Insert Witty Title Here
June 29, 2011 6 Comments
First of all, I have just watched the opening 15 minutes of “Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince.” Hollywood, please try to avoid presenting me with “Scenes from Work” when I’m trying to relax can’t you? I was chilling out. Nicely relaxed, in fact. I was just at the point where I had moved beyond ‘train driving fat man coming off shift’-mode and then bingo! I’m seeing Arkwrights haring past the camera at 80mph and hearing English Electric 507 traction motors grumbling away from platforms. I was suddenly pointing at the television screen saying “I’ve had coffee in there. That’s Surbiton, that is. That’s Surbiton, I’m sure that’s Surbiton.” As it turns out, I was right – the station sign was a bit of a pointer. I felt temporarily clever, folks. I enjoyed a brief flash of that “I’ve been there” superiority that people get when they see a place they have visited on the telly. This didn’t last long, partly because the only boast one should have about Surbiton is knowing how to leave it quickly but mostly because of a reference to “that tosser Harry Potter.” I’m not averse to a knowing joke between characters in a fictitious story, but when they are making a reference that impacts on me personally whilst filming at one of the stations I drive through…? That’s not funny. I’m upset and I want compensation. I may attach this to my current ongoing legal action against J.K. Rowling for making her hero look like me and letting my workmates find out about it.
Since this is a somewhat disjointed post, I’ll be bouncing from topic to topic as I feel like it. Since you’re all bright and lovely people I’m going to assume that you can all keep up with me. As you might have noticed, I have a Twitter feed, which means that I can practice my skills in boring people senseless in only 140 characters. Lucky public eh? Apparently there are currently 341 people following me. Enjoyably this means that for the first time in my life I have stalkers, and digital ones at that. Hurrah for me! Finally, I have found people who think I’m interesting! I’m counting on you lot not to give me away. Anyone who mentions tuppawear, weak orange squash, fish paste sandwiches and note books full of train numbers will of course find a horse’s head in their bed tomorrow morning. And while you’re at it, try not to mention that I might indulge the odd cliché. Twitter has indeed been very useful just recently with all the trials and tribulations that SWT have suffered in the past few weeks. I have been passing on information on the various cock-ups and misadventures that have stopped us running trains, and the effort seems to have been appreciated. Why SWT themselves have yet to harness Twitter I don’t know – lets hope they change their minds soon, because it’s a valuable tool that can take the pressure away from the long-suffering staff on the ground when things go wrong. For those of you who use South West Trains and Twitter, may I suggest that you add @askSWT and @NRE_SWT to your feeds? You who have found yourself stuck might find them of use…
And add me while you’re at it: all stalkers welcome.
Oh dear. My muse has broken down. Bugger. Hmmmm. What to do? Ah… Tea is the thing that will allow me to catch up with myself. Back in a tick.
(15 minutes later)
Tea has been achieved and I’ve remembered what the next paragraph was going to be about: stations. At what point did the railway suddenly begin to think that passengers are happy sheltering from the elements beneath aluminium and plastic? I suspect it was a British Rail cost-cutting measure, but I found myself somewhat distressed to see the wooden shelters at Effingham Junction being replaced with structures more suited to a bus stop than a railway station. Alan Williams, of Modern Railways fame for those of you who don’t know, wouldn’t be pleased. Surely a successful industry can do better than this? Our passengers pay enough for their season tickets, to say nothing of the fact that they are also still forking out large amounts of tax cash to Network Rail: they deserve something better than bus shelters. While we are on the subject of Network Rail, I also gather they are proposing to replace the 3rd rail with 25kv overhead naughty knitting. Potter has thoughts about this:
- 25kv is for heathen non-Southern railways, with the exception of high-speed services on the South Eastern to enable passengers to escape Ashford, Folkestone & Dover more quickly.
- 3rd rail is famous for not sagging in hot weather.
- 3rd rail makes prettier sparks – and yes, I was driving this one!
- Potter will abduct and eat the pets of senior NR executives, without gravy or dumplings, unless this plan is abandoned forthwith.*
Abandon the 3rd rail, indeed. Boys, I’ll listen to your plans for replacing the 3rd rail when you can stop bridges falling down, running rails from buckling and scrotes from stopping the job with their wire-cutters.
*Pause for thought*
Nope. There was a thought that I was trying to have and it’s failed me. Most vexing. Still, it’s a nice day, and I shall be spending this afternoon taking my camera for a walk (it’s in the garage) before a spot of dinner.
*Further pause for thought*
Ah yes – a final thought. One of my Twitterati, @Al_S, tells me he is upset to my continual use of the word ‘plastic’ as a term of abuse. “This makes me sad, as I’m a composites chemist”, he tells me. That’s fair enough, and I am of course not qualified to argue with you.
But since the phrase “hateful over-weight soulless piffle that makes Pac Man noises when they pull away and when the brakes go on and I can’t access the TMS when the wheels are turning and the horn is too bloody loud and which idiot designed this cab layout and who thought that seats with no padding for your arse was a good idea and why to do the toilets stink no matter how recently they’ve been cleaned and why can’t I turn off that automated electronic whinging tart who insists on telling me the screamingly obvious every 30 seconds” doesn’t fit into 140 characters, ‘Plastic’ is going to have to do instead. Sorry.
As a peace offering, feel free to call me ‘Fat Weirdy-Beardy Driving Bloke’ to get your own back. That’s well under 140 characters, and better still it’s 100% accurate.
* – Potter has previously threatened to eat puppies belonging to First Great Western executives if they didn’t offer him a job interview. They offered him an interview, interviewed him and then told him to sod off. Clearly the threat of eating puppies without ketchup wasn’t enough… Hence the lack of dumplings.
About driverpotter
Agree that the love affair with brighty sparklo knittty-tangle is doomy to faily-wise. One only has to catalogue the total shut downs of entire main lines at the dropping of just a single stitch of the knitting but when “im go buggerup” (pidgin technical term) with solid lumps of steel which, unlike dangly bits of copper, seem to be almost immune to theft. With juice rail you lose just one train in most incidents and rarely have any mess to clear up before running other trains on the lines. And as for all those bridges to get lifted or tracks dropped….
What WOULD be a good idea is to realise that the old blue square and mega-version of the RS232 which connected said traction together was a damn useful system. Lose the juice and simply bang on a Type 2 or Type 3 at either end of the dead train and you had a working train set again.
What is very worrying is the current thinking being fed to that man from Weybridge, leading him to believe that technology solves every problem and modern signalling systems are much more reliable, all at the expense of cutting out tangible resources to cut ‘costs’. The doughty Mrs Ellman has already seen through this with the Coastguard and the answer given at Railtex gave cause for equal concern. Mother Nature has lent a hand here, to back-up the efforts of our friends in the pre-emptive recycling industry. When your technology goes phuut and disappears in a puff of smoke (or the back of a van) you need that tangible resource to work with.
On another related topic – related to cost paring – the use of standard TSRGD road signs on the railway grows. I have now seen 2 uses of Diagram 562 (Page 51 Chapter 4 – Warning signs) with the supplementary wording “Signal Ahead” apparently placed to remind train drivers of what they should really be expecting, as a lot of drivers are surprised to find signals at a point shortly after passing these signs. Whatever happened to route learning? So what next? Will we see Diagram 602 (Page 13 Chapter 3 – Regulatory Signs) as a substitute for the fixed distant? If I can fathom out how to post the pictures on Twitter or send them to Potter via e-mail and his snapper chums you’ll get to see them.
BTW was it you I engaged in discourse a few years back heading for CBW to play with 1001 when it was being used as a Thunderbird for Tour de France specials?
It might well have been me – was the bloke you chatted to short, round and oddly geeky? If so, it’s almost sure to have been me.
I look forward to the day that I can get a 225km/h express to the south coast out of Waterloo, built out of lovely stiff lightweight CFRP sandwich panels, just like the latest whizzy jet things (the lateness of the B787 and A350 being very much down to their management being of the type that’s been vastly over promoted and now struggles to locate posterior even with the aid of sat nav, several mirrors and a camera/screen aid) will be, and powered by AC, using wires put up properly, not the cheapo version on the East Coast or the ancient version on the Great Eastern).
Even if I do have fond memories of catching Aquafresh liveried 455s out to Stoneleigh at the end of journies that mainly involved big noisy diesels that flew down the east coast from places north of Edinburgh (the ones from the very far north, when I was very small, being before even Edinburgh got knitted).
When I was but a youngster, I heard tales of the dim and distant past; of days when the London Brighton and South Coast Railway Company used 1500v DC overhead wires to power its trains. The South Eastern and Chatham Railway Companies and the London and South Western both used 3rd rail. Then along came the Grouping and the Southern Railway had to make a coherent system out of the separate bits it had inherited. Clearly they could have gone either for overhead or for 3rd rail. Like many here, I consider that the decision to go third rail was soundly based, and has stood the test of time. Anyway, the money has all run out of the hole in the back of the piggy bank and been spent already, though the government hasn’t noticed yet, so there won’t be a change in my lifetime or yours. Relax and get on with enjoying the proper railway!
Wires SHOULD not go saggy in the heat – so something worng with the tensioning systems (Proabably scrotes jacking up the weights as opposed to nicking cable)
I note that cable-nicking can screw the LSW as well – didn’t someone do this near Farnboro’ recently, shafting everything down the “main”?
And, you were lucky to get that Juniper away – 3rd-rail DOES suffer in the snow – though not as badly as the passengers, and especially if you are SOuth Areturn outside Orpington, trapped, and illegally imprisioned overnight, because “Management” couldn’t find its’ way out of a wet paper bag …..
To be a truly authentic train spotter you also need a tartan pattern duffel bag containing a flask of hot Bovril. And one arm of your glasses mended with elastoplast. Though you needn’t actually break your glasses to achieve the look – just wrap some around one arm and it’ll look the same….