Sandals and beards at ACoRP awards - Shocker!

Disappointing news from Friday's ACoRP Community Rail awards!

Despite the best efforts of General Manager, Neil Buxton, and the industry's very own 'Pictographer Royal' there was a shocking beard deficit amongst the evening's 270 attendees.

The assembled Community Rail champions, industry supporters, hacks and TOC directors apparently eschewed the traditional facial-fuzz and sandals in favour of smart suits and safety footwear...


EMT's Shoveller & Northern's Butcher hosted the evening and here present Mark Hopwood of FGW with a special award - allegedly for rescuing passengers from a long distance 'dog-box'.

Sadly, busy diaries prevented a Minister from seeing and saluting the 'Big Society' in action.

Sources charitably suggest that it takes some time to recover from the National Rail Awards.

Snapper snaps

Unusually, serving Rail Minister, Tom Harris, elected to discuss transport on his now infamous blog.

What caused Tom to bend his own unwritten rule was the ruminations of a mad Vulcan to which he felt compelled to respond.

The posting proved an immediate hit with readers commenting in droves with thoughts of their own.

Needless to say both Captain Deltic and The Fact Compiler shoved their ha'p'orth in, to greater or lesser effect.

So excited became the debate over whether additional trains or new track would increase capacity (the answer is of course both) that Paul Bigland, the industry's very own 'Pictographer Royal', felt compelled to post.

The brave Snapper even signed off with:

"Of course, further electrification would allow greater fleet utilisation too..."

Of course extending the Pendolino network would also allow Snapper to recharge camera batteries on even longer distance assignments!