Where Worlds Collide

Patrick Crozier thinks high speed rail is boring:

I have now travelled on high-speed lines in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Japan. And they are all dull. They’re too synthetic. Too quiet. Too antiseptic. Too fast even. They don’t move about enough. They don’t make any satisfying noises - like the rush of air against the superstructure, far less the (now not quite so familiar) clickety-clack of British commuter railways. Far better the joys of a British Mark III carriage or even the deep-sprung seating of the workmanlike Mark I.

Ah, sometimes, nothing quite beats travelling in a old pressure-ventilated Mk1 or Mk2 with all the windows open and a big locomotive at the front. The over-silenced underfloor engines of something like a Voyager is no comparison with the roar of a English Electric EE12CSVT or a Sulzer 12LDA28C!

The view from the window isn’t as interesting either. Typical high speed lines in Europe have a significant proportion of the route in tunnel, and much of the sections that aren’t buried underground are hidden behind sound barriers. No views of picturesque villages from the train window. And with passenger trains segregated from the freight and local trains, no wayside stations or marshalling yards either.

Patrick also makes the valid point that service frequency and network density are as important as maximum speed when it comes to overall journey times. Just about every long distance journey I make by train depends on a local connection train at each end. I find how good or bad the connections are makes as much difference as to the overall end-to-end timing as the speed of the intercity section of the routes.

What are we to make of this?

The Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) today announced that it had not received an acceptable offer from Virgin Rail Group (VRG) in the renegotiation of the CrossCountry rail franchise.

A Best and Final Offer for a single-tender deal running to 2012 was recently received from VRG, but was significantly too high to pass the value for money test that the SRA undertakes on behalf of taxpayers. As a consequence, the SRA informed VRG this afternoon that it is ending negotiations on the CrossCountry franchise.

The SRA’s rights, which are designed to protect the interests of both passengers and taxpayers, are contained in a ‘Letter Agreement’ signed between the two parties in July 2002. This gives the SRA the right to terminate the franchise should it be unable to reach agreement on a long-term deal.

The SRA has informed VRG that it reserves its right to terminate the franchise, and that it will inform VRG of how it intends to take matters forward on the franchise in the near future. In the meantime, the annual budgeting process will continue on the franchise.

Services on CrossCountry are unaffected.

The Guardian has some comments on the issue.

The failure of talks means the SRA could throw open the competition to rival bidders, or choose to share out the network between other train operators.

One industry source last night suggested the government wanted to redistribute Virgin’s new Voyager trains to replace ageing fleets on other inter-city lines.

CrossCountry trains are among the most heavily subsidised in Britain receiving £241m last year. They have been crippled by problems with overcrowding and punctuality.

Cross Country used to be the cinderella of the Inter-City network, relying on hand-me-down trains from other, more prestigious routes. When Virgin trains took over the franchise on privatisation, they replaced their entire fleet of trains with shiny new ones, a far greater investment than this network of routes had ever seen before. One has to ask if it was justified, especially when the new trains turned out to be so unsuitable for some of the routes. It would have made more sense for them to have built a much smaller fleet of new ones, and refurbished some of the older ones.

Quite what the future holds now is anyone’s guess. The SRA seems to be taking a short-term bean-counting approach to running the railway, and the constant musical chairs of franchising is getting more and more ridiculous; First lose North Western but gain Scotrail, Arriva lose Trans-Pennine but gain Wales, National Express lose Scotland and Wales but gain East Anglia. Now it’s Virgin’s turn. One could say they had this coming with the fiasco of Operation Princess.

What might happen if the SRA breaks up the Cross-Country franchise altogether and splits up the services between the other intercity franchises? Will the Voyagers be redeployed on other routes, and the ‘ageing fleets from other inter-city lines’ (i.e. Inter-City 125s) return to the cross country routes? Personally I think we ought to see cascaded Mk3s from the West Coast line hauled by the EWS class 67s made more-or-less redundant with the end of the mail trains. Which operator might run the long-distance trains such as those running between Scotland and Cornwall? Might those trains even disappear altogether?

I think it’s a case of watch this space…

A followup to my earlier worst guitar solos of all time, here are another five:

Child in Time by Deep Purple, solo by Ritchie Blackmore. No, not the well-known live version from Made in Japan, or the equally good original studio version. The one I’m talking about is the dire solo from the Man in Black’s very last album with Purple, the thoroughly mediocre live set Come Hell or High Water. By this time it was clear Blackmore’s heart just wasn’t in it any more; there’s none of the fireworks from axe-shredding 70s classics like California Jamming or Rainbow On Stage. Instead we get a couple of minutes of directionless tuneless strumming, until keyboard player Jon Lord puts it out of it’s misery by taking over on the Mighty Hammond. At this stage in his career, Blackmore’s tantrums were much more interesting than his guitar playing.

Sting of the Bumblebee by Manowar, solo by Joey Di Maio. The token bass solo in the list. The Flight of the Bumblebee played on a bass guitar. Is there really anything else you need to know?

Soldier of the Line by Magnum, solo by Tony Clarkin. OK, Tony Clarkin isn’t the world’s greatest guitar player; most of his solos are repetitive and clumsily structured. But what makes the guitar break section of the song so dire is the the way it exposes Magnum’s rhythm section of the time as complete waste of space. During the rest of the song Clarkin’s powerchords drive the music. But the moment he plays a solo, the bottom completely drops out of the song. Any when the solo isn’t up to much in the first place, the end result is just embarrassing.

Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, solo by Kurt Cobain. For some inexplicable reason the late Kurt Cobain often appears on lists of great guitarists. While he undoubtedly was skilled at writing memorable songs and expressing White Wolf Games levels of angst, a great guitarist he was not. Not for nothing are Nirvana credited with killing off the guitar solo. While there is a ’solo’ of sorts here, it’s just a few bars of tuneless nothing. I’d much rather listen to Neil Schon.

Burning Rope by Genesis, solo my Mike Rutherford. From the album that marked the beginning of their descent from sublime progressive rock to bland corporate pabulum. Rutherford might be a decent melodic bass player, but his lead guitar never rises above the banal. Steve Hackett he ain’t.

Oh No! Electric Nose indulges in cat-blogging. And the cat seems to be imitating Kitten Kong!

Pitchfork Media have compilied a list of the 50 Worst Guitar Solos. A few of them are on target, many more are not. (Blue Öyster Cult ‘Awful musicians’? You must be joking). But they have the guts to put an overrated icon at number one. (Link from Dodgeblogium)

Anyway, here are my list of bad solos. There’s only five of them, but I’m probably treading on sacred cows too…

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath by Black Sabbath, solo by Tony Iommi. This song contains three of Iommi’s monster riffs, but the solo is the weak spot in what’s otherwise a classic song. It’s a thin, weedy thing. Although Iommi is known for his riffs rather than his solos, he’s still capable of doing far better than this.

Everything by Vardis, solos by Steve Zodiac. I’m not naming any individual songs, because I can’t remember any titles. But Vardis were one of those bands that only really had one song, and played it over and over again. I remember a review of a live album of theirs, that described it as sounding like “A thirty second excerpt of Dave Edmund’s ‘Sabre Dance’ in a continuous loop for forty minutes”. And that’s exactly what they sounded like.

Paranoid Android by Radiohead, solo by Johnny Greenwood. This is an album which would have really benefitted from some proper solos. But all we get is one note strummed really fast going “EeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEe”. Was that supposed to be a solo, Johnny?

Champagne Supernova by Oasis, solos by Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. Noel seems to think that Paul Weller is a great guitarist. He’s not. And Noel himself is an order of magnitude worse. Anyone who thinks Noel Gallagher is a good guitar player simply does not have a record collection that goes into double figures.

The live solo spot by Nigel Tufnel of Spïnal Tap. I’m old enough to remember the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the early 80s. Every band gave their guitarist a solo spot where the rest of the band walked off stage leaving the axeman to go Weeeeeeeee widdlywiddly widdlywiddly widdlywiddly eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ngngngngngngngngngngngngng for a few minutes. And the audiences went wild! Well except for the people who hadn’t already gone to the loo during the drum solo.

It appears that a European advert for the film “Super Size Me” is upsetting the Freepi. Serves them right for the ridiculous “Freedom Fries”.

Covering some similar ground to The Test of Time, this post by Paul De Angelis on Blogcritics has some interesting thoughts on why the divide between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture is slowly breaking down.

Craig Seligman once remarked on “…the weakening force of critical opinion in the face of ever-expanding mass interests and tastes”. But this change was more than the result of an expanding middle class or more prevalent media. It was spurred on by the rise of the HIFs — Hardcore Intelligent Fans — who accomplished two important things:

1) They championed traditionally disparaged genres (like science fiction) and media (like comic books), claiming them as worthy of analysis and serious critique. Academia had failed badly in this respect. For years these things were shunned, and now the universities, instead of being in the vanguard, are trying to play catch-up. But courses on pop culture are like listening to senior citizens use contemporary slang: it sounds clumsy, forced, and slightly embarrassing.

2) HIFs also managed to find alternative ways of getting their ideas out there, sidestepping professional venues by producing fanzines and holding conventions. Though fanzines had problems with distribution, that’s been alleviated by their replacement, the internet.

Not that the litsnobs and classical music snobs will concede defeat easily. There are still people that insist that “composed music in the European classical tradition” is inherently superior to all other forms of music, just as there are those that insist that any work of fiction that does not conform to the narrow tropes of the genre known as “serious literature” is worthless trash.

I’m not arguing that worthless trash doesn’t exist; nobody has yet repealed Sturgeon’s Law. But I’m sure for every SF novel or thriller that’s formulaic drivel, there’s also a “seriously literary novel” that’s pretentious drivel. (or even formulaic pretentious drivel). And for every vacuous pop song that’s forgotten in six months, there’s an equal proportion of unlistenable classical compositions that have been performed precisely once.

The August issue of Dreamscribe is now online. This one contains the fourth of Amadán’s Online GM Tips, and my own review of Summer Stabcon.

There is going to be a major revamp in the next month or so, giving Dreamscribe the improvement in appearance and navigation it urgently needs.

I’ve been uploading a few of the train photos I took on my west of England trip to my Fotopic.Net gallery. So far there are assorted EWS and Freightliner 66s at Lostwithiel, and a few shots from Cockwood Harbour. More to come!