Can't deny the introduction of the Elizabeth Line to Taplow has been transformational - 6 trains an hour to London through to Abbey Wood in the peak, GWR managed 2 as far as Paddington, it's been a major draw to the area which still however retains its rural charm and peace and quiet despite being pretty close to London and suburbia.

Hopefully the planners won't ruin that by allowing hundreds of new properties to be built!

 

... when compared with Taplow - population now around 2,400 - which nevertheless has access to a main line railway.  Whereas Portishead has been with without any railway connection since 7 September 1964.

Soon to be rectified, however - and that, I think, brings us rather neatly back to the point grahame was making in his original post for this topic. 

CfN. 

 

The 2 hourly Bristol-Oxford also now pass through

 

Back in the mid 1970s on the WSR we were complying with the regulatory burden.  Staff passed by British Railways traction and movements inspectors, for example.  We worked to the BR rule book. 

What stopped the progress of the re-opening was the BR Divisional Management at Bristol, who plucked some mad costs out of the sky (or elsewhere) and stuck them onto the Running Powers Agreement they wanted, for WSR trains to run over the couple of miles of former Up Relief line. You'd call these costs "Access Charges" these days, I guess.  Maintenance for the track, S&C, and signalling system.  A proportion of the Silk Mill signalmen's wages.  All sounds reasonable enough until you come to the BR way of calculating them

BR also wanted to control the maintenance of all vehicles that would be using their track, and wanted to charge exorbitantly for providing fitters and inspectors to do this.

The NUR's 1976 "blacking" of the railway "to protect the jobs of their bus driver members" was a godsend to the BR management.  They did not dare challenge the union (this was before the union power reforms of the 1980s) so it was convenient to blame the NUR for the through trains never becoming possible.

So it was the cost and inertia on the part of the big railway that meant the initial ambition of the WSR not becoming fulfilled

 

Verily a throbbing metropolis!

 

Should be. Two 175s out today 002 started it's mileage accumulation doing Exeter-Paignton-Exeter then ended up in Exeter depot.

113 is doing mileage accumulation between Plymouth and Penzance.

There is still one 2 car and eight 3 car at Wolverton that when they arrive at Laira will be service ready according to Mark Hopgood. Nothing has come out of Wolverton since the 23 June.

 
I'd like to see things go further with the removal of a separate service charge, the full cost of each item on a menu just being what it says on the menu. I know there is a perception that for particularly poor service you can choose to exclude that element, but the same doesn't apply when buying most other products, or indeed when paying for other services such as home, bike or car repairs, or (say) private dental treatment. I express my appreciation for good service by repeated patronage, and avoid places that give poor service while trying to avoid basing my entire judgement on a single experience unless it's obviously indicative of the general attitude.

 

Cut of in his prime!...

 

Portishead - population now around 26,500, for example. 

 

Well that's the rather thorny question isn't it?

At present there are just the Paddington services, and it doesn't really seem justified to add an extra stop to them, particularly when they are running on diesel.

Arguably a better long-term solution would be an all-stops Bristol TM to Chippenham metro service, which could also accommodate additional new stations like Saltford, Bristol St Annes, Bathampton etc.

The longer-distance Weymouths and Southamptons could then be run semi-fast.

Whether there is a capacity to do that and how well it matches to the ridership patterns is another question

and to remove some of the stops from the 

 
 

 
Those 175s are great aren't they? Presume they are supposed to be running these?

All cancelled.

10:14 Plymouth to Penzance due 12:12
13:14 Penzance to Plymouth due 15:10
13:39 Plymouth to Penzance due 15:40
15:52 Penzance to Plymouth due 17:47
Thu, 27 August 10:14 Plymouth to Penzance due 12:12
Thu, 27 August 13:14 Penzance to Plymouth due 15:10
Thu, 27 August 13:39 Plymouth to Penzance due 15:40
Thu, 27 August 15:52 Penzance to Plymouth due 17:47
Fri, 28 August 10:14 Plymouth to Penzance due 12:12
Fri, 28 August 13:14 Penzance to Plymouth due 15:10
Fri, 28 August 13:39 Plymouth to Penzance due 15:40
Fri, 28 August 15:52 Penzance to Plymouth due 17:47

 
Presumably we are all interested in how this affects the railways of the South West, so it's probably worth considering:

1) The vast majority of the population growth has been in England
2) There's considerable long-distance internal migration going on from metropolitan areas like London and the Midlands to places like Devon and Cornwall.
3) Almost all of the people migrating internally are working, or affluent retired
4) A lot of these people are self-employed or working remotely, and more likely to be using rail than locals, particularly travelling long-distance by rail for work
5) The children of internal migrants are also more likely than "natives" to go to sixth form college and even to university whilst living at home, which again, boosts rail in many cases

So whilst the population growth has definitely boosted populations of the big cities, at the same time, internal migration is considerably boosting the case for rail improvements throughout the southwest
 

 

You have triggered my interest to dig deeper


It would appear that the requests from Brazil come from all over the country, but those from Iran are concentrated.  Could relate somewhat to how the country's internets are set up, and whether accesses might be via or through VPNs which give lie to real source locations.

 
Interesting; wonder why those are so much higher?

 
About 10,000 access requests per day (out of 380,000) denied based on them being identified as robots coming from distanct counties who really can't have much interest in rail in the South West of England. Here is a log of the number of accesses denied from the countries we see the most of such activity from.
    341 Bulgaria
   3511 Vietnam
   7070 Australia
   9627 China
  22917 Iran
  27139 Brazil

Of the 380,000 requests, 190,000 (yesterday) were answered by our receptionist server and the othet 190,000 were passed on to the worker machine.

"News" only - I am happy with numbers like this.  I was looking only because I am tidying up log files!

 
There have also been various track inspections between Guildford and Redhill in the last week or so. Needless to say will not have made things for catching a flight at Gatwick.

 
Looking at the headline in this morning's paper about pensions and the triple lock, the demographics are important.

In this case the dependency ratio, the ratio of those paying tax (mainly of working age) to those benefiting from the tax income (mainly children and older people). The dependency ratio has been heading in the "wrong" direction for years, but governments appear to have been looking elsewhere.

Looking at origins my ancestors were French Huguenot refugees 300 years ago. As somebody in Northern Ireland said recently we are all immigrants. A good place to look at for this sort of thing is what is now Tower Hamlets. The Huguenots settled in about C17th, followed by the Jews as a result of various pogroms in eastern Europe, followed by Bangladeshis, Somalis, ... As the situation of each group improved they moved out to better areas, often to Essex.

In more recent times Hounslow is interesting because of Heathrow. In the days of the passenger survey for estimating migration people tended to say Hounslow was there destination.

 

Time made up along the way - the connection at Trowbridge into Bristol was made, as was the connection into the Weymouth train at Westbury. Good.

 

 
Still awaiting the return of passenger carrying services between Oxford amd Bletchley ... here's a look to how it basin was in 1965




Edit to correct typo, for clarity. CfN.

 
From the Atworth History Group


Atworth is a few miles out of Melksham on the Bath road, served by bus services 271, 272 and  273.   

On Monday 5th October, buses are scheduled to leave The Guildhall in Bath at 18:18 (a 272) and 18:53 (a 273), reaching Atworth at 18:41 and 19:14.  Return servive are at 20:48 (probably too early - this speaker can ramble!) and 22:48 (good for a pint in the White Hart after the talk)

Buses leave the Market Place in Melksham at 18:02 and 19:07 and reach Atworth at 18:16 and 19:19.  They return from Atworth at 21:27 and 23:37, all on route 273.   These buses run from Devizes - 30 minutes earlier - and return there, arriving 30 minutes later.

 
Those of us who were born in the mid-1950s will be familiar with the idea of friends and contemporaries born overseas, in the last days of the Empire and or forces families posted overseas. There were two members of my year at school who were born in Singapore, and my wife  came into this world at the Royal Military Hospital, Nicosia.

Enlarging on Jaymac's theme, at one stage the German Government actually withdrew citizenship from those born there. In the late 19th century, the Kaiser's government did just this in the case of anyone who left and thereby avoided being drafted into the army. One of those affected by this was Donald Trump's grandfather. He'd left to make his fortune in the USA. It's not clear if the family habit of draft-dodging was also a motive. However when Mrs Trump, unhappy with life in America, persuaded him to go back he found that he was no longer a German citizen, so he had to return to the US as an undocumented, stateless alien immigrant.

There's something of an irony overload in this story....

 
From Save the Train-

Quite some excursion for the 10am from King's Cross to Edinburgh! 

 
He has the right to German citizenship? How so?

I was born to British parents serving in Germany (RAF, WRAF) and don't have the right to German citizenship, nor was I eligible in the past. Germany has only had jus solis since the year 2000, with citizenship granted to those born of foreign parent(s), provided the parent(s) was/were habitually and legally residing for eight years before the birth. This was decreased to five years in 2024. Also, the time spent serving in Germany, even if living off-base, didn't count toward settlement/residency.

Born before 1 January 2000: Germany did not have a birthright citizenship rule (jus soli) at all. Children born to foreign parents only received the parents' citizenship, regardless of how long they had lived there.

Having a Scottish father I await Scotland's independence to become a dual citizen.

 
...and North Camp station started life as "North Camp, Aldershot", later "Aldershot Camp" before a number of interim name changes to the current one.

 

 

Hmmm.  They need to get Network Rail in, to fix that piece of track, apparently.