RAIL 742 Stop & Examine
FGW sends Laira fitters to London First Great Western’s Old Oak Common on Sunday February 9 was a busy place. That morning Production Manager Colin Jeffery welcomed extra staff in…
Storms and bad weather
Senior Network Rail man Robin Gisby noted on February 6’s Today programme: “It feels like we’re having 1-in-100 year events every year or so.” With the battering Britain and its…
Do we really need the ‘Withered Arm’?
Destruction of an 80-metre section of sea wall at Dawlish has reopened the debate about the merits of finding an alternative rail route into Devon and Cornwall. The obvious alternative…
Delayed on East Coast
Arriving at Newcastle station late last night for the 2115 to London, I was met with a departures board displaying an ominous ‘Delayed’. This was strange because the 2115 starts…
A first class conundrum
At face value, it sounds simple to convert first class coaches into standard class to reduce congestion. Think of first class and many will think of large seats arranged in…
NR transfer pushes ORR towards redundancy
Network Rail’s debt are now our debts. Of course, they always were, it was only accounting niceties and fudge that kept debts guaranteed by government from government’s books. With the…
Switching Network Rail debts to government could increase sell-off pressure
This week could see Network Rail’s debts of around £40 billion added to Chancellor George Osborne’s account. It depends on a decision from the Office of National Statistics which is…
Network Rail faces fines for late trains
In the three months that constitute Quarter 2, around 122,600 trains ran late as Network Rail posted performance that varied between 0.9 and 5.1 percentage points behind its targets. These…
Plenty of work on the Great Western Main Line
An awards event in Bristol last Friday took me west of Reading on the Great Western Main Line for the first time in many months. Most recent attention around Reading…
French railways
A trip last week to Normandy provided a perfect opportunity to reflect on the differences between British and French railways. The default view would have you believe that Britain’s railways…