TSSA backs Reichsbahnmarschall Abbot

At last some good news for Labour leadership candidate Diane Abbot

Abbot has been trailing behind in the leadership race but all this looks set to change with today's exciting announcement that the TSSA have thrown their paperclips behind Diane's campaign.

Gerry Doherty, general secretary of the union, said, "Diane was the only candidate who supported our policy of a publicly owned railway without any qualification or hesitation.

"Labour went into the 1997 saying it was going to reverse the Tories' privatised railway but never did anything to undo that damage over the past 13 years.

"We want an affordable state-owned railway system like the rest of Europe. Diane agrees with that very sensible policy and we shall be asking our members to vote for her accordingly."

Fear not Gerry, a state owned railway system is exactly what you'll get.

Unfortunately the state in question appears to be Germany.

South West Trains expands onto West Coast?

This from Driver Potter...

I refer to the July 2010 edition of Modern Railways (Page 22 if you're interested) wherein is made mention of incidents with ice-bound Bendydildos:

"Ice also built up on and under the train. in one incident, a lump of ice was dislodged as a Class 390 was passing a Class 450 EMU. The ice bounced between the vehicles, breaking half a dozen windows on each train."

Us SWT boys aren't known for hanging about, but there is a limit to how far you can coast - Waterloo to the West Coast Main Line is probably asking a bit.

Can I claim my prize for "Pedant of the Month" now, or do I have to wait?

UPDATE: This from Captain Deltic...

That should be Smart*rs* of the month and I can only blame the Editor for not covering up my deteriorating faculties for once.

Railway Garden Competition - Also Abroad

This from Storm Force...

This taken on a recent trip at Sveti Rok ob Sotli in Slovenia.


The train is stopped in the station!

Railway Garden Competition - Abroad

This from Tb...

This view of Alstetten in Zurich just shows how poor the Swiss railways are compared to Britain.


Note that there is no garden to admire between the extended service intervals and no fence to lean on at the platform end.

Also there are no signs telling me what I can and cannot do - help!

In the panic that such unbounded freedom causes, I realised that Network Rail should offer it's consultancy services to help the Swiss correct both their poorly maintained infrastructure and lackluster punctuality record, for which they are rightly pilloried.

Perhaps, if they try hard enough, they too can achieve post Hatfield levels of performance?

Pointless signs - A60 stock

With a bowler tip to Oily Spanner...

A bit worrying that this obvious piece of information has to be displayed in the driving cab of Underground trains.


Maybe driverless trains are the answer after all?

Pointless signs - Smethwick Rolfe Street

This from D0260...

How's this for a cracker, seen last week at Smethwick Rolfe Street station between Wolverhampton and Birmingham on the WCML.

It has two completely useless signs as well as a garden on the platform.

The sign nearest is so rusty , that nothing at all can be read on it, I haven't a clue what it used to say.


The second sign in six foot tall overgrowth says "Passengers must not alight here".


Really!!! Prizes surely for ideas how that would be possible anyway.

The final shot shows the vertical garden wall of greenery taken from where I was standing, looking in the opposite direction


There were enough poppy seed heads visible to be of interest to Afghan producers.

Lookalike: Grand Central's Marilyn?

This from The Master...

It appears that the soi disant 'veteran' observer was in Yorkshire this weekend running a straw-race.

Rather than impersonating Baroness Thatcher perhaps he should have done a turn as Marilyn?

Then again perhaps not.

Selling off NR - Cui bono?

Telegrammed by Bulldog Drummond
Interesting that two very similar stories (Alistair Osborne in Friday's Daily Telegraph and Tom Winsor in the Times today) suggest that the Government could trouser £12bn by selling off Network Rail.

This is based on the accounting wheeze that the Regulatory Asset Base is really 'worth' £36bn.

The figure is arrived at by deducting the debt of £23bn which supposedly leaves an equity of £12-13bn.

Complete fantasy of course as the RAB is not a realistic asset valuation in commercial terms and it conveniently overlooks the question as to who would want to invest in a business that has such huge debts, which can only be propped up by massive government subsidy and borrowing that, in part, goes to cover normal running costs and paying debt interest.

Network Rail is a complete dog's breakfast of a business and is only viable with huge levels of taxpayers' moolah.

The only people who can have any possible interest in selling off this business are the huge army of bankers, lawyers, consultants and general hangers on who are experiencing thin pickings at the moment.

It is certainly not in the interests of the taxpayer or those who want a properly run and cost-effective railway.

Pointless signs - Tamworth

Ding dong the train is dead!

***Foster review of IEP expected 07:00 Tuesday morning***

More tomorrow...

UPDATE: This from Reuters...

A decision on whether to proceed with a programme to replace the Intercity Express trains will be taken alongside a wider review of government spending in October, the Department for Transport (DfT) said.

No shit Sherlock.

UPDATE: Foster report here...

And just a flavour to wet your appetite:

The Department for Transport’s strategic positions have appeared to some in the industry as susceptible to change and unpredictable. Questions are asked about the coherence of IEP, extended electrification, high speed rail and overall strategy.

The real issue here, I believe, is that there has been insufficient communication between the Department and the industry, including communication about IEP, and this has opened the way for significant negativity to develop. This is a key area for attention and further improvement.

This problem, particularly with IEP, appears to have been amplified by DfT’s procurement approach, which has placed heavy emphasis on commercial confidentiality and thus relied on independent advisers and consultants rather than industry expertise. This has engendered a sense of disengagement and disenchantment which I believe could and should largely have been avoided. I also ask a number of questions about arrangements for managing the costs and coherence of independent advice within the Department.

Smooth words fail to mask damning conclusions.

UPDATE: This from the Shunter...

Erm, so the review concludes by suggesting a further review?

I propose that Captain Deltic should be remitted to do it, but by Friday lunchtime, if he needs that long...

UPDATE: This from Captain Deltic...

Whilst Sir Andrew has taken a notably gentle tone, I found this variant of the motorist seeking directions in Ireland, diverting.

"I must record here that if I had a reasonably blank sheet of paper I would not manage the programme like this"

As for the suggestion made by The Shunter - please accept my apologies, but owing to pressures of work the earliest I could do this is next Wednesday.

UPDATE: This from the Torygraph...

The announcement by Mr Hammond could also jeopardise as many as 12,500 jobs which the previous Government said would have been created or safeguarded by the project.

Indeed - in Japan.

UPDATE: This from @sharpsharp, via Twitter...

From p22:

Depending on the exact mixture of newly acquired, re-engineered and cascaded rolling stock, and the technical approach to the provision of services beyond the present electrified network, it seems likely that more than half of the benefit on the East Coast route, and probably around three quarters of it on the Great Western routes, could be captured for between 40% and 60% of the cost.

Eye congratulates the Department for Transport on its masterful understanding of Value for Money procurement.

Pointless Garden Competition - Conflation edition

This from Cheers Joe...

I notice that the themes of your blog have met head on at Limehouse.


I do not know whether that station also has pointless announcements.

However, I am always reassured by the announcements at SouthEastern stations that warn one to take care on the platforms "due to an incident of weather".

Pointless signs - A 2002 vision of the future

LUL - In the Brown stuff...

Telegrammed by Spinning Charles Yerkes
The pink ‘un had an interview on Friday with London Underground MD Mike Brown.

Brown, recently restored to us from his sabbatical at Heathrow, throws full light on the fall out from the collapse of Tube Lines.

• Northern line resignalling delayed until after the Olympics

• Piccadilly line upgrade postponed sine die, with further development work required on the signalling interface between the Picc and District in west London where they share right of way but not Infracos.

• The interface between the Met line and the Jubilee line – another rubbing point between Metronet (dead) and Tubelines (almost deceased) – is cited as a project where things could have gone better.

• The £1 billion resignalling of the Sub-Surface lines is being rescoped and relet next year, much to the dismay of Invensys (formerly Westinghouse) who had been a shoe-in under the Metrodebt tied supply chain but must now compete in open contest. Completion is not expected until 2018, until when the new S Train fleet will potter around under the old electro-mechanical arrangements, with train stops, and not get anywhere near the 50% increase in capacity promised.

• Jubilee line resignalling, due for completion this autumn, won’t be. “We have not yet got into the detail of where we are on the programme and where its delivery schedule should get it,” Mr Brown told FT hack Robert Wright.
  

Beg pardon?

TfL agreed to buy Tube Lines in early May.

In two months, with full access to everything Bechtel and Amey ferrovial were doing, is it such a shag up that LUL still can’t discover an end date? (Yes. Ed)

Dame Shiti Vadera is 48 (ish, according to wikipedia) and Gordoom Brown is missing.

Pointless signs - the audio version

This from a Mr Malins...

There are as many, probably a lot more, pointless announcements as there are pointless signs.

At Bridgend there is an automated one running on the footbridge with the same message, but interestingly only in English.

Surely they could have added Welsh for good measure, and this one runs all night, even when there is no traffic.

Maybe it's for the Clubbers coming back from Swansea, who are in no condition to take it in anyway.

Back to the future - NR adopts double arrow

It appears that Network Rail's Midlands Region can read the runes!


The arrows of indecision clearly looks a safer bet than doomed NR's back of a fag packet logo...

UPDATE: This from Our International Correspondent (and others)...

The Met Rly/GCR boundary sign at Mantles Wood is very smart, and even the proportions and perspective on the "BR" double arrow are right, so unlike Banbury and other piss poor examples see Eye Passim.

But why is this sign so nice, when usually for NR any old thing will do?

Because, to judge from the typeface and colours, it isn't an NR sign. It's a TfL production.

The opposing sign which would be the responsibility of NR - "You Are Now Leaving Coucherland - Use the SPT to ask a Grown Up before passing this point" - is probably not nearly as smart, if it exists at all.

First Network Rail?

The Independent on Sunday will have caused many a ruined breakfast with its list of industry figures keen to take on Iain Coucher's job.

According to the Sindie the great Dr Mike 'Death' Mitchell "is understood to have privately expressed an interest in the role."

No doubt this joyful news will have been welcomed by the nation's interior designers, whose skills will now be in great demand to remove embedded cornflakes sprayed into soft furnishings.

Once recovered from the Heimlich Maneuver industry bigwigs will also have been comforted to read that two further First alumni - Nicola 'Not So' Shaw and Andrew 'I Closed the Skies' Haines - are also rumoured to be in the frame.

Perhaps there is a chapter on career progression in Sir Moir's Lovely Book?


Fortunately, before any further damage was done to the nation's stock of rail executives, the Sindie piece made clear that NR has hired headhunters, Egon Zehnder, with a brief to seek candidates with experience running international companies.

The resulting sighs of relief issuing from across industry breakfast tables are apparently audible in deep space.

Pointless signs - York

Stockade station - Birmingham International

This from D0260...

Further to Eye's piece on the Coucher Memorial Fences at Stockport, welcome to Birmingham International, or should that be HMP Elmdon?

About a month ago each and every platform end, north and south, was fenced at the top of the platform end ramp.

These photographs are the north end of Birmingham International station, taken from Platform 4, nearest the NEC.


A similar thing has happened at Coventry, but as the platforms there are narrower, the fencing is not quite so intrusive.

At Birmingham International the sides of the fencing, usually finished in triangular wood, now sports a sort of giant egg-box of shredded rubber tyres.


How much did this lot cost?

Indeed!

Eye was pleased to see that Nigel Harris over at RAIL has also taken up the cudgels against the apparent relentless march of these costly genuflections to the Elf''n'Safety Taliban (see Stop & Examine in the latest issue).

Perhaps ORR readers can advise whether this really offers a value for money solution to a percieved safety risk?

Bob Crow - just a pussy cat

This from the Tax Payers Alliance...

With Trade Union Leaders flexing their muscles with strike threats and warnings about impending public spending cuts, the Tax Payers' Alliance presents its first Trade Union Rich List.

The list compiles the detailed remuneration of all Trade Union General Secretaries and Chief Executives whose total remuneration exceeded £100,000 in the financial year 2008-09.

According to the TPA the RMT's Bob Crow earns £105,679 a year.

Now the TPA is not the most subtle of organisations, so to illustrate their findings they provided the following endearing image...


Eye will pay Fifty Guineas to the first industry MD who attempts to tickle Bob behind the ears.

An apology to our German readers

The Fact Compiler has been taken to task for stereotyping our Teutonic friends in the previous post.

Clearly in the new Europe this can not be tolerated.

To make amends Eye is happy to run this picture of the launch of ScotRail's new Class 380 EMU at Siemens, Wildenrath, yesterday.


No stereotypes there then.