I enjoyed this video on YouTube, of a drone flight between Portishead and Pill.

https://youtu.be/CutQrj_5vWI?si=oQOzVKFX0uEZJOgT

 
25th July is doing the rounds on forums.s hinting that the gwr 230 will be carrying fare paying customers

 

Ah, thank you.
A freight pulled into Westbury platform '0'. A while later I saw the same train had a different headcode and went down towards Warminster, so I wondered where the now new front engine came from (and what happened to the engine now on the rear).

 

Following up from the weekend just gone ... the Swindon, Chippenham, Melksham to Weymouth through service ran ... as far as Westbury! Offputting to the public who had planned a day out, and it does long term damage to the railway's reputation, use, and whether people will risk it again for a very long time.

 



Which sums up my reasons for dislike of DMUs. Very often shorter, often less reliable, put passengers off.

 
Don't think there is much chance of a new station at Ashton Gate,

as yet,and unconfirmed,the new Mayor is a dark side fan.

 

Bearing in mind the bumpy road that the project has frequently stumbled over for too many years, I'm wondering what further potholes the business case could reveal before the sound of spades in ground can be heard......and just how long does it take to approve?

 
tl:dr certain makes of c21st vehicles are often a lot more reliable and better engineered than those from the 1980s.

The musing on the Portishead branch's temporarily moribund infrastructure and the parked-up new vehicles that surrounds it, took me to Weymouth, it reminded me of the time when driving licences were passed and the hunt for an ex demonstrator vehicle was on.

This was 1989ish, and there was a British Leyland garage nearby, so, in we went to check over... a Metro.

A canary yellow Metro.

This, the sales guy said, was the price it was because it was a 'Jersey Metro' - perhaps it was some tax advantage that caused them to be taken to Weymouth, exported to the Channel Islands, re-imported and sold. I immediately reflected that perhaps it had been cargo on a car transporter train, down the harbour branch on its way to the ferry. Perhaps that happened. Perhaps there's no photographic evidence.

Further inspection suggested that it may indeed have been sitting around in a salt-laden atmosphere, despite it being 'New' the paintwork was dull and a little rust was starting in the weld attaching the roof gutter. To this day, in some remote location on Jersey, there just might be a vehicle compound with half a dozen now barely recognisable relics of that era.

Ended up buying a near-new Peugeot 205 XLD, which on the whole worked out well, though it was rather hungry for front wheel bearing gaiters.

Also, at one point, it needed a replacement head gasket after a few winters of cold starts and immediately up a 1 in 6.

Oh, and later on, its clutch cable snapped half way up a 1 in 7, which stopped the job, though a plus point was that Anthony Head stopped to see if we were ok and then two guys from the garage that maintained it came out very cheerfully to see if they could rescue the situation.

Then... drum brakes. Coming out of Chepstow on the suburban road with speed humps and constantly touching the brakes, onto the motorway and it became obvious that the brakes were somewhat on and would not release - I can't remember the symptom (oh yes I can, it involved heat, smoke, and, once we were off the Severn Bridge, a visit to the hard shoulder). Once they'd cooled they were somewhat happy again.

And... ah, yes, the time that fuel starvation set in, but only in an uphill direction - that turned out to need its fuel pump and injectors needing to travel to a specialist engineer...

Oh, and just once, we ran it out of fuel, partly because we didn't know where Bicester was and partly because the thing was ludicrously fuel efficient (for a car) that it was easy to forget about the stuff. The guy from Green Flag, to his credit, didn't bat an eyelid.

But... it worked out well. Thinking now of the strange trip back from Orkney during that fuel strike, no fuel so the motorway system was empty. The people we were staying with up there kindly lent us, was it a 25 litre plastic can, which with a full tank as well put South West England easily within range, without needing to depend on a filling station, most of which were out of fuel.

Mark

 

Both scenarios happen. Market forces being what they are, a shipload of cars and vans heading here from Asia might arrive to a recession and sit around waiting for someone to want them. That isn't apparently the case right now. The best figures I can find suggest about 750,000 cars annually pass through the dock, but that includes cars for export as well as arriving. I can't find a number, but car imports were £44 bn to April 2025 and exports £31 bn. Whether that translates to the same proportion in numbers at RPD, I couldn't say. We import mass-produced cheaper cars as a general and very rough rule, but export the higher end.

 

Why not Titfield Thunderbolt on the tenner, Thomas the Tank Engine on a fiver, Ivor the Engine on the £20 and Hogwarts Express on the £50?
:-)

 
The satellite view of the route: the out-of-use railway passing acres and acres of new vehicles of one kind or another parked up nose to tail... an eloquent commentary on the UK's transport priorities.

Does anyone know if the vehicle storage there is largely short-stay or is it the case that cars are imported and then suffer the fate of being, well, marooned is the wrong word as it suggests isolation, and there's thousands of them?

Mark

 

By 2028 the 175’s will, one hopes, be in service. This will presumably help. Is it naive to hope that in two and a half years there might be some improvement to the current crewing problems?

 
From the context, I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to imagine that the three stations referred to are on the Portishead Line. Portishead and Pill are baked in, but the plans have passive provision for Ashton Gate - close to the Stadium. There is no committed funding for this, but it has been mentioned by the WECA mayor recently.

 

That's how I read it.


Perhaps it should launch as a weekday only service to start with!?

Anyway, positive news, though there have been so many false dawns with this project before I can't help but think it will still have some hoops to jump through!

 

The signallers are able to enter any 4 digit alpha-numeric code.  I notice that one of the sidings at Westbury has a ground position signal W706, so I wouldn't be surprised that it was a short notice light engine shunt move to the Down Siding 1 that signal is located on. 

That would explain why it vanished as not all ground position signals at Westbury have berths (including W706), so headcodes will often vanish.

 
Are you 100% about the code, was it something from an earlier view of the website?

Only trains passing non commuter were:
6A12  / 6A18 Whatley Quarry to Appleford approx 1017
5U73  Empty 9 car IET from Westbury to Stoke Gifford approx 1021

 
Today (8th July) whilst watching the disruption/melee at Westbury between 0930 and 1020 on Opentimetrains, I saw a code T706 enter Wesbury via platform 1 and rapidly go towards Warminster.
It then vanished.

I can find no service with that code.
Any thoughts please.

 

Not really clear is it, could even read the loosely worded 3 stations as the new Wellington, Cullompton and Haxby.

Originally there were following on the line (not all open at same time) Bedminster and Parson Street (rebuilt in 1930s with two islands about 220m long, as part of quadrupling through to branch junction), then on actual branch had Ashton Gate, Clifton Bridge, Nightingale Valley Halt, Ham Green Halt, Pill, Portbury Shipyard, Portbury and Portishead.

Portbury (adjacent to M25 junction 19) would probably make a good Park and Ride location (if they could build a multi storey car park for some of the car import terminals thus freeing up land), although there is risk might end up stealing rail journeys from further south with people driving to junction 19 instead

 
I was just going to add a note to this thread about reports that the Chinese have built an ekranoplan. Here is one from Aerotime:

Supposedly the China Sea is small (and flat?) enough that such a thing might serve to shift an army across it to a beach in short order. Those reports also mentioned the DARPA programme called Liberty Lifter, aiming for a bigger one able to cross oceans. And then guess what - yesterday DARPA announced the abrupt closure of that pgroramme. In Aviation week:

Hard to keep up, isn't it?

 
I think the three stations are Wellington, Cullompton and Haxby near Liverpool. I would have thought a W&C Parkway might have made more sense, but some tanked up lager louts might have other ideas!

 

Is there any commitment to employ enough trained staff to run a train service reliable enough for people to use once the line and stations are provided?

 
Source: gov.uk press release

Three stations... so Portishead, Pill and, er..?

 
 I'd very much like to see the Titfield thunderbolt on a £10 note .

 
Rather fortunate that the same hara-kiri isn't expected of British Transport Ministers/Civil Servants when they get the chop or have to resign due to some past/recent misdemeanour or incompetence - there would be scarcely a lamppost on Whitehall without a (highly subsidised!) body dangling from it! 

 

Commonplace indeed.   There was no shock over the weekend that half the service was lost, and no external cause - "act of god" - to explain it.

The industry's position is indeed odd, and frustrating.

 
Finally finally finally...the green light has been given along with a whole raft of other rail and road improvements. The government has put in a further £27 million. Just the final business case approval and it will be spades in the ground....

 
Pity the 769s couldn't have been fitted with batteries.  Porterbrook likely to be looking for homes for yhe class 350/2's and they did suggest fitting these units with batteries

 

Now I would have said the Penydarren Engine was better known - and not just because this stands just down the road from me:

 

But it was in France not really a UK railway problem

 
Former Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoit has committed suicide on the day of his dismissal.
Starovoit's death was confirmed by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. They reported that the former minister's body with a gunshot wound was found in the Odintsovo municipal district in his personal car. Russian investigators say they are investigating the circumstances of his death.
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Telegram channels report that a firearm was found next to the body, and the preliminary cause of Starovoit's suicide is a possible criminal case involving violations during the construction of fortifications in Kursk Oblast.
Mash reports that Starovoit signed a decision by the region's operational headquarters to allow the Kursk Oblast Development Corporation to spend 19 billion roubles (US$241 million) and select subcontractors itself.
In addition, the investigation is checking the possibility of Starovoit's involvement in violations in the procurement of medicines for hospitals in the oblast and in the "failed transport reform" in Kursk, which failed to repair tram tracks and deliver new carriages.

Starovoit was testified against by the former head of Kursk Oblast, Alexei Smirnov, who was arrested in a case involving the embezzlement of 1 billion roubles (US$12 million). The same was done by the former director general of the corporation, Vladimir Lukin, and former Kursk head deputy Maxim Vasilyev, who was involved in the construction business. Both are currently in pre-trial detention.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin dismissed Starovoit on the morning of 7 July.