Where Worlds Collide

While I was in Leicester on Saturday morning after Breathing Space‘s gig the night before, I went for a walk around the city, and saw the famous bowstring bridge on the west side of the city.

This bridge is one of the last surviving bits of the Great Central’s London extension in Leicester. It’s scheduled for demolition to make room for an expansion of De Montford University’s sports department.

As chronicled on Jonathan Calder’s Liberal England blog, there’s been a strong local campaign to save the bridge, but it’s looking increasingly likely that Big Money and sports jocks are going to trump preservation of Britain’s victorian industrial heritage.

On Friday morning I got up a few minutes early to photograph the steam-hauled Scarborough Flyer on it’s way from Crewe.

I was expecting the advertised loco, A4 pacific 60009 “Union of South Africa”. But what turned up was LMS No 6201 “Princess Elizabeth”.

There were a lot of people on the station with cameras.  I think I was probably the only one under the age of 65. I was certainly the only person wearing a DEMU “No Kettles” t-shirt.

So they’ve finally announced the decision to electrify the Great Western Main Line. And they’ve going right through to Swansea rather than stopping at Cardiff, which is a sensible decision. No mention of Plymouth or Penzance, although keeping the wires up on the sea wall might be an engineering challenge!main

While I have to applaud the decision, I do have to ask why this wasn’t done 20 years ago. The last major electrification project was the East Coast Main Line, which British Rail completed in 1988. So why did they disband the electrification teams rather than carry on with the next project.

In retrospect, the answer is simple: Privatisation happened. Because of the ideologically-driven need for short-term profits, it was no time for long term investment projects. So Britain continues to lag behind the rest of Europe, with a significant proportion of main line trunk routes operated by diesels.

The other electrification project announced is the George Stevenson’s Liverpool to Manchester line, opened in 1830 as the first main line in the world. At first glance this is an odd choice; the only trains using it’s entire length nowadays are a handful of local trains; even the Liverpool to Manchester expresses use another route. But at Newton-le-Willows there are connections both north and south with the main London-Glasgow line. These connections will enable electric to run directly between Liverpool or Manchester to Scotland, and serve as a diversionary route between Liverpool or Manchester to London when the more direct routes are closed for engineering work.

So hopefully we’ll see the end of the class 185 “Lardarse Express” diesel trains operating under the wires for 90% of the journey on Manchester to Edinburgh services. Although seeing Virgin Trains using diesel Voyagers 100% under the wires between Glasgow and Manchester doesn’t exactly convince sceptics of the value of electrification. Neither does the percentage of freight on electrified routes hauled by diesels.

The train company formerly known as EWS seems to have got itself in a bit of bother over noisy coal trains.

The Falkirk West SNP member said analysis carried out by Falkirk Council showed the night coal runs by freight company DB Shenker were creating a substantial vibration problem.

He said the average vibration level for DB Schenker trains was 0.075 millimetres per second and could reach up to 0.091 mm per second.

That is in contrast to Freightliner Limited trains who also use the route to transport coal to the Fife power station. Tests revealed they created a vibration level of just 0.025 millimetres per second.

Mr Matheson said the different readings could be attributed to the speed of the trains and the different coal wagons used by the companies.

The DB Schenker (ex-EWS) trains use coal hoppers delivered shortly after privatisation to replace life-expired wagons dating from the 1960s. EWS, charismatic leader Ed Burkhart decided to ignore decades of rail experience developed for European conditions in favour of doing everything The American Way. So these new wagons had ‘more economical’ American-style heavy cast bogies rather than the lighter designs favoured up to then in Britain and Europe for a very different rail environment. He didn’t take into account the extra punishment they inflicted on tracks that carry heavy passenger traffic. And I wonder how much environmental noise was ever considered - after all, in America the rails always run though the worst bits of town inhabited by poor people whose opionions tend to be ignored.

Freightliner’s more modern wagons use far more technically sophisticated bogies designed to minimise track wear. And they also seem to be a lot quieter.

I think having my camera die on my three days into my holiday was a blessing in disguise. I’d had a Fuji S1000, which I was never really happy with, and faced with an exposure meter fault that would cost more to repair than the camera was worth, I decided it was time to upgrade to the DLSR I should have bought a year ago.

None of this shopping around, poring over “Whatever SLR” and comparing rival cameras with similar specs; just a matter of what Jessops in Torquay had in stock that was within my budget.

I ended up with a Sony α200 with an 18-70 zoom lens, plus a 75-300 telephoto zoom, and after two weeks I can say I’m very happy with it so far. It did take a few failed photos to get used to the fact that it didn’t have the shutter delay which was a ‘feature’ of the bridge camera I had before. What you see in the viewfinder when you press the shutter is pretty much what you get in the picture; the autofocus is extremely fast.

So here’s some examples of what I took with it

The down platform at Lostwithiel in Cornwall is a classic shot for early to mid morning. Loco-hauled passenger trains are long-gone, but I find Voyagers are quite photogenic.

An EWS 66 moves sllowly across the crossing at Lostwithiel on a china clay train.

Testing what the 300mm telephoto can do. The train was something like half a mile away.

And of course it’s got to be able to handle indoor concert photography, which is one of the most challenging types of photography there is. This one of of Heather Findlay of Mostly Autumn at The Wharf in Tavistock. I took it at 3200 ASA handheld at something like 1/60th.

One from DEMU showcase on Saturday; another high ASA slow shutter speed handheld shot; I think I went down to 1/15th sec on this.

This camera is also a joy to use; all the buttons are clearly labelled and the menus are intuitive so that you don’t keep needing to refer to the manual to find out what something does, or how to something. After a year in which I took very few photographs, this camera has got me excited about photography again.

The downside of having a very busy day is you feel completely shattered on the next. This is what happens when you go to a model railway exhibition and a gig on the same day, and the first of those is two hours travel away.

I missed the Derby show last year for family reasons. This year it’s moved a different date, and moved out of it’s old home at The Assembly Rooms become the latest show to move to a dismal sports hall on the fringes of town. If you’re one of the minority of visitors that travels to shows by train, this is almost always a bad thing; rather than a location within walking distance of the main railway station, you have an extra half-hour’s travel each way by bus to get to the place. It’s why I don’t go to the Nottingham show any more; that one always such a pig to get to I’ve decided it’s not worth the effort.

Saying that, despite the hall lacking the character of the old Assembly Rooms, they still had a good selection of layouts and traders. Derby always emphasises non-British modelling, and there was a selection of French, Swiss, German, American and Canadian layouts as well as British outline. The simple but effective “Glenrothes North Junction” flew the flag for British N, a slice of 1990s central Scotland.

The traders did my credit card too some serious damage, with a lot of continental rolling stock doing it GBH in the first few minutes. The long-awaited Kato Swiss RIC stock is finally out at truly eye-watering prices, and last years modern Minitrix wagons have finally appeared, including the long tarpaulin-roofed flat. This is one of those 1:160 models of a continental loading-gauge prototype that happily scales very close to a 1:148 representation of an equivalent British gauge version. And I also picked up a Dapol InterCity livery DVT. There was also a Dapol 66 in DRS “Compass” livery which lunged at my credit card but missed, because I’d spent enough money by then.

Then it was a three hour journey by bus, two trains, a tram, and a lengthy walk across central Manchester to Bury for the latest date of Mostly Autumn’s spring tour. I’ve seen this band so many times that it’s not just the band, but their siblings, parents and significant others who are greeting me by name!

Mostly Autumn have been on blindingly good form on this tour, and tonight’s gig was no exception. Having Gavin Griffiths back on drums seems to have lifted the energy of the live performance to a new level And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Heather as enthusiastic or as animated before this tour; she’s also on spectacular form vocally, and dominates the stage visually. Bury has always been a good venue to see the band, great atmosphere and good acoustics; just about the best sound balance I’ve heard on this tour; every voice and instrument clearly heard in the mix, and nobody so loud that they drowned out anyone else.

Still another half-dozen dates left on this tour; the next gig is next Saturday at Bilston in the Black Country, followed by appearances at Southampton, Tavistock, Oxford, Gloucester and Norwich. I’m planning on going to three of these. If you like powerful 70s-style melodic rock with a bit of celtic-flavoured prog thrown into the mix, you really ought to go to one of these.

A web-based bus slogan generator to make your own version of the infamous “atheist buses” you can see in the UK. Unfortunately the full lyrics of Marillion’s “This is the 21st Century” don’t fit.

We’ll start with the rather obvious H.P.Lovecraft version

One for this Saturday’s gig in Lowdham

And finally, the obligatory gamer one:

Yes, it’s the time where all the model railway manufacturers announce their releases for the forthcoming year.

1zu160 lists the new releases from a lot of continental European manufacturers - although the text is in German, you can tell what things are by the pictures, and the class numbers and the alphabet soup of wagon codes are equally comprehensible (or incomprehensible) in any language.

I’m interested in Swiss-outline, and Fleischmann are doing three new versions of the SBB Ae6/6; the early green livery with the chrome stripes as fitted to the first 25 locos, the later red livery without the chrome stripes, and the most recent red and blue “SBB Cargo” colours which to my eyes doesn’t suit this classic traction at all.

On the intermodal front, Fleischmann are doing the six-axle articulated Sggnos intermodal flat, which duplicates the existing Hobbytrain model. I’m not really keen on duplication where so many intermodal types are yet to be modelled, but given the patchy availability of Hobbytrain’s models, at least the Fleischmann model should be easier to get hold of. Minitrix meanwhile are doing a 5-wagon set carrying Hangartner swapbodies and semi-trailers. This is a bit of a compromise - the wagons are the now obselete Sdkms piggyback wagons, where the prototypes are, ironically, Sggnos’s. Fleischmann are also doing a 3-wagon set of SBB Cargo’s newish high-capacity 2-axle vans.

Minitrix are also doing another run of GM Nohabs, in Belgian, Hungarian and epoch III Danish maroon. With an all-new Hobbytrain model of this iconic locomotive on the horizon, I’m not sure who really wants to buy this long-in-the-tooth model any more. Perhaps it will be a budget price model, but you never know with them.

Given the current state of the economy, it’s anyone’s guess when (or even if) all these models will eventually appear. But provided I still have the money to spend by then, I can see myself getting at least some of the above over the course of the year.

Matthew hill says rude things about Stockport

See, Stockport’s the bit that missed the toilet — bounced off the rim, the M60, the Manchester ringroad that is — and settled into the carpet halfway between the Pennines and the Cheshire set.

For those of us who live within the borough of Stockport, that’s fighting talk. On the other hand, perhaps he’s got a point. Stockport town centre is a bit rubbish. And he’s dead right about the most significant landmark, the railway viaduct.

Yes folks - Electric Nose is back! Still doesn’t allow comments, though