What!?! ‘and the meeting being held in Taunton’. Please don’t shatter my illusions Chris, that one of the things that makes the TWSW meeting so special for you was that it’s held in Taunton!

Totally get the Voyager bit.

Finally, I remember being at Edinburgh Waverley station a few years back and doing a double take when looking at the arrivals board seeing Bath Spa listed before remembering there was the early morning departure from Bath.

A preliminary report into last month's funicular crash in Lisbon that killed 16 people including three British nationals has detailed a litany of failings.

Portugal's Air and Rail Accident Investigations Bureau said an underground cable - which acted as a counterweight between two carriages and broke, prompting the crash - was defective and had never been certified for passenger transportation.  It said the cable was not technically suitable and was acquired in 2022 by the company that runs Lisbon's public transport, Carris.  The 140-year-old Glória funicular, popular with tourists, derailed and crashed into a building on 3 September.  There were 11 foreigners among those killed, including the three British nationals, while another 20 people were injured.

The supervision and maintenance of the funicular by a company outsourced by Carris also did not work properly, apparently giving the Glória funicular the all-clear on the morning of the disaster - though it is not certain if the check actually took place that day.  In addition, the state body that looks after all of Lisbon's funiculars did not cover the Glória one, as it should have done, the report said.

The emergency brake system, which the driver correctly tried to apply when the cable snapped, did not function properly and was never tested in advance, it says.

...

Despite the Voyager, and the meeting being held in Taunton, we've been friends ever since.

Duo raise £1m for women's urinals start-up


Hazel McShane (left) and Amber Probyn co-founded the firm Peequal

Two businesswomen who co-founded a women's urinals company hope to go global after raising nearly £1m in investment.

Amber Probyn, 27, and Hazel McShane, 29, say the urinals made by Peequal, for use at festivals, are three times quicker to use than portable toilets.

The Bristol University graduates will use the funding to manufacture the next-generation urinals, which they hope to send to events in Europe, the US and Australia.

Ms McShane said they have had interest from event organisers around the world. "Like us, they want women spending less time in queues and more time enjoying the events they love," she said.

The pair, who graduated in 2020, came up with the idea after spending many summers working at music festivals in the UK.

"We knew women would welcome any innovation that meant they didn't have to queue for hours," said Ms Probyn. "What we didn't expect was how much love the urinals would receive, and we've been blown away by the support women give us at events."

Manufactured in Somerset, Peequal's urinals are made from sugar cane and plastic recovered from the ocean.


The latest design allows the women's urinals to be flat-packed and stacked

The urinals are designed to minimise splashback and allow for clothing to come down at the front. Users squat, while holding onto handles.

The latest design allows the urinals to be flat-packed and stacked. The founders estimate that a lorry carrying 21 portable toilets could instead carry 56 of their urinals.

The urinals have been used at 25 events already this year, including Glastonbury Festival and the London Marathon.


Ms McShane says event organisers around the world are keen to use Peequal

The Peequal founders raised £925,000 in their latest round of funding, bringing the total raised during three funding rounds to £1.4m.

Julia Davies, impact investor at We Have The Power, is a key backer. She first came across the urinals while running the London Marathon. "It's always satisfying to invest in a service you've used and admired," said Ms Davies. "What I really love is its potential for a huge sustainability impact by reducing toxic waste generation at events."

Like many in their mid-20s, Tia Costell feels young people are being priced out of finding their own place to live.

"It's hard enough for people to rent in London, let alone get on the property ladder. Properties are so expensive and hard to come by - if you can't get there on the same day, you can't even get a viewing."

This is a familiar story across the country, and particularly in London. But has the capital's flagship infrastructure project - the Elizabeth line - made renting even more expensive?

The Elizabeth line opened in May 2022, and has become the UK's busiest railway line, carrying one in six train journeys in the whole country, according to Transport for London (TfL).

Figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest there has been a disproportionate rise in rents along its route.

(BBC article continues)

Doubt over future of the West of England's dial-a-ride Westlink minibus service


Government funding for the dial-a-ride Westlink minibus service is set to expire in March 2026

There are doubts about the future of a bookable minibus service after it emerged trips have been costing up to £50 a passenger.

Westlink was introduced in 2023 by the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) after several regular bus routes were lost in the area.

The scheme has government funding until March, but will have to pay for itself for it to continue after that.

WECA mayor, Helen Godwin, said her team are "evaluating how best to keep people connected, improve these demand-responsive services, and ensure value for money".


David Redgewell said some have been taking advantage of the service, using it like "their own personal taxi service"

Passengers book trips on an app and are taken to existing bus routes for a £2 fare.

The service was set-up to run in areas of Bristol, Bath, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset in 2023. However it has carried very few passengers and at points it has cost £40-£50 per passenger per trip to operate the service.

David Redgewell is a member of the South West Transport Network that campaigns for transport users in the region. He has used the bus service and said often he is one of the only two people on the minibus. He said the service has come down in cost and now works out at about "£14 per passenger, [which is] still a lot of money".

Roger French, who writes a bus and train blog, said the minibus service is "completely financially unsustainable".

Mayor Godwin said the contracted buses predated her time as mayor but she appreciates the "challenges of trying to fill the gaps in the commercial network".

20.04 on Sunday from Paddington to Hereford started 22 late and ended 55 late. Fortunately the Royal Blenheim in Oxford is a very convivial waiting room.

The passenger is not happy and starts arguing with the officers. We are in the concourse of Ealing Broadway Elizabeth line station which is a fare evasion hotspot. The Transport for London (TfL) enforcement team has asked him to produce his ticket after the barriers flashed he was travelling on a child fare. He certainly doesn't look like a child.

The argument gets more and more heated with the passenger insisting the barrier machine has taken his ticket and that's why he can't produce it. Rather comically he turns out his pockets. He is trying to charm his way out of the situation.

The laughs slowly stop as it becomes clear he is in trouble. Suddenly, he bolts straight out of the station. The officers shout at him and try to shepherd him away from the exit but there doesn't seem to be much they can do. They aren't allowed to restrain him or arrest him. They have a hands-off policy and their safety comes first.

Welcome to the world of trying to stop London's fare evaders.



The officers have seen it all. People hurdling the barriers, or even crawling under them. There is a lot of "double gating" where the evader tucks in behind someone else going through the barriers. These officers are in Ealing Broadway to try and stop fare evasion.

It is a huge problem for TfL, costing it £190m a year. Fare evasion has increased since the opening of the Elizabeth line as more passengers use the TfL network, and many stations on the line don't have staffed barriers. The loss equates to 3.5% of all fare income. TfL wants to get that down to 1.5% by 2030 although it admits this will be a significant challenge.



Nasir Ahmadi, one of the officers, told BBC London: "One of their main excuses is, 'It's very expensive, we can't afford it.' 'We can't afford it' or 'Transport should be free' or 'I left my Oyster card at home or my bankcard at home', things like that. The fact of the matter is everyone is paying their fare and they should be paying for their fare. It's not fair on the general public that they are paying for their fare and you're double gating and pushing your way through."

Another revenue protection, Tomi Ogunsuyi, has also heard plenty of excuses: "On a daily basis we usually see people pushing through the barriers. We see them crawling through as well. Our aim is to stop the violence and aggression and to support the front-line staff. We tend to hear common excuses like, 'I haven't got any money, I didn't know. Why can't travelling be free?' We tend to hear a lot of excuses, to be honest, but we are quite used to it so we explain the reason why everyone should pay for their journey."

Over a three-month period this year, TfL had 9,934 open cases under consideration for prosecution for fare evasion, including both one-off and repeat offenders. Since April, it has issued more than 30,000 fixed penalty notices, which have recently been increased to £100, and has reported over 9,000 individuals for possible prosecution.

Tfl says it is also increasing the number of on-train checks. It says its enforcement teams have completed over 2.8 million checks on board Tubes and trains. It also uses a combination of data, travel pattern analysis and CCTV to identify persistent evaders.



TfL's head of compliance, Anand Nandha, says they have just employed a team of specialist investigators to focus on persistent offenders. He won't go into too much detail about how they track offenders down but he's confident they will catch more passengers who don't pay their fare. "It's not a victimless crime at all," he told me. "We have customers who pay their fare and they will end up having to pay more because we are losing more revenue on the network. So we want to ensure that revenue is used for public services and to help [keep] fares at a low level.

"We have up to 500 revenue inspection officers deployed on the network. We are using different methods of detection. We have a team of investigators who we have just employed who will use different methods to go after persistent offenders, like plain-clothes operations on the network. We are also looking at technology. We have numerous sources of data to look at patterns of fare evasion and we are also looking at infrastructure on the network to see how else we can reduce fare evasion."

An estimated £45.5m of annual revenue is being lost from passengers not paying for tickets, South Western Railway (SWR) has said.

The data was released after a campaign group submitted a Freedom of Information request to SWR, which said the overall rate of ticketless travel was about 3.9%.

The rail operator runs services in London, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Dorset, Devon, Somerset and Wiltshire.

An SWR spokesperson said: "Our revenue protection team is focused on effectively deterring fare evasion and bringing down the rate of ticketless travel."

It said ticketless travel had reduced by 40% since 2017 and was now at its lowest ever level.
The figure appears to be £5m higher than what SWR said in May, while across the rail industry in the UK, it is estimated fare evasion costs nearly £240m a year.

The Freedom of Information request also said that SWR spent more than £370,000 reimbursing passengers for hotels and taxis due to delays and cancellations.

Additionally, 7,293 trains in the last year were short formed and had less carriages than planned, due to train faults and other issues.