Transport Tycoon Forums

Dave wrote:And sure, bet the driver’s seat is nice - shame you have to get out of it to see the up starters in the tunnels

haha nope we don't
Second manning ftw!

Good news everybody. Lancashire has some got its new trains of the next generation.

The lovely 150s.... wait a minute...

https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/n ... ast-lancs/

Well, this would be a huge shame, especially with that reason!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-d ... e-48229400

Redirect Left wrote:Well, this would be a huge shame, especially with that reason!

Have stuffed things in Australia because they taking unnecessary risk trying to get a photo as well as dare devils playing chicken with the trains.

They have put up wire mesh security fences along the tracks to prevent access to them. These fences are about 20 metres or more away from the tracks and 2 metres high. So now if want a photo of the trains from along the tracks have to do it through the mesh.

Only place can get a photo that is not through the mesh fence is on railway platforms, finding ground higher than the fences, and on bridges. But many of the bridges are starting to get the high mess fences as idiots been throwing rocks at the trains.

I think we should ask why it's only 4472 that appears to inspire such mass stupidity. Other kettles can generally go about their business incongruously enough.

My favourite clips are always the ones where a modern train obscures the spotter's view, or the one where a bloke gets surprised by a DMU just behind him.

Kevo00 wrote: My favourite clips are always the ones where a modern train obscures the spotter's view, or the one where a bloke gets surprised by a DMU just behind him.

Those are always a cracking watch, when someone up norf is trying to record Tornado and then a Pacer trundles past entirely ruining it all.

aah, ood times.

Ever wondered how many hours get wasted from delays?
Someone worked it out! Using data from trains which arrived 30 or more minutes late, classed as a significant delay, about 3.9M hours were lost last year. Worth noting of course that doesn't include all the little minutes of smaller delays, about 80 trains a day filled the definition for 'significantly' late. About 660 trains a day were cancelled.

BBC News

Oh no! My PhD supervisor was obsessed with that topic...how much productive we would be if trains were not delayed, or simply quicker in the first place!

The Caledonian Sleeper franchise, which operates overnight trains between London and Edinburgh, Glasgow, Fort William, Inverness and Aberdeen has been in the news a fair bit recently, and for all the wrong reasons.

Last week, one of their brand new CAF-built Mk5 sets had an emergency brake application, and suffered significant wheelset damage as a result whilst running a Northbound Lowlander service (London - Glasgow/Edinburgh). The train soldiered on from the initial location for a while, and was eventually cancelled at Stafford at around 0545, already over 3 hours late. Passengers were then put onto coaches north, which I'm sure was an unpleasant experience. Since then, the services that the set should have been covered have been cancelled (currently until at least Wednesday for one portion), with passengers offered an overnight coach, or ticket acceptance on LNER services (although, looking on Twitter, there appears to be confusion about whether LNER are actually accepting tickets). The set that suffered this has been in Longsight, Manchester to use the Wheel Lathe facilities to attempt to get rid of the flats that were formed as a result of the incident, whilst just next door is the CAF facility (the former Manchester International Eurostar Depot) where Transpennine's Mk5A sets are being tested from, which would perhaps make any heavier work (wheelset changes, etc.) easier.

The things that concern me are:
1) How did this happen? All the enthusiasts channels (even before this incident) suggested the Mk5s did suffer some brake issues, which caused a delayed entry into service for Caledonian ones, and Transpennine's are still to enter service, but surely Caledonian wouldn't have had the train enter service before this known issue was ironed out.
2) Given new stock of any kind has a history of teething problems, why were Caledonian so hasty to hand back their old Mk3 sets that had just been withdrawn (and are still used on the highlander), rather than keeping them a little bit longer until reliable service was proven.
3) Even with the old Lowland Mk3s gone, why are Caledonian preferring to cancel part (or all as was the case originally) of the train, instead of using the large number of Mk5s up in Scotland on Highland testing duties (surely a delayed entry into service on the HIghlander is better than cancelled trains?)
4) How badly are incidents like this going to impact the franchise from a PR perspective? Lots of people have already been put off the Caledonian Sleeper due to price hikes with the new stock (and the service is already heavily subsidised IIRC) and they've had poor reliability in recent times as well. It's only a small franchise, so any changes to custom will have a big impact.

Source: BBC

Two rail workers have been killed near Port Talbot in Wales today, they were struck by the Swansea to London Paddington train at around 10am.
The GWR train was carrying around 180 passengers, and after 3 hours stranded aboard were transported onwards by coaches.

Rail Investigation Accident Branch (RAIB) have already begun their investigation, although the exact details of the chain of events leading up to the tragic accident may not be known entirely for some time yet.
BBC News

A while ago I bought a web domain, with a plan to make a website doing train things.

Skip to today, i am fighting with the systems, because for some reason Network Rail in the UK use lots of different codes to refer to what is the same place. Here's an example of what I mean, taken from the openraildata wiki So I have to store all of these codes, and quickly refer to the storage every time the system throws up a reference. Think i'll use most of my CPU doing lots of database searching for this! Time to learn rapid methods of data storage and retrieval, i think!

Redirect Left wrote: ↑10 Jul 2019 02:17 A while ago I bought a web domain, with a plan to make a website doing train things.

Skip to today, i am fighting with the systems, because for some reason Network Rail in the UK use lots of different codes to refer to what is the same place. Here's an example of what I mean, taken from the openraildata wiki
2019-07-10_03_05_05-Identifying_Locations_-_Open_Rail_Data_Wiki.png

So I have to store all of these codes, and quickly refer to the storage every time the system throws up a reference. Think i'll use most of my CPU doing lots of database searching for this! Time to learn rapid methods of data storage and retrieval, i think!

As with any time you have multiple lookups, you have different codes for different purposes. It would be lovely if someone decided to create the 'definitive' code lookup, but sadly life doesn't work like that.

Pasengers

3Alpha, also known as TLCs (Three Letter Codes) or CRS (Customer Reservation System) codes denote stations. More specifically, under certain circumstances, they denote part or stations. This is because I believe CRSs - as in the name - were invented to keep a record of where assisted customers needed to be met or escorted to; St. Pancras for instance has three separate CRSs for separate parts of the stations (eg: the domestic high-speed part is SPX), although for general passenger query issues, STP is used for all three sections (the TLC).

Interestingly, there are approximately 2,600 stations in the country (and more if you include all the extra CRSs that aren't TLCs. Which means that statistically about 1 in 6 combinations of 3 random letters are a station name. This makes it rather difficult to create new codes, since new stations tend to have rather common names that are similar to other stations, and the obvious codes are usually taken unless you want something that begins with Z. Codes that begin with X aren't used publicly, since they tend to be assigned within railway software for things such as station groups. Codes beginning with Z tend to be former London Underground stations (eg: ZFD for Farringdon).

NLCs (National Location Codes) are used primarily for fares. They genuinely do have to be different from the other codes, since fares are often to station groups and other non-geographical 'locations'. For example, purchase a ticket to London and it'll often be to NLC 1072, which is 'London Terminals'; of course London Terminals isn't an actual geographic place that can be located on the rail network. Likewise for various other things such as [London] Boundary Zone 6 (0072), Manchester Central Zone (0451) - which allows a free connection on Metrolink within the city centre, and there was (perhaps still is_ a code for Windsor Stations + Legoland, which included entry.

Trains

TIPLOCs and STANOXes are used for TRUST and various other rail industry recording systems. They often include things such as junctions, timing points, signals, staff halts, and various other places that passengers generally aren't interested in. Because there are loads of them they need to be longer. I tend to find that STANOX is the best way to identify train locations since you can't second guess them and have to confirm them every time you want to use them. (This causes a huge problem when people try to second-guess TLCs to enter into systems without checking; Cambridge is CBG, not CAM which is Camberley!)

Interestingly, sometimes TIPLOCs make their way through to public information systems if there is an unusual working. For instance, when the line through Feltham is closed, trains to Reading go via Wimbledon, Weybridge and then reverse just east of Virginia Water at some named signal; the signal itself shows up in National Rail Enquires as a 'station stop'!

No idea what ATCO is!

JamieLei wrote: ↑12 Jul 2019 07:22 [a lot of text once lived here]

Most of the systems I deal with from the Network Rail systems use STANOX. Thankfully it isn't hard to procure a total list of STANOX/TIPLOC codes. I'm currently learning train movement stuff which is a huge spam of info every time a unit passes through a location monitored by the TRUST system. Safe to say during the day, that sometimes means a lot of messages per second being pushed to my server in this style format. I'm still yet to decide what I want to do in the end, so i've ended up learning as much as I can about the data gets pushed publically if you're subscribed to these data sets on Network Rail / National Rail Enquries systems.

So, whilst travelling on a train from Manchester Airport to Manchester Victoria around the Ordsall Chord, I got thinking. En-route, they pass through Salford Central (kinda, pass the side of the current station, is used as a timing location, and may eventually be stopping). Salford is a City in it's own right, so, is Manchester the only place in the UK where to travel between two stations in the same city, on a mainline train, you travel through another city on the way?

Just a bit of railway trivia for the evening.

Very facetiously... Blackfriars (Southwark, London) to Aldgate East (Tower Hamlets, London) via ... er... the City of London!?

Same goes for Westminster... In fact Westminster is probably slightly more legit!

I was a very happy driver Saturday night.
I got a drive this beautiful looking unit....

Geo Ghost wrote: ↑22 Jul 2019 00:51 I was a very happy driver Saturday night.
I got a drive this beautiful looking unit....


received_351405955758216.jpeg

received_1400975296720713.jpeg

Oh wow, ace livery! I hope I see it whilst I'm around London and route to and around Brighton when I'm down in a few weekends time!

Some fun with the UK's HS2

I still think reopening GCR would be a better deal... People get local railways as well.

HS2 just gets more and more ridiculous.
When the plan originally was being thrown around, I was all for it and quite excited by the prospect. But since then, it's become something of a joke.

I still believe at the moment that we'd benefit more upgrading other small lines, mainlines, reopening some old closed lines to improve cross-country connections (such as the Oxford-Cambridge line that was being thrown around).
Hell, even ERTMS upgrade to mainlines would be a huge benefit in the long run.