I am fairly sure that refers to the road and bus stops on the main road. Ealing council have CCTV^▸ (Closed Circuit Tele-Vision) cameras that will catch you if you stop on the main road. I was actually in the bay, which is private land and has this company enforcing it and have subsequenty found out that its people stood at the station entrance with a handheld camera taking photos of cars.

What annoys me is there is nothing on the entrance to the bay saying that^s its private property and waiting is not allowed.

and if you look closley that might even be someone doing it by the dexters shop in the white shirt.

I received a parking ticket recently for stopping in one of the bays outside earling broadway.

I had assumed wrongly it was like most stations where you were allowed 20 minutes free. However I was only there about 2 minutes and did not even turn the engine off or get out of the car and the picture even shows my reversing lights as I am reversing out of the bay!

I can understand the need for restrictions on a station like this with minimal parking, but it was extremely unclear that absolutely no waiting is allowed and it seems very excessive.

Secondly, it has taken them over 4 months to send the notice out, is it still enforceable?

Unfortunately this was a trainee Driver involved with this incident.

It always saddens me to hear about these things, there had been some progress made on this by introducing security guards at Southall station, however this just seems to have driven it to other locations.

My thoughts are with the driver and instructor and I sincerely hope they are both able to recover from this and continue in there chosen career.

Hex is due to stay, this is according to a family memeber who works for them, BAA want to keep a fast sevice. But personally I cant see a buisness case for it after crossrail as alot of its customers come from the city, who is going to want to get on a crossrail train then get off at Paddington to change onto HEX when crossrail will be going to Heathrow anyway for a time saving of aprroximatly 15 mins. But what will go is the Heathrow connect as crossrail will cover its exact route.

Yeah not quite what I meant Swlines, I was trying to say use the depot at Reading cause, its allready there and I suspect will have spare capacity when Crossrail comes in.

If you ask me it seems crazy not to run it to Reading!

There is some sort of depot being built at West Drayton for Crossrail, surely the money spent doing that would be better spent extending to reading. In the grand scheme of things the electrification costs to enable this must be tiny compared to the cost of tunnelling under London.

Reading is already a natural terminus for suburban services into London which works very well for people going both ways enabling people coming form intermediate stations to go to Reading at get a fast train to the west, and people coming off fast trains at reading can get straight on a local stopping train. Why introduce an extra change at Maidenhead? There is also a depot at Reading which I am sure would be able to accommodate Crossrail as with the reduction of local turbo services they will get moved somewhere else, which saves building an extra depot at West drayton.

This is typical short sighted thinking.

A good program.

I have one question though, why are the railways no longer self sustaining? Does it cost that much more to run a train service 50 years on?

Unfortunatly not in the wales area, anyone know if its available on i player?

Agreed electrification is a must.

However the GWML^▸ (Great Western Main Line) has a problem in terms of the severn tunnel, it is too small to get OHLE equipment into.

I have always maintained that the crossrail electridfication should help encourage the further electrifcation of the GWML.

Why are Gatwick Express on the list but not Heathrow or Stansted?

quote from the Crossrail document:

8.4.75 For major trackworks outside Paddington station a total blockade will be required that
will affect all services (ie GWML^▸ (Great Western Main Line) and local services) for a period of two weeks. Services
will also be affected by partial blockades for a week either side of the total blockade.
During this time local and GWML services will terminate at Ealing Broadway station.
The disruption to passengers at Paddington station will cause an impact of particular
importance since the blockade will affect all local and GWML services to Paddington
and passengers using the London Underground. This is also addressed in route-wide
impacts (see Chapter 7).
76

I have also included the link:

http://billdocuments.crossrail.co.uk/files/Home/Home3/01.Environmental%20Statement/Volume_02/Chapter_08_pt01.pdf

For me electrification is key, how can we have a modern efficient railway, without electrifying the network. The wheels are already in motion for the extension of the electrification to Maidenhead. As I have mentioned in several other post it seems crazy that this is not being continued to Reading, if not further. The main cost in the crossrail project is in the tunnelling, so why network rail is not taking the opportunity to extend the electrification then, is beyond me. We lag behind our European counterparts by miles with a decent railway infrastructure.

How can the government be considering ordering a new generation of diesel trains to replace the HST^▸ (High Speed Train (Inter City class 43 125 units))'s, with all the debate on environmental concerns, and the volatile nature of the fuel source for these trains, it seems crazy.

Although the costs of this type of project are significant, this just seems of short-term solutions to a much bigger problem. The government just needs to bite the bullet on the cost and think about the long-term future. This kind of thinking was what lead to the Beaching cuts, and now look where we are now.

As for the impact for passengers, we are looking at significant disruption when crossrail is built, it has been reported that Paddington will be closed for as much as 2 weeks in one go, to allow the work required to be done, so as passengers we are going to have to grin and bear it.

I believe FGW^▸ (First Great Western) are "trying" to improve their service. I think they are genuinely worried about losing their franchise, a new MD, better refunds for tickets, the return of free off-peak first class for season ticket holders, and less cancelled trains. One of the things that really annoyed me was the cancelling or revising of trains so they missed half their route. Rather than doing the best thing by passengers, they were minimising the penalties for a late train by revising it or cancelling it all together.

Having said this, I think there is still a long way to go.

I expect it was just the signalman routing the train onto the wrong track. Easy to get confused between the express and connect. As I have said before a member of my family works for Heathrow express, they say that the signalmen sometimes make mistakes like this.

What time of day was this?

Sometimes the connect acts as the express with an additional stop at Hayes late at night. This may have been why, but does not explain why it was not announced.