Where Worlds Collide

A year after the derailment at Potter’s Bar, for which dodgy maintenance remains the prime suspect, we have another prang on the East Coast Main Line. This time, the locomotive and front two coaches of a GNER express for Glasgow derailed leaving Kings Cross station in London. Fortunately this time nobody was killed or injured, but trains services are seriously up the spout at Kings Cross this morning, with something like six platforms blocked. Again the accusing finger points at dodgy maintenance of pointwork, and at the same maintenance contractor, Jarvis.

Update: Jarvis have pleaded guilty M’lud. Amazing footage on Channel 4 news tonight of them attempting to drag the derailed class 91 locomotive with an EWS class 67. They’d connected up the brake hoses, and used a long chain to couple the locos together. The chain promply parted. I’m not quite sure what they were attempting to do; my best guess is they were trying to move the derailed loco to a point clear of the damaged track where it could be rerailed by heavy jacks. Bringing in a big crane would require the isolation and possible removal of the overhead catenery, which would prevent them from using other platforms in the station.

One incident is bad luck, two looks like carelessness. Sell your Jarvis shares, chaps!

The Japanese were building them in the 1960s. The French have had them for twenty years, and the Germans for ten. Now we have the first dedicated high-speed rail line in Britain. A whole 46 miles long!

After speeding along the French LGV from Paris to Calais, and through the Channel Tunnel, trains between Paris and London will be using this new line to save about 20 minutes in their journey to London. And they they’ll come to the end of it, and complete their journey along winding and congested commuter lines round south London to reach the terminus at Waterloo.

As an aside, I’m sure Waterloo was chosen as the initial terminus purely to piss off the French. Revenge for their Charles de Gaulle Airport.

It will be another four years before the second section of the line opens. Much of this section is in tunnel, burrowing under east London. It will terminate at the massive Victorian Gothic edifice of St. Pancras, currently much under-utilised since it’s surburban services were diverted away into the cross-London Thameslink line in the 1980s.

How is it that the French could get their high speed line ready and open at the same time as the Channel Tunnel itself, while it takes us ten years to get round to ours? One major cause was the widespread opposition to the original route through the wealthy parts of Kent, which eventually led to the first proposal being abandoned in favour of the present more northerly route.

I remember a seeing a news report of a bunch of Wiccans conducting a banishing ritual which concluded in the sacrifice of a Hornby Mk3 coach (Hornby hadn’t done a Eurostar in those days). Maybe we have them to blame.

This is just cruel.

Transport Blog rants at the “Safety Fascism” affecting the railways.

Last week an engineer found some loose bolts on the brake disks of two Silverlink Trains class 321 trains during routing maintenance. They decided to withdraw the entire fleet of trains for safety checks, cancelling the entire service the following day. The advised commuters “not to travel”.

It took several days before they restored a full service on the line.

I do not believe there was any serious risk to life. What happened is that Silverlink management, fearful of a prosecution and possible jail sentence in the unlikely event there was any kind of accident, decided to err on the side of extreme caution. I take the fact that another user of the same type of train, First Great Eastern, didn’t withdraw their fleet as evidence that this was indeed an overreaction

Then the real villains of the piece get into the action. Once Silverlink made the decision to withdraw the trains, they couldn’t just put them back into service as soon as they checked the rest were OK. Oh no, can’t have that! Enter the Heath and Safety Executive, that unaccountable amorphous bureaucracy that’s slowly strangling the railway industry. Only this sanity draining red tape monster has the authority to put the trains back into service.

Why in Brunel’s name can’t the train company that took them out service in the first place be able to decide to put them back?

The HSE is a bloated bureaucracy that’s mainly concerned with protecting it’s own existance. They don’t care if any of their stupid decisions end up costing more lives that they ’save’. They get away with it because the tabloid press are quick to blame the rail companies for everything that goes wrong with the network. Sadly there don’t seem to be any votes in cutting the HSE down to size, something that’s going to have to be done if we’re serious about keeping a rail network in this country.

Meanwhile, on the roads, things like this happen every day. But there’s no chance of the HSE imposing the sort of crap they inflict on the railways on road users. Motorists would never stand for it.

A lot of people have been posting 9/11 thoughts today. Rather than post a long semi coherent essay, I’ll point you at what others have written. Start with Scott’s Thought for the day, quoting Roger Waters. Solonor says Just Remember. Read Al-Muhajabah’s words. And read the whole of the9/11 memorial poem on Body on Soul. And read my own post of a year ago today.

The War Party are saying “Never forget, Never Forgive”. These are the people that believe 9/11 was the start of a clash of civilisations, a fight to the death between the west and the Islamic world. The “Never Forgive” line sticks in my throat. I was bought up a Christian, and forgiving your enemies is a central plank of Christian believe. Christ told us to forgive our enemies for a reason. If you give into hate, the hatred will consume you and you will become what you hate.

“Forgiving” doesn’t you should not defend yourself against people that want to kill us; 9/11 told us there are fanatics out there who hate us and have no respect for human life. But we must remember they are just a hard core of fanatics. And if we have to go after them, it must always be for no other reason than self-defense. Never for revenge or a sense of “closure”.

Revealed! The awful truth about the RIAA File-Sharing Amnesty. (link from Samizdata)

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Dizzee Rascal wins Mercury

Unlike some people, I never expected The Darkness to win. They might have been the best band, a blast of fresh air in the currently stale British music scene, but they were never going to be trendy enough for the Mercury judges. And there’s also the rule that the favourite never wins.

I’m definitely tempted by this new horror game on DreamLyrics. A pity the GM has to trash a perfectly good GNER Mk4 set when he could have wrecked a Virgin Voyager instead.

On My Stereo: The new album “Watching the Storms” by Steve Hackett. I’ll give this a couple more spins before attempting to write a review, since “Darktown” took me a while to get into. This one’s a bit more accessible, and I think a slightly better album.

Teresa of Making Light has discovered the wonderful www.nycsubway.org site. I discovered this about three years back when I was researching for a character in an In Nomine game set in New York. History, operations, abandoned stations, it’s got the lot.

The underworlds of modern cities make worderful RPG settings, whether in New York, London, or any other big city with a longish history. Who knows what unseen horrors lurk abandoned stations like British Museum, or never-opened tunnels like the high-level tracks at Highgate?