This sneaky image has come the Eye's way.
Presumably taken by someone at today's Javelin launch who snuck away to see Network Rail's restoration work at King's Cross.
This, apparently, is part of the eastern range, above what will be the first class lounge.
But what on earth are Gallagher brothers doing there?
Cross Country's new ad is on YouTube...
Lukewarm.
UPDATE: Captain Deltic asks on behalf of CaRT*:
Why no shot of an IC125 in the new Cross Country commercial?
*Campaign for Real Trains
Congratulations to South Eastern for starting Javelin services six months early.
Whilst the official taster services won't commence until the 29th June, today saw a special run for hacks and others of the great and good.
The inaugural run from St Pancras to Ashford also saw the new class 395 fleet formally christened when the Chief Thumper, Roger Ford, undertook the traditional ceremony of "Assaulting the Interior Trim".
He pronounced himself satisfied.
Pity there are no power sockets though.
CORRECTION: This from the Major...
If The Fact Compiler hadn't been so busy elsewhere he might have noticed that the power sockets are between the seat by your knees.
Just check it's okay with the nice lady in the adjacent seat before plugging it in...
Telegrammed by our man at Buggleskelly
Rail chiefs in the Emerald Isle have come up with a master plan to revive the flagging fortunes of their lightly used lines, including the famed Limerick Junction to Waterford route.
Iarnród Éireann seem determined to copy the worst ideas from Britain's Department for Transport and have proposed acquiring a hybrid railbus from Japan, or even a Parry People Mover, to cut the operating costs of the 54 mile line.
Wags are already scouring the land for an elastic band of suitable size.
According to Irish Rail's Spin O'Meister, Barry Kenny, the vehicle is one of a number of cost-cutting options on the route which sees only 54,000 passengers a year.
Seasoned observers of the Irish rail scene have better ideas.
Perhaps IE might actually promote the route or even provide a timetable that gives useful connections out of Limerick Junction. A Sunday service might also help.
To be fair Kenny appears to be doing his bit.
In May highly respected Irish Times hack Brian O'Connell travelled the line. Sadly he had to suffer a 61 minute wait for a connection at Limerick Junction.
With the best will in the world this sort of journey won't make for a compelling travel piece.
Of course this may be exactly what Irish Rail chiefs want.
Any increase in passenger numbers would scupper plans to close the line.
Which is why the case for a hybrid railcar appears so compelling.
With the option to run the railcar in road mode the line between Limerick Junction and Waterford could then be closed for 'essential maintenance' - permanently!
This from the Irish Independent last week...
Controversial Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is campaigning to be re-elected on the plank that his country is advancing as rapidly as a train, only the train in question is Irish, almost as old as he is and until 2007 was delivering freight around the country.
There's a pun here somewhere about Gerrymandering but in the current climate probably best not to make it.
UPDATE: This from Andrew Grantham over at the Railway Gazette...
An Irish diesel?
That's nothing - look at the train on the top of the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways website!
Beats an exported Pacer.
The Eye has received an email from a confused reader.
Dear Fact Compiler, he writes.
I live in Chester and access the internet via BT Broadband.
For the past couple of days the National Rail Enquiries website has been running adverts in Spanish.
And this one, today, is from US Government...
Can you tell me what's going on?
Well I'm afraid we can't but perhaps one of our more technically savvy readers can?
This from Virgin Trains...
More frequent departures and even faster journeys are on the Virgin Trains agenda as demand for rail travel grows and air goes into decline.
Virgin Trains is going all out for the Glasgow market, having grounded the airlines between Liverpool and London and become the travel mode of choice for Manchester-London.
And on, and on, it continues. With not one mention of the infrastructure controller.
Nice.
UPDATE: Up to a point Lord Copper...
Those of you unconvinced of the benefits of Twitter may soon be converted.
Those canny boys and girls over at Chiltern are "offering Twitter followers the perfect gift for Father’s Day – a train cab ride on our infamous bubble car."
The Fact Compiler, whilst not convinced that a bubble car can be 'infamous', has already entered!
UPDATE: This, unbelievably, 'twittered' to The Fact Compiler by a very slick Chiltern...
We used the word "infamous" with a sense of irony.
This is an amazing prize for one lucky dad.
We all love the bubble car!
Good effort - nice use of technology.
Monday's guest post from Ben Smith on how the railways might use social media attracted considerable interest amongst readers.
Brendan Nelson, a consultant who works for Tobias & Tobias, helped FCC to deliver the Twitter service that Ben mentioned in his post.
Brendan has asked if he might share his view with Eye readers.
Yes he may and here it is:
A number of rail companies have already responded to Ben Smith's guest column on June 15th, which argued that rail companies are failing to exploit social media.
However, as one of those behind the First Capital Connect Twitter service Ben singled out as "getting it wrong", I thought I'd chip in with my own two cents.
Twitter users subscribe to, or "follow", any number of other Twitter accounts. The more accounts a user "follows", the more information they receive - and the more difficult it becomes to sift through the incoming stream of information.This information overload poses a challenge to train operators looking to use Twitter. They generate a lot of data, most of which the average customer will find irrelevant. For example, customers travelling between Brighton and London Bridge at 6pm aren't interested in incidents at Stevenage close to midnight.
So if all this data is simply piped through a Twitter feed, its "followers" will have to deal with a high noise-to-signal ratio: the vast majority of messages will be of no relevance. This issue of relevance was the problem we set out to solve with FCC's Twitter service.
Our users state their journey preferences so that the system can send alerts when - and only when - relevant incidents occur. This is the fundamental difference between @FirstCC and @uktrains, which adopts more of a broadcast model. Followers of @uktr_firstcc might receive at least nine irrelevant messages for each relevant one.
Another strength of the "targeted" model is that our system uses Twitter's "direct message" feature, which means users receive emails and potentially SMS messages when alerts are sent. All this is free of charge.
Ben says that we miss the "social" aspect of Twitter. But I feel the social aspect is intrinsic to Twitter itself and users will forward on information that they feel is important - even if it came to them as an official, targeted communication. And a quick look at conversations on Twitter confirms that passengers don't need encouragement to talk about train services.
So while @uktrains has its strengths, I believe that - by solving the problem of relevance - our model does as well.
Just as bulletin boards didn't make email obsolete, the public conversations taking place on Twitter won't make official, targeted communications obsolete either.
Oh dear.
ATOC's exciting Connecting Communities Report already appears to be falling apart under public scrutiny.
Readers will recollect that the report was widely leaked over the weekend before being officially unveiled on Monday to much media fanfare and misty eyed recollections of pre-Beeching days.
But it would appear that much of its thinking is back of the fag packet stuff, judging by this story in the Herald Express...
THE steam railway company which runs Churston Station says it has not been consulted over new plans to reconnect the line with the mainline route to Newton Abbot.
Andrew Pooley, general manager of Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway, says the company has not been involved in compiling the report, which singles out the old Brixham line as one of 14 which should be reopened nationwide.
And he says the idea 'has not been thought through'.
Indeed.
Perhaps surprising that ATOC didn't bother consulting with the heritage line before publishing a report that proposes using its infrastructure for new services.
Doubly so, as the report was written by the former chairman of another heritage railway in the South West.
Is the Eye alone in fearing that ATOC is now more interested in spin than substance?
Exciting news from The Reporter, the Ciras newsletter.
Following a reader concern about the length of some Grand Central HST sets The Reporter sagely announces: 
This presumably explains Grand Central's much improved reliability in recent months?
One of the bidders for the Tyne & Wear Metro may be about to drop out according to NEBusiness:
Last night The Journal was informed of rumours one bidder was preparing to pull out of the bidding process, a claim Nexus said it could not comment on.
There are currently four bidders for the Tyne & Wear metro concession: Deutsche-Bahn, Serco-Ned Rail, MTR Corporation and an in-house Nexus team.
Tyne Bridge MP David Clelland, who as a member of the transport select committee should know better, claimed that Nexus "...is not being privatised".
Which means that he is either deluded or that the smart money is on the in-house team.
Good news for West Coast Main Line Passengers.
According to PR Week:
Network Rail has appointed Iris to handle an integrated consumer PR and advertising campaign... to showcase Network Rail’s £9bn upgrade of the West Coast main line.
Indeed and very splendid the ad is too.
Much to the chagrin of Virgin, who would rather the £2.4m campaign spend had been used to deliver a reliable railway.
But what's this?
Has NR appointed Iris as part of a charm offensive to win over Virgin's top man?
As regular readers of Eye will recollect Sir Beardie is very fond of being pictured with ladies in various states of undress.
As Iris also handle Wonderbra the potential for joint PR could be breath taking.
Network Rail has spent enormous amounts of time and money creating a National Electronic Sectional Appendix (NESA).
And a jolly good thing it is too.
But what's this?
To view NESA on-line you need to download the SVG Viewer from Adobe.
Alas - when you visit the download page it carries the following sorry message:
Please note that Adobe has announced that it will discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer on January 1, 2009.
Always good to see one legacy system replaced by another.
IT consultants, bonuses and trebles all round!
UPDATE: This from Tom over at Blairwatch (which hasn't been updated since 8th May!):
A tad harsh - SVG is an open standard with plenty of viewer support around the place, as NR make clear.
Now, if NR had used some kooky format that you had to pay Microsoft squillions to interpret, I'd have been up for giving them a good kicking, but using SVG is common sense.
Now all we need is open access to NR's geographic data in some interestingly queryable form, plus the postcode database, the Ordnance Survey data etc... etc...
***The First Secretary announced that from the end of April until 7th June more than 60,000 car buyers have been given a £2,000 discount for scrapping vehicles more than 10 years old.***
Telegrammed by 221b Baker Street
'I say, Holmes, what do you make of the disturbing case of the Pacer engine, found near Olive Mount junction?
'Watson, you will of course have noted the significance of RAIB's investigation and the detail of the event contained in the NIR.'
'But Holmes, RAIB is not investigating and there has been no NIR!'
'That, Watson, is the significance!'
UPDATE: The NIR has apparently now been published and RAIB are involved!
Deep breath.
It would appear that private sector Train Operating Companies want to reopen lots of stations!
This from the Sunday Telegraph...
The Association of Train Operating Companies is due to give unprecedented backing to the restoration of disused track and the reintroduction of passenger services on other routes which currently only carry freight.
Excitingly ATOC members propose using taxpayers money to do this rather than their own.
No matter.
The list of lines is strangely familiar...
Lines... include the Uckfield to Lewes line in East Sussex, the Bristol to Portishead line and Yorkshire's Harrogate-Ripon-Northallerton route... the restoration of the Manton Curve in Rutland... while reopening the Woodhead line from Manchester to Sheffield...
Can it be?
This is surely an echo of Railtrack's 2000 Network Management Statement?
Is Michael taking up Gerald's mantle?
Careful, there is no Woolworths left to move to.
UPDATE: This just in from Leo Pink...
Gerald Corbet is now at LRC, where they specialise in ensuring that F***-ups don't have embarrassing results.
How come he was overlooked to be NR's new Chairman?
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