap and we need to put in new lines to the north of the United Kingdom. At least HS2, if it is to be built will be a start.
An Excellent Popular Article On Crossrail
The Sun newspaper is not generally associated with well-written articles about major construction on the railways.
But this article, is one of the best for general consumption about CrossRail I have seen.
Israel Builds A High Speed Rail Line
When you think of Israel, you don’t generally think of train lines, as after all it’s a small country geographically. But then there has been a long history of train travel in the area and especially a hundred or so years ago.
So I was rather surprised to see in The Times yesterday, that Israel is intending to build a heavy rail line from the cities on the Mediterranean coast to Eilat on the Red Sea. The aim is to run high-speed passenger trains to help develop the southern city and also create a freight by-pass for the Suez Canal, which now looks it could get a bit dangerous with all the troubles in Egypt.
There’s a lot more here on the Med-Red railway in Wikipedia.
I have a feeling we’re going to hear a lot more about this railway and the effects it will have on Egypt.
Readers Favourite Stations
It’s not a scientific poll, but look at this article from the BBC’s web site.
I’ve actually been to most of the stations they show, except for Madrid, St. Louis and Dunedin. Although some were visited years ago.
I think too the article shows what a world-wide serious readership, the BBC’s web site has, as all of the stations were suggested in response to an article a week or so ago, praising Grand Central station in New York.
If I was going to be chauvanistic, I’d leave the choice to the head of SNCF. He has called St. Pancras, the finest station in the world.
But I’ll probably disagree in a few months, as when Kings Cross has the square in front, it might be better than its neighbour.
Ridiculous Ticketing
I went to the football at Ipswich today. at least the trains were running normally and after a late breakfast or was it an early lunch, I caught the 13:30 from Liverpool Street station. Before I’d left home I’d tried to buy the ticket I’d wanted which is an Off Peak Return from Harold Wood to Ipswich, but for some unknown reason the computer wouldn’t let me choose this ticket. Why Harold Wood incidentally, you may ask? The reason is that my Freedom Pass takes me that far and so I just need to buy the extra.
So I had to buy the ticket in the booking office at Liverpool Street station. Usually, they sell me an Off Peak Return from Harold Wood to Ipswich, but this time, they sold me back-to-back Off Peak Returns from the Zone 6 Boundary to Manningtree and from Manningtree to Ipswich. The cost was £18.25. Two weeks ago, I was sold one ticket for the journey from Harold Wood to Ipswich at £20.95. I questioned this with the clerk and he said this was the best deal.
On the train, just like I usually do, I upgraded to First Class at a cost of £7 each way. But this did give me pretty good free wi-fi and a soft drink or coffee if I wanted one.
My reason for calling it ridiculous is that if I want a First Class Off Peak Return ticket, why can’t I buy one in one go on the Internet? I know that my Freedom Pass only gives me Standard Class to the Zone 6 Boundary, but surely they could have two Senior First Class tickets, one for those with Senior Railcards and Freedom Passes and one for those without the Freedom Pass. Properly priced and thought through, it might actually be a big seller, as quite a few of those in their later years spend money on the better tickets.
As it is I bought the First Class Upgrade on the train and got yet another orange ticket. I was also issued with a Penalty Warning on the way up to Ipswich. According to the Inspector, this was Department of Transport rules, but I’ve never had one before.
Ridiculous Ticketing
I do wonder how much all this paperwork costs GreaterAnglia and their passengers in extra charges. But at least all of the staff I met, were extremely curteous and had my needs uppermost in their mind. And the clerk saved me £2.70.
The system would probably be easy to implement as everything is computerised.
If you are buying a ticket on the web, it would just be necessary to check a box to say you had a Freedom Pass.
If you’re buying at a Ticket Office, the clerk needs to see your Freedom Pass anyway to give you the right ticket. He would do the equivalent of checking the box.
The orange ticket would instead of having SNR have another code of perhaps SNR* to indicate it was only valid with a Senior Railcard and a Freedom Pass.
And We Think We’ve Got Nimbys!
This article on the BBC’s web site shows that nimbys get everywhere, even in Italy. But it is a fascinating article about a rail tunnel between Italy and France. Christian Fraser, the author, puts this case in favour of the tunnel.
The pro-tunnellers employ a mixture of hyperbole and hard-nosed economic home truths as they argue for the project. The Atlantic will reach out to the Urals via this new link, they cry. Freight trains will zoom to and fro, boosting the shambling economies of southern Europe. Of greater interest to British tourists – skiers like me – is that the journey time from London to Milan will be cut to just six hours.
With those against as follow.
The naysayers insist that the tunnel will be an ugly, expensive white elephant. They point out that the existing trans-Alpine road and rail routes seem to cope very nicely, thank you. They claim that projections of traffic were drawn up 20 years ago and are hopelessly out-of-date. And they are worried about potentially dangerous minerals that are buried underneath the mountains being released into the air and water.
Hand on heart, even the keenest of protesters would struggle to claim the Susa Valley was an area of outstanding beauty. A narrow pass, it is already crammed with the clutter of human development – a motorway stalks across the valley floor on gigantic stilts, elevated above railway lines, quarries and factories.
But he also describes the action taking place.
In Italy, they have lobbied tenaciously – and at times violently – in their fight against the rail link between Lyon and Turin. Some 400 people were injured in clashes with the police last year when the tunnel site was first fenced off.
I know that area reasonably well, as I’ve driven through it and flown over it in a light aircraft several times. It is one of those areas, where if asked to dig a tunnel, your first action would be to ask if there was an easier route.
I don’t know the economics of this rail route, but I suspect that in the future some route will be completed to allow passengers to take the train from London and Paris to Rome or Milan.
The Anonymous Widower 