As I said just being Devils Advocate 

I have been a boater on the Thames, canals and sea going far longer than I worked on the railways.  Llangollen canal incident sadly means a number of people have not just lost their boat but the home, luckily there was no loss of life or serious injury

 
I have come to the conclusion from the news reports that there was a de-wirement in one of the tunnels, sounds like it was a le-Shuttle caught up in the entanglement; that train may not have been the cause of the damage.

It is difficult enough to sort OLE de-wirements on open plane line, the logistics required in a 22 mile long tunnel are not to be underestimated; and repair cannot be done until the damaged train had been hauled clear of the damaged area.

I know from my previous dealings with Eurotunnel when I was working they are acutely aware of the demands on their systems over certain peak times of the year, Christmas and New Year being one of them; the place a lot of resources in the lead up to and over these peaks.

The did well recovering so quickly

 
Horrendous.

BBC News - Eurostar delays enter second day as passengers stuck onboard overnight
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0q4eg03eyzo

 

I thought there were still some answers missing, and on checking I find that quizzes 5, 7, 13, and 21 (this one) do lack complete answer sets.

But based on the presumption that we know the initial letters, I had one last look at the unfound ones here. There are not a lot of stations with names starting with I, so that is made much easier - it's IBM (Halt), which may or may not still be a station by whatever definition is relevant. That restricted choice does not hold for the others three, so they are not easy guesses.

 
The board for so much of this stuff is, probably ...
... and there seems to be scope there for leisure canals.  The Llangollen current issue thread there, perhaps.  I would get concerned if we had separate threads for every arm (Wendover Arm or Bumblehole Basin, anyone) but then I guess if we ended up with an Ardingly and a Mannez  Quarry thread that would be getting interesting - if perhaps member driven so we would move with it.

 

Thanks, grahame. 

I am definitely not a fan of your first clip - that male pursuer could have been running much faster in broad daylight if he'd only ditched that big metal torch from his gunbelt, right from the beginning of the chase.

Your second clip is a great one - well worth a watch / listen.

In response, I can offer two of my own 'music' clips.

The first has absolutely no discernible railway context, but it is particularly resonant to me, as I remain convinced that it features you - and I wonder whether Lisa has watched it (for her second opinion): from YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxXdrsvEtnU (3:16)

My second offering is light-hearted music and heritage railway related (but doesn't feature you): from YouTube, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG-NaWehAkU (3:41)

Happy New Year!

 
tl:dr - power supply issues, job stopped, much disruption.

Mark

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/30/eurostar-trains-cancelled-delayed-channel-tunnel-le-shuttle

 

Thank you. Let's hope it's much much much much quieter than this year.

Lisa and I celebrating the New Year tonight - firstly because we like to be ahead of the game, and secondly because I want to be up early on 1st January to catch the first train of the year!

 
Here's another new topic I've primed, ready.  CfN. 

 

Thank you for your post, Electric train.

You make a good point - but one which I would rebut, as follows:

Firstly, we do indeed have a very substantial number of topics relating specifically to heritage railways - of which there are many, throughout the UK, and which carry thousands of (generally leisure) passengers.  Similarly, we have several topics covering ferries, steamships and other public transport based attractions.  These often 'heritage attractions' are generally widely used, judging by the sheer number of posts they generate on the Coffee Shop forum.  Not so much so with 'canals' - which were never much of a 'tourist attraction' - more an historic working environment in the wider infrastructure.

Secondly, (and perhaps more personally), I know that most of the administrator and moderator team here on the forum have something of a 'canal / narrowboat' background (myself included). While we also have active interests in heritage railways, I may perhaps have favoured 'canals' disproportionately in my own posting out on the forum. There is, however, absolutely nothing to say that any of our members should not post anything relevant about canals, heritage railways, or their historic infrastructure (whether on land or over waterways).

Meanwhile, may I offer best wishes to all of those boatowners, families and others dealing with that Llangollen canal incident. Chris from Nailsea.

 
extra stops are promised on some services....as an example. no one claimed a full rewrite

 
Also, civil servants have their own rungs that they automatically move up while employed as such....don't get me started....

 

And SEVEN HOURS later, the admit to adding in a bus


Better than nothing ... but yet I wonder if and how many people have changed their plans between the cancellation just before lunch and the admission that a bus would run at quarter past seven.

 

I didn't log those, feeling the the award of a recognition is the important bit (to me, anyway) not which rung of the ladder you are put on.


Yes, but they don't get the reward us campaigners get of travelling on public transport and thinking "I had a bit to do with getting that running"

 

Sounds more of a few tweaks to diagrams to release two sets for longer on depot rather then a whole timetable change.

 
If you really require those details, ChrisB, they are readily available in the full list on the Government's website, at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/694929f072075a1d4a5089cd/NY26_Gov.uk_List__Final__18_12_25.pdf

However, there are some other names in that list, where senior people at the Department for Transport have been awarded "Order of the Bath, Companions of the Order of the Bath" for 'Services to Transport'.

Surely, they were just doing their jobs - for which they are probably already very well paid?

CfN.

 
Things move on - and I continue to try to deal with them.

We were already up to page 23 of posts on the third of my latest split topics here - so I've now started a fourth, at https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=31357.0

This is all done in the interests of clarity and ease of future reference here on the Coffee Shop forum, as ever: I hope this helps.

CfN.

 
As we were already up to page 23 of pages of posts on the previous topic (at https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=24934.0 ), I have now started yet another topic here - hopefully, to keep the discussion into more manageable chunks, in the interests of clarity and ease of future reference.

Hope this helps.  CfN. 

 
GWR don’t appear as yet to have published a list of altered services or maybe they are only rolling stock changes?

 
Which did each get then?

 

Would the same argument be used for heritage railways?             Just being the Devils Advocate 

 

That's a presuming that there will be infrastructure problems in the Thames Valley causing disruption elsewhere in 2026 ....................    I am a born optimist 

 
TaplowGreen, the Coffee Shop forum is prepared for you.

 
Looking at that just yesterday and I was *so* hoping you wouldn't find that wording on the TfW site before it was fixed.

Was it that TfW's rover tickets had a restriction excluded the morning peak during weekdays, this has recently been dropped, and the terms and conditions have not been tidied up? In which case it's made them far more useful.

There's an unrelated inconsistency though, that while their rover tickets allow travel on various other TOCs, the heart of wales circular is now TfW-only, which can be a bit cumbersome for people arriving from abroad.

Mark

 

Chime Whistle Publishing has retweeted his claim about this timetable change, saying yesterday -

 
I've been looking for next year at the Spirit of Scotland ticket.  Do I have this right - that although Scotland has scrapped the peaks, it's still there on the Spirit of Scotland except on some of the far-flung outposts?


I was also looking at the "Expore Cambriah Coast" and it says


Puzzled - what is the difference between "anytime" and "all day"

 

Probably because of complaints (from a certain member   ) that none-travel, none-south-west topics that could dilute the forum's inetrests be kept to one or two places - and "Introductions and Chat" and "And Also" were the two chosen places.  So correct for the thread to be started here, and as it's likely to be a long runner with a number of follow ups, it would get lost and confuse a general canal thread.  


Ah ... where??   I think we both come from the viewpoint that the canals are not really a means of transport these days.