TheSignalEngineer

Nothing new, the London Midland Region had a reorganisations department at Euston House when I was a Staff Rep. I went through 4 in 5 years in the 1980s.

Drift alert for trivia comment. Directly above the loco is a row of terraced houses. That was the birthplace of 'Captain Mainwaring' actor Arthur Lowe, although the family lived in Longsight. Hayfield was probably the home of his maternal grandparents as that was where his mother was born. He was a 'Son of the Railway', his father being a railway clerk and grandfather a platelayer at Godley.

I like the idea of a line down that street. It reminds me of a place I regularly walk and ride, the site of the contractor's line to Kinder Reservoir, which ran from Hayfield. There is a picture of the works train crossing the main street here. http://www.hayfield.info/Railway.html Regarding your back story there were a few proposals around Cornwall that have possibilities. I would like to build one myself and sketched out some lines I thought could have been built by the LSWR if the growth of railways had continued. One was to extend the branch from Grogley Junction to meet with the Newquay line at Roche for a joint section to the coast. An option from Roche was to get into one of the valleys feeding the River Fal and follow it to St Mawes. Another idea was to come off the Padstow line at Little Petherick Creek to go south to St Coulomb Major then pick up a valley in the area of St Dennis Junction to get onto the Tresillian River to Maplas, ending at a joint station with the West Cornwall Railway near the centre of Truro.

I think the prototype ramps were symmetrical. To get the same profile for each direction would require the inverted T-bar on the ramp top which was 44'3" long to be extended by approximately 12'. They took quite some hammer at speed and I remember seeing them with a dip worn into the top in the area where the shoe made contact with the bar. Shed test ramps did come in pairs set at the limits at which the height of those in the main line could be set. The nominal height of a full ramp was 3.5" above rail level. Another use of ATC ramps was to latch up the shoe when running onto 3rd/4th rail electrified lines. These were set at 4.5" above rail level the running in ramp being a dead one which pushed the shoe up onto the latch. The running out ramp was live and this unlatched the shoe so it dropped back to the operational position. There is a paper to the GWR Engineering Society giving a description of the system here http://www.gwr.org.uk/notes/P_206.pdf It includes dimensions of the ramp about six pages in.

The profile of the ramp was not designed for being hit at speed in the wrong direction. The slope at the running on end is 1 in 90 and the trailing end is 1 in 32. Always a right bu**er if it arrived up the wrong way round on the wagon and needed to be turned, especially in a cutting.

Correct Dudders. The state of the track on the southern end was so bad that it was reduced to two tracks at some point between Wembley and Rugby from 1000 to 1500 (IIRC) on weekdays. Birmingham services had 15 minutes added to allow for a double section weave or Northampton diversion with squadron tamping taking place on the Fast lines. During his time as Chairman, Sir Peter Parker described BR as being "At the crumbling edge" with regard to the state of the infrastructure. The situation was repeated with Hatfield and the circle seems to have turned again.

As inclement weather is oncoming it eas decreed by The Management that excercise would be partaken a.m. Due to the forecast I suggested an e-bike blast to Holme Moss Summit. Not too bad on the way out but the return was rather chilly as I could see a storm approaching. 2.5 miles down to Woodhead Reservior in 7 minutes was like being blast frozen. We only caught the rain for a few minutes around Torside and completed the 10 miles back in 35 minutes. It seemed to have calmed down a bit when I looked last night. I gave up on it somewhat after a dismissive comment about one of my posts. I don't know the person's background but as far as the post was concerned I have the T-shirt and skid marked underpants to prove my point.

That reminded me of an incident when we were building the Robin Hood Line. An old road overbridge near Kirkby in Ashfield had to be rebuilt. A large crane started the lift, the bridge girder stayed put and the crane started to sink into the ground which was riddled with old mine workings and had just been topped up with spoil over the years. The contractors had to dig a hole and make a solid base for the crane before the job could be reprogrammed.

The forecast rain hasn't yet arrived in our part of the Dark Peak so it looks as if a bit of the G word will have to be done. First though a raid on a Teutonic food emporium will be necessary as there isn't anything left on stock for lunch. @polybearI haven't ventured into central Manchester since having to change trains there over a year ago during a positioning move whilst photographing a steam train. It was one of those timetable quirks where I was at Ashburys wanting to get to Guide Bridge and the quickest way was via Piccadilly. @Barry Othe boys both started on the All Stars sessions at their local club. Michael Vaughan visited at an end of season for a mini-tournament they ran. At the end he presented Sammy with a signed bat for the best performance of the day. Both have played football since they could walk but have decided you need to be a bit rough and brainless for that. Sammy played what will probably be his last league match last week and Thomas has a Cup Final tomorrow. Tennis is there other main sport, both playing above their age in the junior leagues, and both are good middle distance runners.

Proud grandad actually. They play under 11's at two clubs in different leagues. The little one is only just 9 and a strip of wind to look at him but one of the coaches describes him as their secret weapon because he looks such a little tot but has a good bowling action and has this skidding yorker which is as fast as any of the 11 year olds. His acrobatic fielding comes from playing in goal for the local football team.

Evening all. What a day. Didn't start well but at least it improved with age. I had been thinking I would need new front tyres on the car very soon, but coming home late on Wednesday night the car developed strange suspension noises. I couldn't pin it down and wasn't using it yesterday so took it for an inspection this morning which found a broken offside front spring. Luckily it had only failed at low speed a short distance from home. The garage managed to get the bits needed and fitted plus the two tyres replaced this afternoon so no prolonged time out of service. My opthalmology checkup had been postponed last year due to the pandemic and I hadn't heard anything of the promised new date. I called the appointments system and was told I was on the waiting list. The operator said he would check possible dates and came back to announce that there was a cancellation for next Monday, was i available? After picking the car up I went to see the boys playing in a cricket match tonight. Another good performance with the little one taking a wicket and scoring ten runs whilst the big one took two wickets in a ten run victory. It was the second win of the week after handing out an absolute thrashing on Wednesday where the little one took three wickets for four runs including a spectacular diving c&b and the big one kept wicket for the first half of the opposition's innings getting a stumping, then came on to bowl, took a wicket then after failing to hold a half chance off his own bowling picked up the ball and hit the stumps to get a run out. I said the day got better and as I didn't feel like a big meal when I got home I had a smoked bacon omelet.

Slotted by another signal box. The arm won't clear unless both levers are pulled.

My landlady when I lodged ay Kenton had her recipies used on the show and published in the Jimmy Young Cookbook. She used to try them out on the lodgers. Breakfast was a Full English every morning with cereal or porridge to start and she would always have two main courses at the evening meal, enough of each to go round the table and she expected the lot to go. I put on two stone while I was there. She was on her fourth husband at the time, we did speculate what happened to the other three.

That sounds a bit like an incident when my sister was wrongly arrested for alleged use of a stolen credit card in Solihull. The description was a bit vague, short young woman, light hair, child in pushchair. During questioning the detective asked her about a previous use of the same card, to which she said she was in Devon at the time. When asked for details of a witness who could confirm it she replied "The Reverend ..... St Mary Vicarage ..... Phone no. .... Case didn't get any further.

I thought the whole thing looked like a concept drawing from a brochure for a 1960s new town. The frontage looks like some of the early publicity for Coventry station reconstruction.

Possible effects of track condition was first mentioned about 600 posts back I think.

I never got as far as Uni. I did the BR S&T engineering student scheme. First thing I learned was how to dig a hole and put a crank frame into it without it moving around when the lever was pulled. When I went to Crewe to do my workshop training one of the first things I had to do was make my own toolbox and some small hand tools. Sheet metal work, making piano hinges from a sheet of metal and a steel rod, filing bits of metal flat and square, turning, drilling, rivetting, welding, etc. 54 years on I am still using them for my hobbies and DIY.

It depends on how tight the contract is and how good their negotiators and lawyers were in the first place. There may be capping or shared risk clauses. Then of course how are Agility Trains tied in with the contract? Is it a specification, manufacture, maintenance or operational environment driven issue? A lot will also depend on how much egg-on-face that DafT are willing to take as I'm sure Hitachi could rake up lots of muck about how the contract was handled, the quality of specification, constant shifting of the ground regarding scale of electrification and the quality of Network Rail's track.

The parent company has quite large assets although I don't know how big the debt pile is. They have been selling bits off for years to keep other bits going. The fun comes with how the group is structured financially as it appears it could be a myriad of subsidiary companies.

Would you like to be standing trackside or as a passenger on a platform when you see a large piece of metal approaching you at 70mph?

Our youngest grandson who is now just 9 is well into gardening and growing food. He started to take a real interest when SiL took on an allotment plot about three years ago. Last year grandson won a prize of about £50 worth of seeds from the national allotment society for his lockdown gardening presentation. My plot is slow going this year because of the cold weather we have been experiencing. This morning was good enough to get the grass cutting at home done but now turning wet yet again. Doesn't bode well for Anne's tennis match tonight. Yesterday we almost managed one of our regular MTB rides, being stopped by two thunderstorms and having to modify the route a little. It was the toughest one we had done so far this season encompassing Rivington Pike. The morning loop included the road climb known as Anglezarke Hill which rises 300ft in three quarters of a mile. We were pleased that our time round the loop was our second fastest in about 20 trips probably helped by doing the last half mile in two minutes to get out of a hail and thunder storm. In the afternoon the route was made up as we went along due to the incoming storms of which we only got caught by one. It included a one mile continuous climb rising 500 feet on rocky roads which we managed to do. Rain has stopped and sun come out so off to make the most of it before the next lot hits at about 5.30.

At the time I was working on WCML upgrades and actually in a meeting at Euston when the Hatfield crash happened. I was travelling regularly between London, Birmingham and Manchester and it was absolute chaos for weeks. One night I caught a train at about 1800 from Euston to Manchester, the previous two having been cancelled. I stood all the way to Macclesfield and the train finally arrived in Manchester just in time for my last local home departing at 2318. Many services were reduced to 50% of the normal timetable due to increased journey times as a result of the blanket 80mph and localised lower speed limits imposed.

Weren't the bodies built in Japan for the trains to be assembled at Newton Aycliffe?

I was stuck in the middle of it as a young lad on a family holiday trying to get home from St Austell to Birmingham. Possibly one of the best days I ever had for trainspotting but my mother wasn't impressed by 11 hours on a train.

Sounds all too familiar. I was in a meeting with Railtrack late in 1997 for completely remodelling and resignalling from Slade Lane through Stockport to Cheadle Hulme. They said that they wanted it commissioned at 1999 Christmas and New Year holiday period. The judgement of myself and our Pway/OLE colleagues was that it would take about half as long again as they were proposing. I offered completion at Christmas 2000 as we didn't have a job contracted for commissioning during that holiday period at the time. Tongue in cheek I asked the Railtrack side how much they were willing to pay me for warking on the Millennium Bank Holiday. They said that a foreign company had offered to meet the timescale so we pulled out of the talks. The company turned out to be the signalling part of Ansaldo. Despite their promise to do the work by 1999, there is still infrastructure built by the LNWR in the 1880s involved in signalling trains through Stockport. What eventually was done took about 7 years, cost an absolute fortune and was about a quarter of the scope of what we were offering to do in three years. The trams that Ansaldo built for West Midlands PTE were far from watertight. What's more the rain had a direct route to the electrical systems in some of them.