No need - in fact totally logical for you with all the circumstance, and for some others too.

 
My grandad (* 1908) had the most amazing driving licence. Every conceivable category including (what was then) tracked, road roller and trolley vehicle - and he never sat a test in his life.

Apprenticed as a motor mechanic in the late 1920s, he was sent out to the Post Office with his 3/6 to get a driving licence, (radio and dog licences were also available at the same counter) and off he went. Grandfather [sic] Clauses assured the rest, and he drove thus to his dying day.  Not behind the wheel, I must add.

 
Your bad what?

 
Purely for the record (and I may have posted this personal information before, on the Coffee Shop forum), I have a squeaky clean driving licence for manual and automatic vehicles, which I've held since August 1986.

It has stood me in good stead, enabling me to drive various delivery vans in a previous employment, for example.

Personally, I'm not a particular fan of automatics - but that's the way things are going, apparently.

My advice to any young driver applying for their driving test is to just go for it - with the current waiting lists, anything is better than nothing, and you can hopefully upgrade it at some time in the future.

CfN.

 
I stumbled upon the Severn Beach Miniature Railway Facebook page today.  Quite a few recent posts, one of which went into some detail about the latest developments including their wait for planning permission, designing stations, rolling stock and an appeal for loan of excavation/fence posting equipment.  Seems that the Severn Beach steam dream is still alive.

 
Another update, from the BBC:

 

But so many of those algorithms developed in user code are learning material for firmware which is learning material for code in hardware. I celebrate these building blocks onto which we can build magnificent applications and solve problems we could not solve without them.


Ah yes - my predecessor as the Tektronix sales rep for the West of England (Swindon to Penzance) sold you the 4010s.  I sold Rolls load of 4014-1 options 1, 30 and 34 when I moved from tech support into sales (with messages from many that technical people cannot sell!) .  Glad you found them far more productive than the smaller ones - none of which were MY sale to you 

The 4016 was quite a late addition to the Tek dumb screen range.  I recall when the very first one arrive at Heathrow and got dropped in its box off a forklift and I had to pop down to Heathrow to evaluate the damage as "the expert" on a device I have only seen up to that point on a brochure.

Learned a lot in my just-over-a-year in sales, the South West becoming the best in the country and the only one that made target.  British Aerospace, Westland Helicopters, Geothermal Energy Project a nd a number of other very interesting places with military links.  And of course Rolls!  My sales manager (RIP, Peter) supported me as I failed to make all the expected subsidiary targets like number of customers visited per day - I think I manage to do 42% of what the powers that be wanted.

P.S. Good on Brock for selling you the 4010s and perhaps the odd 4012 before the 4014 was released!

 
May I also please add my own apologies for my non-attendance at the meeting?

Three things intervened, for me: I overslept, having had a full-on day yesterday re-configuring our kitchen; the weather forecast was crap and it was already raining here; then I saw that the Bristol <-> Taunton trains were severely disrupted.

Sorry if I sound to be a bit of a wimp, but I just decided that it was all too much of a faff.

My own thanks to JayMac for his texted offer of including me in a lift in his car back down to Taunton - unfortunately, some time after I actually read his message. My bad.

 
2C67 the 0800 from Cardiff Central to Exeter St Davids, did terminate at Highbridge & Burnham, arriving there at 0942. It turned back to form 2Z10, the 0936 Highbridge & Burnham - Cardiff Central, actually departing at 0955.

GWR then restarted the service from Taunton at 1000 as 2Z67 running to 2C67s schedule to Exeter St Davids.

 

Receptionist server could not reach worker server.  Occasional blip, I think - thought your referer is strange.  Anyway, I paste the URL and got to the page and not a 502.

 

The timetabled Sunday train from Melksham at 08:38 to Swindon gets there at 09:02 ... and the bus from Swindon at 09:15 gets to Cirencester at 10:15.  Looks good

except

The Melksham train is replaced by a bus tomorrow ... which dawdles into Swindon after the 09:15 bus  has left.   Nice one!    Next bus to Cirencester gets there at 12:15.   4 hours, home to Cirencester - yuk.   How about driving for once?


Don't fancy that ... and as far as I can see, they don'e even bother to run a bus to Kemble to / from Cirencester on a Sunday.  And it's a bit far to walk.

Aborting my plans, I think. 

 
In 1982 I obtained executive committee approval to buy the first 12 IBM PCs for a major accounting firm, we already has some Apple IIs.  When the XT came out there was a special program on the diagnostics diskette to park the hard disk head before moving the machine.
I had an early Compaq Portable in the boot of my car for a week to see if the disk really could survive general use.

I remember that the New York office received a call from IBM marketing.  They said that sales were far, far higher than expectations and they wanted to know what they were being used for.

 
Visiting this today (full disclosure, in a vehicle, on a day when the M4 was closed between Tormarton and wherever, and took care to travel before things got completely silly).

The Cirencester station exhibition is a solid event with many volunteers on hand, tea, coffee, biscuits, pervasive access to the building site that is the interior of the station (and which housed an exhibition) and access also to the railbus - and at one point the organisers ran its engine, which sat there hunting in a conversational way.

It's certainly positive to finally see the building's interior as a work-in-progress.

By mid-morning Cirencester became impressively clogged with private vehicles: and at mid-day its car parks gridlocked. While the origin point of most of the people in those cars will not have been Kemble, that itself is shaped to some extent by available transport - and Kemble's still the local gateway to the national rail system.

With the cards falling slightly differently, there might now be a block of fast-charging equipment alongside at Kemble, and an appropriately scaled battery vehicle to shuttle back and forth to Cirencester, taking even less time for the trip than the 11 minutes booked to the 1950s railbus.

Not covered by the exhibition, a visit to one of the line's surviving masonry structures is a treat in terms of the quality of the work on display. Visiting the station building was a treat for different reasons - the bare bones of the interior often on display, the structure's brick core has gained various steel beams, and yet a sense in one upstairs room in particular of its significance in the year or so when the terminus at Cirencester was apparently very much a base for the team working on bringing the extension into existence, onward and through the Stroud Valley.

Oh, and thinking again of that railbus & wondering if there's another location that would be very much a fit for exhibiting it... ah... yes, but possibly much goodwill needs to be in place and then of course a bit of paperwork to tackle.

Mark

 
It's a great experience. I always try and do it every year if I can, as well as the one to Inverness & Kyle. They're only going to Fort William twice next year, due to Royal Scotsman taking the path to Mallaig on Day 2. So I've booked on the one in March from Birmingham.

Most passengers, as well as the train crew, stay at the Premier Inn as it's just a 5 minute walk across Morrison's car park to the station. So it's not actually too bad. One year I shared breakfast in the Premier Inn with the driver and guard, before they had to head off to the depot to get the train ready. Plus, Fort William station doesn't normally open until around 11 on Sundays, as the first train isn't until 11:41. So the station gets opened specifically for the charter passengers and then locked up again once we've left. Which is quite a fun experience.

 

There might have been - in the end it ran all the way & was only 5 mins late


All the Railway Bill contens to digest for a start....


Edit to correct typo
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30.8.2025 01:00 / Our worker server is down. Investigating. News by 08:00
31.8.2025 06:00 Full service restored.
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If you think you should have received a real page - please contact me - graham/at/sn12/dot/net
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Lasted until about 1100

 
From the BBC:

 
Good to meet you, and Finn too. His hearing might not be so good but I couldn't miss that the moment I picked up a biscuit his tracking systems locked on to me with an almost audible 'Snap'.

Mark

 
Cancellations to services at Evesham

Due to a fault with the signalling system at Evesham fewer trains are able to run on some lines.
Train services running through this station may be cancelled or delayed. Disruption is expected until 09:00 25/10.

Customer Advice
Due to a fault with the signalling system at Evesham some services maybe delayed; altered or cancelled as a result.
-
We're sorry for the delay to your journey.
-
We will update this message with more information when we have it.

 
Chris  - I would send the pension administrator a letter,  setting out the full history (your length of service, retirement date, and details of your correspondence so far) and tell them that if you do not get a satisfactory response within the next seven days you will refer the matter to the Pension Ombudsman. Send it by Recorded Delivery (or whatever they call it now), keeping a copy, and follow up immediately if they don't deal with it to your entire satisfaction in that time.

It's easy to find the Ombudsman online. I had a problem with one of my schemes and this spurred them into action.

 
Return Journey - excellent company and catch up on the very busy 5 car 16:05 Taunton to Westbury; MarkA hope you connected easily to Bath.  I was offered and accepted a lift from a Devizes rep to TWSW who had parked at Westbury and then trained onwards; networking all the way to my front door - thank you for the list and so much more discussed.

The day as a whole?  There are so many informed and motivated people out there - but the whole travel and transport setup and its wider place in the community is so complex that it required continued supreme investment of time, effort and money to make it work, and often gets lead astray from the ideal because of where we are today, limited resources, and individual and political desires taking priority. We know what needs doing.

But, my goodness, there's so much that we're not doing and we're currently in such as state of flux that we have many questions unanswered about what and how we;re doing, and we have - at least locally - a train service that's so unreliable that people are walking away from it.  Witness even my use of bus and lifts yesterday.  And whilst we have talk of doing better, and some changes which have gone a bit in the right direction, overall we have an ongoing problem that's being kicked down the road; that may not be the intent, but it's the effect

 
From my feed

 
My first meeting with computers was at school cutting bits of perspex to make a water powered computer. All I can remember was that if your feet got wet the answer was going to be wrong!

In the army I used mechanical predictors. Analogue was well suited to artillery/ballistic calculations. Remember an anti-aircraft predictor, weighing about a ton, which sat inside a radar (rainbow code name Yellow Fever). In the process of changing one the pivot on the lifting gear sheared, that was a call for new underwear.

 
TravelWatch SouthWest at the Firepool Innovation Centre in Taunton
Friday 24th October 2025

For me - Inspirational.  A valuable day with so much to think about and learn from - both from speakers and from networking with colleagues - partners in the advocacy of better travel and transport.

I have posted onto the "How Stuff Works" board my raw notes - I have given them the briefest spell check once-over but otherwise raw and very much "Errors and Omissions Excepted".  My interpretation of what was said, selective in what inspired me and which I had time to note, and I may have got it wrong in some cases - hence not out there in public view.

TravelWatch SouthWest general meeting day - meeting running from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. - is so much more than those 4 hours for me. It's about the whole day's experience - the planning, the travel, the observation, the networking along the way. And if things go a bit wrong, so be it and there is the more learning from those very issues.

In a perfect world, 07:00 from home, 07:21 train from Melksham, 07:34 from Chippenham, 08:45 from Bristol Temple Meads, 09:17 into Taunton.  But there's no such thing as a perfect world.  I didn't even attempt the 07:21 train - the connection at Chippenham is just under the industry "official" 5 minutes and often fails; not worth the risk. Hindsight - Real Time Trains suggests it made with 75 seconds from arrival to departure at Chippenham yesterday, with both trains late which meant I would probably have been having kittens, and possibly by the time doors were released on one train they would have been closed on the other.

So - "risk assessed" (note how we have added that technical term over the years to our common-sense approach, I walked out of home at 06:45 for the 06:47 bus. The MyTrip App allows me to be drinking coffee and chatting with Lisa even as the bus tracks its way around Melksham Forest and Bowerhill and I only need to walk out to the bus stop as it comes down Pathfinder way. Much of the theme / comment on transport at the TWSW related to ever increasing efficiency, and making public transport as welcoming as private transport.

Bus more or less on time; I don't care if it was a minute or two late - the comfort of tracking has overtaken the watching of the seconds and wondering where it is of years gone by.  Stood on the pavement, under the street light, aware I was in dark clothes and needed to be seen; very clear arm out to stop the bus, arm only withdrawn once he indicated he was pulling in.  Fare £3 - before 9 a.m., so old git card of no use; not sure how the £3 / child fare none-discount that Faresaver give on senior cards before 9 a.m. works - something to do with distance: gee - I wish the fare system was simple and clear.

Six on board into Melksham Market Place where another six joined, and for once no stop at The Bear, but passenger who had been on the bus before I joined got off at Avonside. No stop at Blenheim House or Scholars Way but we did pick up before Shaw, drop off further passenger at Maven House and then pick up as we went through Whitely - transport friend also headed for TWSW amongst others. On through Atworth and then the "top road" past The Swan and through Bathford, again with multiple pickups.  A good illustration of how the odd passengers here and there and the local traffic on and off all come together to make a viable service. Murmurs suggested that being half term the bus was quieter than usual, and my observation somewhat dropped off once I was chatting with John.

The 271 inbound stops in Manvers Street opposite the railway station and makes for really good connection.  The outbound 271 (and 272, 273) does NOT call at Manvers Street ... but a story for another day.

As we arrived in Bath, a text message to tell me that a person had been hit by a train just outside Taunton, and that all trains were on stop. Experience suggests that when such things happen, it will take some hours before trains are running again.  However, the ticket office clerk (yes, an open ticket office at Bath Spa Station with is so helpful and re-assuring) told me that the 08:45 connection from Bristol was running and that we should catch the 08:06 to Bristol to connect into it. John and I were not sure whether to believe that the train was running, but as I'm a board member at TWSW it's incumbent on me to be there for the meeting even "in extremis". So carried on.

Why advise to catch the 08:06 though?  We caught the 07:47 as the first available train to Bristol - it always seems sensible to me to travel on the next available train to an intermediate change rather than wait - as advised and as official systems will offer - the train with the closest possible connection that's within the designated minimum change time.  It seems like a needless risk to watch a train go then have a greater rush to make the change.

An email from an admin lady at TWSW let me know of the "all stop" at Taunton - received on the train, and letting me know that she too was already stuck / stopped at Temple Meads.  Our unofficial networks and information systems ahead of the game again.

Anyway - into Temple Meads and (first thing) search for an onward departure board or member of staff; we knew to leave the platform (15) and look for screens in the subway - for first timers, finding your onward train can be interesting and not obvious at Bristol.  08:45 showing "cancelled", 08:56 to Exeter (and we know that Exeter is beyond Taunton) showing "on time".

We knew to find a member of staff on an excess ticket desk at Bristol on platform 3 - headed that way and as we did, I spotted [R] - TWSW lady and we discussed onward plans. She was pulling in a personal resource to get to Taunton - good on her to get to the job / far more important for her as the meeting admin than for me, but it left us wondering.  Man on ticket desk didn't know - "developing situation - listen our for announcements" and thank goodness John was with me because there was no way I could hear.  We looked at the option of getting the "Falcon" long distance coach at 09:00, but that's a 25 minute walk from Temple Meads, and then would have dropped us off in Taunton on the outskirts (need for further transport or a 2 mile walk to the venue) at 10:35.  A clue from the ticket man, and from a customer assistant on platform 3 doing assisted travel, that they were looking for buses for rail replacement, but had only been able to find 2 at short notice so far and they were both at the Taunton end ... writing this up on the basis of "what do I learn" - no complaint, just "what could be done better" to help the staff help the customers.  The 08:56 - a slower train via Weston eventually ran, I understand, as far as Highbridge and Burnham; should have been indicated as "probably terminating short" on the board but there's a whole new topic there.

What about John and me?  Angels come in all shapes and sizes; a really good friend and member here - THANK YOU - had been out and about and was coming to the meeting and came a long way off his plan (also disrupted by the rail chaos) in his car up to Temple Meads, and picked us up. I would say much more to show just how much that's appreciated, but it's hard to do so without disclosing details that are not mine to share.  I will say THANK YOU again.

And so - three humans and a hound out of Bristol and down the M5 to Taunton and a wonderful chance both to network catch up, and also to see and feel the M5 for the first time for me in - well - a number of years.  From around 08:50 in Bristol, we got to the venue somewhere around 10:00 - for once I dashed in without taking any photo, so I can't look back at a timestamp to give you an exact time.

With so many TravelWatch people coming to Taunton by train, and no trains running, the 11:00 meeting didn't start on time;  trains from Bristol and from Westbury (and probably Exeter too) did arrive soon thereafter - enough to start the meeting at 11:15 as it turned out, with other arrivals up to 11:45 and a number of people - totally understood - taking the step (sensible for them / not meeting admins, etc) deciding to give the meeting a miss.   Several of them here - you missed an excellent meeting and a good opportunity to Network - but missing the meeting won't have been pivotal in our campaigning and it was a good call.

The TWSW admin team, and the staff at the Firepool Centre, did a professional job - and in the case of the TWSW ladies, that was in the extreme of a moving situation and damage limitation - full credit to them too.

I am writing far more than planned here - posting in a minute but going to ask you reading this to add Saturday 7th March 2026 to your calendar for the next TWSW meeting - worth attending even if only half as good as yesterday, but yet early planning is already suggesting it will be twice as good!

Edit to correct typo

 
Those living in man-made underground bunkers - in Minehead, just for example - please note. 

 

Before people in Wiltshire and Somerset etc start panic buying heating equipment, ordering teams of huskies etc it's probably worth noting what the "BBC article continues" to say......

"If showers fall over high ground - mainly above 400m - there is the chance these will turn to snow.

This is most likely over the highest ground in Scotland where a few centimetres of snow accumulation are possible.

There may also be a touch of wintriness over the highest hills of northern England, Wales, and Northern Ireland"

......so we shouldn't need to prepare to he digging each other out of snowdrifts just yet.

Don’t panic, Captain Mainwaring.

 
As so often, Newsthump nails it........

 
First desktop computer I ever used was about 1978 or 79, an HP9845 on the County class HMS London.  It was primarily used to display received data link info from the more modern ships (with their computerised ops rooms), but when not in use for that purpose it had some basic administrative uses.

By 1982 we were using dumb terminals and PDP11s (I think?) for networked admin tasks on ships.

But now that I’m into my 70s, at least I can refuse to accept the stereotype that us ‘oldies’ know nothing about computers.  In the mid 80s from my recollection it wasn’t really kids buying home PCs, but us parents…

Paul