The scheme is changing ... see (here) on Facebook


Saturday service withdrawn.  Finishing early afternoon.  5 mile limits in many parts. New zoning (?) "Improve efficiency" probably means "stop being taken advantage of for longer awkward journeys" and I suspect the time carrying passengers will go down while the proportion of time between loads will go up. But it will be cheaper - long £3 journeys down - 60p per mile for 5 miles.  I can't see if the five miles is as the core flies or as the minibus drives.

 
Delays to services between Hungerford and Newbury

Due to a speed restriction over defective track between Hungerford and Newbury trains have to run at reduced speed on the line towards Newbury.

Train services running through these stations may be delayed by up to 10 minutes. Disruption is expected until the end of the day.

 
I was chatting with Cliff in the Market Place this morning.  He had come over from Bradford-on-Avon for a spot of Grand-dad duty - taking the two-generation-down person from home to an activity in Melksham, back to Mum's for lunch then off to drop little one off at Dad's in Warminster.  He was, of course, driving. There's no practical choice - at the moment - for this sort of activity; even where there are buses and trains they are too sparse and connect too poorly for them to be practical.  If the area were a connected city, then it might be different. "In London, of course ..." he said ... but could we be like London?

Bath and Wiltshire Metro, anyone?    Buses to the station in Melksham?   Connections, through fares, ticketing?   It's hard to visualise a full "London" service, but there are little things that could make a big difference.   "Going to Weymouth on Saturday" said John who I also met.  "Driving to Bradford-on-Avon and parking there" he says - "Connections from Melksham don't work".

 

An interesting map including some things it does not show - such as the walk from Lancaster Gate to Paddington which is well with their 10 minute window.

 

I liked your whole post.   I would have liked it alone for that one sentence, and look forward to it being achieved.    It IS possible.   How long was it between the last "old" passenger train and the first "new" one at ... Ashington, Alloa, Bathgate, Corby, Ebbw Vale, Galashiels and Okehampton?

 

From earlier on 27th


From 27th (evening)


And still today - 31st - showing the higher fare

 

Interesting question ... I would guess it's more than just the borders as the Core Valley Lines don't stray into England, do they?

 
Not quite got my head around on whether this concerns the entirety of TfW or just cross-border services.

Mark

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/rail-reform-in-the-wales-and-borders-area-publication-of-the-memorandum-of-understanding

 
Mixing Deck has now vanished from the SWR website.................

 

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-between-stations-map.pdf

 

It is a gull with good tastes. If you enjoy good coffee and Turkish pastries, I would definitely recommend the cafe that is pictured there.

 
I guess that the London Underground tube map can give a misleading idea of distances between some stations.

(I do recognise the difficulties of cramming in so much detail, especially as the system expands.)

 
He's gonna need a bigger cat !!

 
As the school holidays start, the first London bound off peak service of the day was short-formed yesterday and again today:

 

What "move towards nationalisation"? The whole thing has been operated under DfT control for over five years. So far I don't think any of the government-owned bits of it have been merged into the new operating structure, even in shadow form, and that includes what RDG/NRE does.

For bookings we are still promised a single GBR service, which will remove anything for there to be differences between (within the railways, at least). Until then it's hard to see what kind of move towards that would make sense - you'd just get on and do it, wouldn't you? On the other hand, a TOC (whoever owns it) that ends up changing its software for some reason is hardly going to spend extra money on making it looked more merged for the short(?) interval before GBR gobbles them up.

 
Not sure about the parking rules https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kr40jxkglo
but maybe the council and GWR will do something to improve the situation. Hopefully more thantalk.

 
If there are more bananas than can be eaten before they spoil, they could be made into banana wine. Bananas contain a lot of sugar and therefore make good wine.

 
Diesel is also in short supply in the UK for another reason.
Many trucking firms maintain their own bulk tanks for filling their vehicles. If a shortage threatens, then drivers are instructed to fill up at retail filling stations, in order to conserve supplies in their private bulk tanks.
This tends to make shortages of diesel fuel more severe than petrol shortages.

 
From London Now


How many metres do people walk from within the two stations on this journey?

What other really close stations are there?  Culrain to Invershin?

 
From "Interrailing for the Older Crowd"


Err ... I thought the move towards nationalisation was in part about the removal of differences.

 

I wasn't very constructive in my answer there, was I?

Analysis

160 posts spread over 29 members have included images from Imgur in their posts.   Just four of those members have posted a noticeable number of images hosted on that site, the other posts look like quotes that include images from those four; 140 are 'original'.  The posts are all old ones now, but still relevant (IMHO) in our database.

Restoration - how?

If the four members can send me the originals, I can work out how to host and offer space to do so - changing the URL when posts are displayed automatically; this will fix their quoting by others too.  As an alternative, members can rehost the images elsewhere and I or another admin can set to allow retrospective edits of archive posts to, exceptionally, change history.

Advice as to how to get the originals if they are only on Imgur, at face value, would suggest using a proxy in a country where access is still allowed. I have tried a couple of those without success - different responses and the obvious ways did not work in differing ways - tried from UK, Germany and USA.  Not saying "impossible" but a much harder approach than going back to your originals.

 
I think you can buy weekend first for travel the following day,but no train station booking office will sell you a weekend first on the day.

The reason is that the booking offices would not know how many wanted to buy the weekend up grade on the train.

 



Please don't - you'll set member broadgage off on yet another one! 

 
3 trains an hour from Westbury to Bristol and yet south thereof ... the long gap of 1hr 20mins in the northbound service from Warminster between 0740 and 0900.


I think you see the effect of the majority of traffic at that time being into the major centres such as Southampton and Bristol.  The trains that are spread out at 30 minute or hour intervals during the middle of the day are much more bunched in the peak - 06:55, 07:24, 07:40 then the gap to 09:00

You see the same and sometimes worse on the buses, which in the peak tines also run slower because of congestion and because of passenger numbers that make loading with ticket validation slower.

 
From the BBC:


I do sympathise, and can offer two brief anecdotes / examples of such misunderstandings, from my days as a grocery delivery driver with Waitrose, before I retired:

1. A customer in Congresbury, North Somerset, wanted a dozen bananas - but she had inadvertently ordered a dozen 'bunches' of bananas. No problem: I used my handset to refund her the excess - and, indeed, I used my driver's discretion to drive just around the corner to a pre-school there, to offer them a few bunches of Waitrose's fresh bananas from my van, as 'a charity donation'. The fact that my wife worked there, at the time, is immaterial.

2.  A different customer, in Wrington, North Somerset, wanted a dozen eggs - but she had inadvertently ordered a dozen boxes of a dozen eggs.  Again, no problem: we grinned ruefully across her kitchen table, I used my handset to refund her the excess, and replaced the surplus eggs onto my van. To be fair, it wasn't inconceivable that she had actually wanted so many eggs: she might have wanted them because she was providing the whole meringue platter for the local Womens' Institute AGM, for example. 

 

Ah yes - this is the very reason that I started the .pdf archive - to maintain the integrity of our resource on the meaty textual side.  This fade or are removed, free hosting sites are monitorised once they have you, firewalls are added, etc.

 
I rode the bus across Bath and connected on to Melksham this afternoon.   A lovely bright afternoon, and seeing the beauty of the world and all its facets.  Four pictures - Bath City Centre, a gull, an island bus stop, and Shaw Church. The fifth picture is in the RUH (Royal United Hospital) - the empty bed I was discharged from today prior to than bus journey home.

I was called in, urgently, just before the weekend after abnormal test results.  "Day Surgery" ward but I ended up being admitted and only being discharged this afternoon - Monday.  Seeing so many other patients far worse off than I am is very humbling;  I have lost the best part of a stone, weaker on my feet and tubed up, but nothing malignant. Probably a "day surgery" op later in the year.  Discomfort but no pain; brain working ... a bit wobblier on my feet but still, already, well enough to use the bus home.

I know that starting three paragraphs with "I" is very self-centred, but just today and this one post IS me. I am refactoring April and knocking back plans to be away early in the month.  These Easter weeks will now be a welcomed window to recover - a "time off" prior to a resumption of my norm thereafter.  Big "thank you" to those stepping in for me at today's meeting and helping otherwise too. Knowing me, the time off will be a chance to have my thoughts wander, write, perhaps do some coding.  And being around, I'll now be able to watch "Race across the World" and "Married at First Site". Convalescence - which this recover is - does not mean I will re-instate meetings - I'll be quietly at home, with perhaps one or two gentle outings.













Nothing but praise for the hospital staff ... whole subject there ... I completed their review form, where they asked for suggestions of how they could have done better, all I could do was add a "Thank You"

 

I worked in oil trading for few years, middle office, not an actual trader.   But it hasn't been very well explained because USA is very much affected.   Basically other countries are short, so a US refinery has a choice of shipping it to local gas stations, or exporting it and being paid much more.   So the only way locals can get fuel is paying lot more to match the alternative export price.

Nearly all the tankers affected by Strait of Hormuz are crude or dirty fuel (heavy fuel).  Light ends (clean) tankers which carry petrol, kerosene, jet fuel etc are not stuck in Arabian Gulf.

Thats part of the reason why diesel fuel is jumping in price lot more than gasoline, because its bulk transport is more restricted, the other reason is that it is end of winter (and diesel is close to heating oil) so stocks are seasonally at lowest.