Again fault on train today.

 
More than 5p

 
Just looked up all the cars for sale on auto-trader for current year 2025 which is a sample size of 49,840

Turns out  85.5% are auto, just 14.5% are manual

Rather suggests manual cars are a dying breed.

Having lived in London Suburbs until 5 years ago, we have had autos since 2001, 24 years ago.   Nowadays my car has auto lights, auto wipers, auto climate control etc, so why would anyone select all these automatic features then specify a manual gearbox.  Illogical (as Sock would say)

 

More about Saltram House, from the BBC:

 

I remember double de-clutching on crash gear boxes of army lorries. Became a habit that I ended up doing on what ever I drove. Useful if you wanted to change from high to low ratio on the move in a Series II/III Land-Rover.

 
We converted to automatic when we bought a CVT Yaris a couple of years ago. I would not now go back to the manual Yaris we had for 10 years. There is much better control, especially at low speeds. Speed adjustment is much easier and the knowledge that you are unlikely to stall when following people uphill on narrow lanes.

It is some change, when I passed my test 60+ years ago our car only had synchromesh on 3rd to 4th and you had to double de-clutch going down the gears. Either that or slow down much more to get them to mesh without too much of a crunch!

 

Social media feedback: an opportunity to express schadenfreude and worse? Making a portion of feedback from that source irrelevant to whatever situation's provoked it.

Mark

 
Where would you draw the line though when applying discretion for a single instead of a return?  10p difference, 50p, £1?  The assumption does also seem to be that the gateline staff should have known the passenger's full circumstances without so far as I can tell being on daily first name terms with her.

Going by the quoted 5p price difference between single and return she's travelling off-peak, and must have a Railcard.  Based on the mention of paying over £1,000 a year for return journeys then possibly not quite often enough for even a flexi-season to be cost-effective as there's no Railcard discount for seasons, but it must be quite borderline.  I don't use Trainline, but the most common complaint for mistakes in online ticket buying seems to be that the app defaulted to what was bought last time, which presumably wouldn't be the case here.  A bit odd that it would randomly come up with a single if a return was requested.  I suspect there's another side to this.

 
Wonder if the RNLI will move eventually too?

 
That's the point made in the BBC article

 
Not much Chris - you've introduced an Oxymoron - Hampshire IS mainland, no?

 
"Commuters" is another.....

 
Why is it that whenever commenting on railway plans, people can't resist using metaphors like "wheels in motion", "full steam ahead", "hits the buffers", "runs out of steam", "back on track" etc?
 

 
From the Lyme Regis Community

 
A public post on Spotted Newton Abbott


Where a single fare is just 5p or 10p less than a return, why would anyone want to buy a single if they were expecting to return - it strikes me that this can only have been an honest mistake - or am I missing something?    Social Media feedback is split between "she should have got it right - no excuse" and "oh - for goodness sake ...".  And we aren't told the story from the staff's viewpoint.

 
Took my motorcycle test in a heavy downpour. From the look on the examiner's face as he donned his large Mac, I was sure I had failed before even leaving the testing centre! I passed - and then promptly fell off my bike for the first time on the way home.

My son took his test in a manual car and passed first time. He now drives an automatic.  As he pointed out to me, once electric cars dominate the market, every car will be an automatic.

 
Interesting online talk yesterday evening by Professor Lesley Lewis on "The Downs–Thompson Paradox & its Impact on Bristol, Bath & Other Cities".  There are several paradoxes there - including the one that says that if you increase road capacity for private cars, all you do is provide for more cars and nothing actually speeds up.

Prof. Lewis emphasised how car-centric Bristol is with the average number of bus journeys made by residents being 50 per year (25 return trips) and compared to Strasbourg where numbers used to be similar, but with improved public transport (trams) they are up to over 300 journeys.  And certainly from our visit to Strasbourg a couple of months ago, good to see busy trams and - where we were - no noticeable road congestion.   Really busy city centre too.

Timing and speeding up transit time was emphasised as one of the keys to getting significant modal shift to buses; in Bristol, though, buses get stuck in traffic, aren't very frequent, and average speed is brought right down by loading / ticket checking time. 

Lots of good stuff in the talk - though hard to follow due to the various technical issues with the session.   Were any other member on there?