From personal professional experience prior to my retirement there are problems with both flooding and the local road system at Barnham. I expect that there are still a number of developers and land promoters working on solutions!

 

I think you'll find the plan is to ban trail hunting, not drag hunting.

 
Indeed.  Let’s hope the DfT make some progress on the proposals sitting in their inbox soon.

 

Good news for those travelling today.

It's a pity the same urge to avoid "negative headlines" at Christmas doesn't apply to inconveniencing customers on Sundays all year round.

 
Drag hunting, whereby hounds chase a scent trail laid for the purpose, is to be banned. I support the ban for two reasons, firstly because live foxes are "accidently" killed, and because hounds are killed by trains and road vehicles.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g9y20j259o

 
With Sunday ‘in the working week’ proposals still sitting with the DfT, a similar to last year enhancement has been given to staff for today and next Sunday.

A near normal service operating as a result today, and it was agreed in time to avoid any negative headlines which is an improvement on last year.

 
My thoughts are ... that I'm very happy with the way things are continuing to evolve, here on the Coffee Shop forum.

Thank you, grahame.

 
The Coffee Shop forum will continue to operate throughout the Christmas and New Year period.  I'm having some thought a to tweaking / tuning / taking forward the Coffee Shop - which were shared with the moderator team a few days ago - to be undertaken during this quieter period.

Nothing to be done as mind-blowing as the changes last year, mind for which we had a brief daytime down time.  Littler things - but potentially a myriad of them.   Some of the items on my list

* Add in the 2024/25 station usage stats and prepare for the ticket flow data that I would expect to be avail mid-January

* See about loading more / all of the current NR timetables (but already done)

* Improve the phone interface read only pages and how they interface to the commenting / logged in pages of the Coffee Shop.  Remove the need for cookies to be approved every 24 hours, and I need to take some internal steps to stop acceptance tables running away.

---

On something of a tangent, you may notice the number of views per topic is not increasing as much/quickly as it used to.   However, threads can now be read via the receptionist server and the numbers logged do not reflect that, as the receptionist has read-only access to the public post and thread databases and they are not counted.  I would not like to guess as to whether the net visits are more of less; I do know that our receptionist served 18,700 thread pages on Friday and 16,700 yesterday without reference to worker server. 

On Friday, some 336,000 requests were made to our receptionist, of which 136,000 were passed through to the worker and resulted in successful responses, with a further 36,000 being thinned out as being request by search engine which we don't want to be indexed.

Thoughts welcome.

 
From the BBC:

 
This 'new topic' is something of a seedling.

It will be expanded as I trawl through the archives of the Coffee Shop forum and move / merge here many previous posts which relate specifically to this iconic line.

In the meantime, my following post may be regarded as 'the seed being planted'.

CfN.

 
Google's navigation routing does know about the Two Tunnels route (i.e. put in start and end points of 'Midford' and 'Oldfield Park Station). Even then the data it has for height seems to be a bit scatty. I *think* the summit of the old line in Lyncombe Vale is ~61 metres above sea level. Google plumps for 106 metres as the highest point and for good measure puts the summit at the south end of the tunnel.

Mark

 

It's almost like they have a vested interest in promoting (self-driving) cars...

 

From the map, it has struck me that Barnham might make a good hub for significant housing expansion- or are there other factors that would mitigate against that such as flooding or SSSI status?  Railwards, connectivity is excellent with services toward Brighton, Horsham and beyond, the Solent area and local services to Bognor Regis and Littlehampton.

 
Sunday December 21

1W15 07:36 London Paddington to Great Malvern (10:15) : held Reading (+27), Wolvercote (+35), Evesham (+54), arrived Worcester Shrub Hill +55 and cancelled thereafter. Ascott - Evesham scheduled 30, actual 35.

 

That's right - the area became fully developed in Victorian times.  Like many of the more central parts of Birmingham it also continues to be redeveloped, both housing and industry.  Whenever I visit Birmingham there seems to be another new building that I didn't recognise from before.

 
Quoting selectively, from the BBC:

 
B. Barnham

 

I wondered who would spot the pattern in the naming.  I know nothing of the Jewellery Quarter - often wondered about it purely based on the name and somewhere that sounds like it's worth taking a look.

The map suggests that this is NOT a station obviously ripe for significant extra residential housing.  Do I have that right?

 
H: Habrough

 
J.  Jewellery Quarter.  I was hesitating to post this because I felt I had cheated by looking at a list of stations beginning with the letter J; on the other hand, Graham had kindly chosen to help us by his choice of labels for the maps.

I recommend a visit to the Jewellery Quarter's museums to get an appreciation of British craftsmanship and a realisation that there is still some manufacturing in this country.