Reading this month's edition of Modern Railways, I was struck an article called 'Boiling Frogs' about the way costs for any infrastructure projects are spiralling out of control. Regardless of whether these inflated costs are paid by higher fares or increased government subsidy, people like me (both a taxpayer and a rail user) will still end up footing the bill.

The article (sorry, they don't have an on-line issue; it's strictly dead-tree only) identifies several factors. One major factor is all sorts of silly rules insisted by the HSE (Health and Safety Executive). Even non-libertarians like me recognise that the HSE is a completely out-of-control bureaucracy, seemingly accountable to no-one but themselves. Patrick Crozier takes them to task over the Potter's Bar accident.

An aside here; why does it now take two to three weeks to reopen a like after a train crash, when before privatisation it used to take a few days? I'm old enough to remember the West Ealing derailment in 1973, when wreckage blocked all four lines. It was only two or three days before traffic was running on the slow lines, while they were still working on clearing wreckage (let alone repairing track) on the fast lines. Can you imagine that happening nowadays? Along with British Transport Police's declaring of crime scenes, the HSE is the major villain here.

To return to these inflated costs, the other major villain is the wheel/rail split. The fragmentation of British Rail into hundreds of separate companies operating trains, owning the trains, owning the track, and maintaining the track was supposed to give us a more efficient railway, according to the architects of privatisation. What rot! I'm now convinced the fragmentation was nothing but a massive job-creation scheme for accountants and lawyers, US-style pork-barrel politics at it's very worst. It hasn't given us a more efficient railway, precisely the opposite. Any would-be efficiency gains have just been swallowed up by this new army of suits.

What is to be done? The effective renationalisation of the unloved Railtrack (the company that owns the track) may or may not be a step in the right direction. I would rather see the wheel/rail split ended altogether, either by renationalising the whole bloody lot (which realistically I have to accept isn't going to happen), or by handing control of the rails to the train operating companies. I realise this is still going to cause problems of track access where multiple TOCs use the same tracks, such as the eight different operators (including two freight companies) using Manchester Piccadilly, but it can't be worse than the present system.
:: Tim Hall 6:45 PM ::  

Click here for a larger (800x600) image

I've added a comments feature to this blog - now you can comment on my entries without having to email me.
:: Tim Hall 1:12 PM ::  

Meanwhile, an Estonian group is recording medieval-sounding versions of Black Sabbath songs in Latin. Their album contains songs such as "Rotae Confusionis" and "Verres Militares" in slow, minimalist versions that wouldn't seem out of place in the Sistine Chapel, according to Yahoo. Their official site is www.sabbatum.com if you want to know more.

Another interesting site (if you want to waste a lot of time) is rateyourmusic.com. Run by the same company that does the comments application on this blog, this site allows you to read and post reviews of your favourite albums; I notice they've put one of my reviews on the front page! This is the list of reviews I have contributed so far.

Another interesting blog - read Tim Deagan's account of his experiences restoring a vintage Amercan fire engine.
:: Tim Hall 8:09 PM ::  

There are an awful lot of blogs out there. Sturgeon's law seems to apply with a vengeance here; more that 90% of the blogs I've looked at at random are completely vapid nonsense, typically the product of a self-obsessed and semi-literate teenager. Look at the "recently published blogs" on the front page of www.blogger.com and click on a few to see what I mean.

There are some more worthwhile ones, of course. I've been reading a few. One is Bruce Baugh's Writer of Fortune II (Electric Weblogaloo). Bruce is a professional writer of role-playing games, and his blog has recently covered topic including cryonics, internet file-sharing, and Hungarian prog-rock. Yes, Bruce, "De Produndis" by After Crying is a superb album, I'm listening to it now. Shows how unimaginitive and derivative most western European and American neo-prog bands are.

Another is Patrick Crozier's UK Transport blog. I don't share his Libertarian philosophy (do you believe in the total privatisation of the road network?), but his blog is well-written and thought provoking.
:: Tim Hall 1:02 PM ::  

I ought to say something about Rowan Williams, the next Archbishop of Canterbury. He's already been rubbished in one or two conservative blogs as an old-school leftie. He seems to me to be an order of magnitude better than the lacklustre George Carey, and perhaps some honest criticism of global capitalism should be heard and listened to. Theologically he seems pretty orthodox, and I find the criticism from one or two reactionary evangelical groups (such as Reform) to an encouraging sign. Previously the church had made too many compromises with these reactionaries over ordination of women, which has left women priests as second-class citizens within the church. With Rowan Williams at the helm, they need to sort our this mess. Of course, you could argue that it's none of my business, since I'm a Methodist, not an Anglican

He's already got in to trouble with Walt Disney (mess with The Mouse at your peril). Disney hits back at his criticism of their over-aggressive marketing to children. I'm not sure of his position on RPGs...

While on the subject of good and evil (sort of), does anyone else think Nicholas van Hoogstraten resembles an RPG or comic-book villain? The vicious henchmen? The massive egotism? The over-the-top palace he was building? We mustn't forget, though, this is a real man who has inflicted a lot real misery on a lot of people.

On a completely different subject, it's a pity I missed the Steve Hackett/Evelyn Glennie concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday; this review from the Guardian sounds interesting. Hope this work gets recorded.
:: Tim Hall 11:22 AM ::  

Arrhan Empire Frontiers, a space piracy message game run on the Dreamlyrics message boards. Follow the adventures of the not-so-good ship Venus Blood, and her merry crew of cutthroats and brigands!

This is a long-running message board game, originating from the late lamented RPGAMES Forum on Compuserve. Originally GMed by Howard Miller, although I've co-GMed some threads in the past. I have now foolishly agreed to take over the game full-time.
:: Tim Hall 4:46 PM ::  

The "Short Sun" trilogy is a direct sequel to Wolfe's earlier "Book of the Long Sun" tetralogy. The Book of the Long Sun is set in a vast generation starship, The Whorl, three hundred years into it's vogage, and concerns the adventures of a novice priest, Silk. The story becomes more complex as Silk discovers more of the true nature of The Whorl, it's 'gods', and his own destiny.

The the first volume of the Book of the Short Sun, "On Blue's Waters" starts as the story of Horn, the supposed author of Book of the Long Sun, now living on the colony world of Blue. Civilisation on Blue is degenerating into anarchy, and what passes for the rulers of the city of New Viron see Silk as the only person that can save it from collapse. Horn's mission to return to The Whorl to find Silk.

As expected in a Gene Wolfe novel, nothing is as simple as it seems, and it grows more complex and adds layers as the story progresses. In the first volume, we learn that the narrator is now ruler of another town on the colony world, Gaon, and the story of Horn's journey towards The Whorl took place many years earlier, a device used in Wolfe's earlier "Book of the New Sun". But by the second volume, "In Greens Jungles", the 'present-day' story of the ruler of Gaon takes over the bulk of the narrative. And the indentity of the narrator becomes more uncertain.

I won't give away any more of the plot; you'll have to read it yourself. I love the way Wolfe uses so many generic SF tropes, such as robots, psionics, virtual reality, space travel and blood-drinking alien shapeshifters, but in a totally original way. There is also a very strong moral and religious theme right through all his books.

It's a pity Gene Wolfe is not better known; the Short Sun trilogy doesn't even have a British publisher! Perhaps it's the combination of his mannered, literary style that doesn't appeal to many SF fans used to a more straightforward type of storytelling, and his use of so many SF tropes (with the assumption that the reader will recognise them) limits the accessiblity to a 'literary' audience.

Of course, there are a lot of web sites about his work. After a few web searches, I found Ultan's Library - an e-journal for studies of the SF of Gene Wolfe, and The URTH mailing list: Discussion of the works of Gene Wolfe. I also found an essay by Gene Wolfe on Tolkein. Gene Wolfe strongly approves of Tolkein's world view, perhaps not surprising in the light that Wolfe, like Tolkein, is a conservative Catholic.
:: Tim Hall 12:31 PM ::  

I spent the days photographing trains along the sea wall, getting through ten rolls of film, and the evenings propping up the bar of the Marine Tavern, which just happens to be the local of well-known railway photographer Colin Marsden. I'll put up some of the photos I took once I've had them developed.

The main attraction, of course, is the finale of Virgin Trains' loco-hauled workings. Unlike the end of the "Westerns", "Deltics" or class 50s, there's a feel not unlike the end of steam about this. Once these trains are gone, there will be nothing more than HSTs, multiple units, and the occasional freight.

Naturally the photographers turned out in droves; two or three on just about every bridge. I heard from a reliable source that there were no less than forty at Cockwood harbour on the Saturday evening. Over the week I met quite a few of the SWRG crowd on the way, as well as the webmaster of the Pet Unit site.

To celebrate all this, Virgin trains have painted six of the surviving class 47s in special liveries to mark their final months in service, five of the six in liveries the class have carried over their long lives.

• 47826 is painted up like a police car to promote the British Transport Police. I'm not convinced by this one myself. Who remembers the class 37 they did in an inter-city advert years ago?


• 47829 "Springburn" is in the Inter-City "Swallow" livery the locomotives carried immediately before privatisation.


• 47840 "North Star" carries the standard BR blue carried from the mid-60s onwards, the longest-lived colour scheme BR ever had.


• 47847 is painted in the large-logo blue scheme that started to appear in the mid-1980s


• 47851 carries 1960s two-tone green. They've done this with the full yellow ends as carried in the late 60s, and it really takes me back to my pre-teen trainspotting years.


• 47853 is painted in the 1964 "XP64" experimental blue - this was a forerunner of the BR blue, but a slightly lighter shade. Unlike the others, it's not a livery I ever remember seeing in the flesh back in the 60s.

Of course, not all the photos were of Virgin Trains 47s; First Great Western have a couple of loco-hauled workings as well. There were some class 67-hauled mail trains, now apparently doomed, and a few evening freights. I even took quite a few photos of South West Trains' class 159s; for some reason I find the livery quite photogenic, and a six-car set looks like a proper train! And First Great Western's (old) livery HSTs are quite photogenic against the backdrop of sea and red cliffs.
:: Tim Hall 12:18 PM ::  

I'm taking a break for a few days, down to (hopefully) sunny Dawlish in south Devon. Being a rail enthusiast I'm going to pay my last respects to Virgin Trains elderly class 47 locomotives making their final stand in the south-west of England against the incoming tide of Virgin Voyagers.

Realistically, I have to recognise that the class 47s, now nearly 40 years old, are life-expired and in need of replacement. They'd been getting increasingly unreliable and expensive to maintain in their old age, and a gentle retirement in preservation puttering up and down a short tourist line is what they deserve. But for the next few weeks at least, they're still in front-line service, working intensive diagrams taking them from one end of the country to the other.

I have my doubts about their replacements, officially named "Voyagers" and unofficially called "Cola Cans". I find the interiors cramped, there's a severe lack of luggage space caused by the fact the overhead luggage racks won't take anything larger than a briefcase. Someone forgot that these are not commuter units, they're long-distance trains used largely by the holiday and visiting-friends-and-relatives market, most of whom come equipped with large volumes of luggage. Then you've got the vibrations from the underfloor engines to remind you you're really travelling in a glorified sprinter with a pointy nose at the front. A significant number of the seats don't line up with the windows so you can't actually see out. And the less said about the unreliable high-tech toilets the better. Altogether they're less comfortable than the 25-year old Mk2 stock they're replacing. Perhaps Virgin should have refurbished their existing coaches and simply bought some new locomotives to haul them.

No doubt the some problems will be solved in time; the teething troubles with the toilets will be fixed eventually, and sooner or later they'll take some seats out to make room for more luggage racks. But I'm sure the idea of 4-car trains replacing the existing 7-car sets is a bad idea, even if the plan is to increase the service frequency. The trains travelling at popular times, such as morning long-haul departures are going to get badly overcrowded. Are we heading towards airline-style travel, where it's necessary to book several days in advance if you want to travel at the time of your choice?

I'm going to be travelling down on the Glasgow-Penzance between Manchester and Exeter; this will be 47-hauled all the way, a five-hour trip behind loco-haulage. In less than a month, this will be history.
:: Tim Hall 8:24 AM ::  

They don't write them like that any more!

It is, as any self-respecting fan of prog-rock should know, the opening lines of 'Dancing with the Moonlit Knight' from Genesis' classic 1973 album 'Selling England by the Pound'. After seeing The Musical Box a couple of months ago, I've finally got round to getting the album on CD (My old vinyl copy is gathering dust at my parents' place back in Slough). I'd forgotten just how good it was.

The cloth-eared music journalists who inanely claim that 'Punk was created to save us from music like this' just don't know what they're talking about. Forget the banal stadium-rock that Genesis churned out for the people who don't really like music much in the 1980s, it was during the Peter Gabriel years in the early 1970s the they produced some of the most creative and sublime music ever to emerge from the British rock scene.

With roots that owed far more to English classical and folk music than American blues, and complex songs with running times running to ten minutes or more, it's never going appeal to the sorts of people that prefer three-minute songs you can dance to. But it has other pleasures; just listen to Steve Hackett's emotive and quite un-blues like guitar solo on 'Firth of Fifth', and Peter Gabriel's distinctive (if surreal) lyrics and melodies throughout the entire album, and Tony Banks dramatic keyboard workout of 'Cinema Show'. The only low spot is Phil Collins' maudlin ballad 'More Fool Me', a grim foretaste of the dire drivel he would inflict upon the world in the 1980s and beyond. With a running time of 53 minutes it's a very long album for 1973, when 35-40 minute albums were the norm.

New on Kalyr.com

A page on my current N-gauge project, Wominsee. Currently just a trackplan and some notes; I will add some photos as construction progresses.
:: Tim Hall 5:04 PM ::  

Just to keep him happy, I'll include this link to www.uglyfootballers.com. Just don't click on the streakers link. It's not pretty. Don't say I didn't warn you! Actually, Mullets is almost as bad. Of course, footballer's bad hairstyles go right back to Bobby Charlton.

Meanwhile. back in the fantastic land of Kalyr.

Follow the fire-fighting efforts in the city of Calbeyn.

Meanwhile, for the adventuring party, things are going seriously pear-shaped. Will they survive? Join the mailing list and find out!

And over on the Dreamlyrics message board game, what unseen horrors lurk within the library?
:: Tim Hall 7:26 PM ::  

Do you want to visit the wondrous land of Kalyr, and experience it's wonders first hand, as opposed to just reading this tourist brochure? Experience adventure and mystery, meet members of strange alien races, play with arcane technology and mystic powers of the mind? Well, now is the time!

Both the Play-by-Web game at Dreamlyrics and the Play-by-Email game at The Phoenyx now have openings for new players. The two games both have roots (and some player characters) dating back to the game I started on the late lamented RPGAMES forum on Compuserve more than 6 years ago.

Character generation rules can be found here.
:: Tim Hall 5:46 PM ::  

All you ever wanted to know about Cornish wagonload freight trains. Some train formations from 1986 to 1991, mostly taken from my photographic archive and notes, and some purely from memory. (While some people can remember obscure third division football scores, I can remember train formations) It's not fully complete, because I haven't been able to dig up all the notes, but it will be updated eventually. Did you know Yeoman-liveried PGAs were used on calcified seaweed traffic in 1990?

The banner ad is meant to be ironic. And it is a really good album...
:: Tim Hall 5:11 PM ::  

Since I don't have a regular Role-Playing group at the moment, one-shot convention games are the only RPGing I get. While you lose the long-term character development and epic story arcs, you do get the chance to play a wide variety of different game systems, and the convention circuit has some wonderful gamesmasters.

I played in these games, which are typical of the types of games you can get at conventions.

"Abnormal for Norfolk", a present-day Call of Cthulhu scenario which started out as investigation into a mysterious fungus-based disease, involved taking blood samples from sheep in the dead of night, and ended up with a fight with fungus-controlled pod-people in a Norfolk village.

"The Agony and the Ecstacy", an In Nomine scenario set in the demon-controlled city of Naples in Italy, run by Mark Baker a.k.a L'Ange. This game contained some very powerful imagery, which I ended up dreaming about that night.

"Grunts", a SF military game using the Blue Planet rules, about a group of soldiers in a far future war on an alien planet trying to get back to base after their transport was shot down behind enemy lines.

Meanwhile, in the news

Office politics wastes an hour a day. Well, I've worked in places where it's been far worse that that :(
:: Tim Hall 12:47 PM ::