I am sharing the public follow up to that - on the basis that wide coverage is sought to fill people in, and also to see if anyone wants to buy track, locomotive, carriages ...

 

 

Class 09 diesel shunter?

 
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:P08210/2025-11-06/detailed#allox_id=0

On RTT
This service is partially cancelled
This service was cancelled between Penzance and Taunton due to the train being swapped (YU).
 This service is cancelled.
This service was cancelled due to an unknown problem (TO).
The inbound service for 1A76 came from -
5A76 0849 Bristol Temple Meads to Taunton, which arrived at Taunton for an on time departure, but left 20 minutes down.

On journeycheck
06:05 Penzance to London Paddington due 11:27 will be started from Taunton.
It will be delayed at Taunton and is expected to be 10 minutes late.
This is due to a fault on this train.

 
Interesting light loco movement today.
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:26587/2025-11-06/detailed

0Z57 1030 Fairwater Yard to Doncaster Robert Rds Shed
What is intriguing is this in RTT Fairwater Yard
Pathed as Diesel locomotive at 27mph!

 
It's not old fashioned. It's difficult for any vegetation that puts roots into structures to be other than bad news, it's something that brings avoidable expense as time passes. Ditto trees growing within a certain distance above a retaining wall. It's now rather more difficult to organise clearing the stuff alongside a live railway line but it should be part and parcel of maintaining the railway.

Mark

 
Vegetation seems to be a feature of much of the railway's masonry structures these days

Perhaps I'm old fashioned to beleive that keeping trees, shrubs and under/overgrowth under control is more cost effective than allowing them to reach a stage where they can be destructive

 

 
https://busandtrainuser.com/2025/11/06/inconsistent-and-unfriendly-rail-ticket-pricing/

The Price Is(n’t) Right


Thursday 6th November 2025

Taking day trips by train north from London always brings home the huge inconsistency of rail ticket pricing, especially if you want to leave the capital around 09:00 to make the most of your day and enjoy reasonably priced fares.


One of the worst culprits for setting unreasonable fares is East Midlands Railway. Reasonably priced off-peak tickets leaving London on the Midland Main Line don’t become valid until 10:05, which is frustratingly (and deliberately) set three minutes after a fast train, taking two hours and three minutes, leaves St Pancras at 10:02 for Sheffield. Catch that train and a return to Sheffield will set you back £161.50 – and that’s jokingly called an “Off-Peak Return” which also applies on the 09:02 and 09:32 departures. Catch the 08:32 and it’ll set you back £254.20 for a return London to Sheffield. What a joke. Aside from business accounts, does anyone ever pay that?

.............continues..............

 
https://bathnewseum.com/2025/11/06/box-tunnel-blues/

 
"Multi-modal functions" does not seem to include active travel. Another missed opportunity missed to improve cycle facilities relating to railways?

 

I *think* I have now identified what's been causing the problem load spike issue, and in the process also made some other efficiency changes.

Main change / issue: We have 9Gb of archived documents (and that will continue to grow) for our search engine to look through, and over 300,000 individual public posts to check too. And such searches are none-trivial. They are welcome - however, it would appear that at least one well known search engine (not Google) has been making lots of search requests and indeed with terms that are WAY off topic. A couple of lines of code mean that we now send a quick and polite reply when an automata searches for things like (and these are real searches from the hours before I made the change):
* MyFloridaMarketPlace abbreviation
* housing lawyer in penang
* Napoleon Dynamite Live reviews
* melinda breslin townsend louisville ky
* 2m tv documentaire region du sud
* wer ist emilio frazzoli unfall

While I was at it ... I have an image library containing 20,000 plus different images, a handful of which are called up frequently and consistently.  They are managed by our worker server which is the one that loads heavy, but I have now mirrored around 50 of them on the receptionist server to allow that machine to answer queries without reference to the worker.    Yesterday, with that change in place, our receptionist served 3,000 images of which perhaps a third were done without reference to the worker.

Here's the worker loading as of an hour ago - solid black line is today's



There will continue to be spikes, including server management and database backup operations but I don't want to see them going off the scale.

 

Thanks, Chris ... all AOK. Not the first time (and I'm sure not the last) that breaking news is broken in new threads by two members in parallel at the same time, and they are sensibly merged.  And if they're in different boards, that involves a move and a decision which is the better location for the developing topic.  Whose name is on the top of the merged topic is automatic as the posts merged are in chronological order. 

It's often worth merging in sub-topics too ... but where there is a mega-topic (as this bill and its consequences are likely to be), spin-offs and divisions may make sense.  I can recall the extra car park at Tiverton Parkway was a result of the Dawlish washout ... yet logically made a full topic on its own right rather than being hidden within sea wall engineering.  Such decisions are always on a balance and I weighed up the passenger voice element of the bill and whether it should be a separate topic, and decided in my mind that it should be - though I had my doubts.   On that basis, the invite to Chris and other mods / admins to make the call and bearing in mind the enormity of the GBR bill, I remain of the view that major elements (there may be another element on accessibility and others) are best as threads on their own right within the same board.

As an aside, there are a few occasion where I may suggest "this should NOT be merged" against perhaps obvious evidence.  That includes posts that are indexed elsewhere and merging them into other threads will break that indexing.  "On this Day" topics are an example here, as are Facebook shares (anyone can make these) of our front pages.   I feel a new topic coming up to tell members how to do that!

 
Ely Mif :9:  175004/005/008/010 175103/104/105/109/110 (175008 is in two halves)

Wolverton : 12 : 175001/006/011 175101/102/106/107/108/111/112/113/115/116 Many of these must be ready to leave.

Laira : 6:  175002/007/009 175114; 175001/003 are refurbished.

Maybe the two refurbished units could replace a HST diagram. Better than lying idle at Laira for another 5 weeks.

Really surprised they only brought one unit down again and not two or three.

 
Thank you, both, for your restraint from speculating.

 
And, I suspect, does the NHS & its mental health care-giving

 
From the BBC:

 
It is now abundantly clear that human nature, training, selflessness and bravery have all played a part in showing that during a major incident the best of the general public and civilian agencies was on display.

In just eleven minutes from the first call to 999 the suspect was in custody. That was an eleven minutes when many people did everything in their power to protect their fellow human and end the incident. Although not meeting the police description of "terrorism" this was a terrifying experience for those attacked, and those witnessing the attack.

A detailed timeline will no doubt come from the criminal investigation and legal process. That process is underway so speculation about the individual charged should be avoided.

We can though applaud all who acted bravely and selflessly and all who assisted bringing the incident to a swift conclusion.

The Customer Host who tried to stop the attacker.
The passenger who shielded a complete stranger.
The train driver for instigating an immediate move to the slow line and making an unscheduled stop in Huntingdon. That is not a quick and easy process.
The signallers for enabling the move and coordinating with emergency services.
The motorist who prevented a carjacking/hostage situation. And then lit the arrest scene with his headlights to assist police.
The police for their swift response and arrest of an armed suspect.
And countless others, including ambulance services, 999 call handlers, and other railway staff.

All the instinct and training worked together to end the danger as quick as was humanly possible.

That's the incident timeline itself. What happened in the preceding couple of days does raise serious questions for the police to answer.

 
With my thanks again for your suggestion, RailCornwall, you did start a lively debate among the Admin / Moderator team on the Coffee Shop forum.

That was all good: we have reached a decision as to where such posts should be encouraged to be made - but that's not final. We on the admin team (well, me, probably )  remain happy to move and / or merge topics, if it helps our readers to find particular posts in the future.

May I emphasize again that nothing will be deleted, just because 'it's been posted in the wrong place'. On the Coffee Shop forum, we don't do that.

I may, however, move the occasional post to a more appropriate location. Goodness knows, I've moved a few of my own, when the benefit of hindsight tells me I should have put them somewhere else. 

CfN.

 
175001 is shown at EXD today in a picture on Railways of Devon and Cornwall by Rich Martian Browne.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10241366930496540&set=g.384010423010289

 
This topic has been moved to Looking forward - the next 2, 5, 10 and 20 years.

https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=31034.0

 
My thanks to ChrisB and grahame for leading me into something of a minefield here.

I suggest that we do have separate topics here, for such sections of the Railways Bill as attract specific comment.

Therefore, I have expanded the heading of grahame's topic, so that we can continue to discuss its implications in the context of the Railways Bill.

However, I am, as ever, open to other suggestions as to how we on the Coffee Shop forum could best deal with this whole subject. CfN.

 
A roads / motorways... is that a bit of mission creep that could do with being put into reverse?
Mark

 
Wednesday November 5


Later:
1W31 15:52 London Paddington to Great Malvern (18:26) : departed +15 (+30 late from depot), Oxford +19, saved 10 at Evesham, arrived Worcester Shrub Hill +13 and cancelled thereafter.
1W33 16:58 London Paddington to Great Malvern (19:25) : stopped at the halts, arrived +19.

Held Norton (+10), arrived +19.

1P44 19:45 Great Malvern to Paddington (22:24) : delayed Malvern Link (+27) and before Foregate St (+43), held Norton (+60), arrived Reading +50 and cancelled thereafter.

Held Shrub Hill (+18), arrived +25.

 

I'm going to defer to CfN on this ... busy sorting out server load issues

 

So go on - merge Graham's here too....

 
There are 9 sections under that one link

Graham has started one thread on one of the sections - Passenger Watchdog - and this was to be the start of a second before setting up all the others so that discussion was concentrated on the Government's sectioning.

Rather than concentrating all discussion into two or even one (if you merge Graham's here too) - I think it better to follow the Government's sections?

 
I have merged two topics here, as they all relate to the same piece of proposed legislation.

CfN.

 
I guess they could increase the compensation from that operator each time they fail to improve?