But there was also a derailment on the Volks Electric Railway yesterday ...
(currently at https://x.com/imjustbrighton_)

 
Also one at Clapham this morning.......perhaps these things come in threes?

 
WSW Frome,

May I thank you, on behalf of all our Coffee Shop forum members, for your detailed, informative and authoritative posts in this topic.

Chris from Nailsea. 

 
For anyone contemplating the rail trip to Istanbul, it can be accomplished (avoiding Sofia) from London or Northern France in minimum 4 days with 3 overnight trains and 1 hotel night in Bucharest. There are various route options for the northern parts which may extend the itinerary. To get such a precise itinerary may require some quite advance bookings in the more peak seasons.  However, it does make sense to go more slowly and take in the atmosphere along the way.

Interrail – I selected without too much thought 7 days in 1 month, first class. At the Senior Rate and in the December sale this works out at around £45 pd. Seems astonishing value. Whilst I had originally thought about going further into Turkey, I decided against at least partly because the scenic journeys get block booked by travel agents.
 
When I planned the Istanbul trip in detail it started to become clear that I really only needed Interrail for Travel Day 1 (and?2). Fares in Eastern Europe are cheap and services may be only second class. So paying outright may be beneficial. See my comments about reservations above and planning well ahead may overcome that problem. So to consume extra days I took a return trip from Copenhagen to Stockholm. The full fare for that seems to have been around £400 so I did get my monies worth on that alone. (Original plan was to return to UK by rail but fully booked became a problem. Separately - Eurostar from Amsterdam seems to have an additional Interrail allocation than from Brussels even on the same train.) It was at this point dawn lifted and I recalled that the 7 days were within the month and not the 11 months of the full pass!!  So, a swifter departure for Istanbul. I used 3 days in Scandinavia, 1 trivial domestic trip to PMH (1st class SAL to SOU mind), and 2 days towards Istanbul.

The main Interrail advice points (if planning a specific point to point journey – pref. well ahead) are:
1.   Do you need First class? Not an expensive upgrade and may be necessary for single occupation sleepers. Overnight trips only count as one day.
2.   How many days do you actually need? Constructing a trip from individual tickets might prove cheaper although less flexible. Advance fares are available in some countries which reduces the cost further. All the operators I used have internet booking platforms – some will not permit online reservation only.
3.   Do make use of the Interrail sales, typically held 3 or 4 times per year. Maximum discount of 25% is usual in December. Various periods available. Overall Pass is valid for 11 months but typically must be used within the 1 or 2 months specified. 
   
   
 
I had entitled this thread “To the Furthest Corner of Europe - By Interrail.” Now we Westerners do tend to think of Istanbul as the southeast corner of Europe. This is wildly incorrect so that the thread title is also misleading. The geographic definitions of Europe are variable, but the extremities certainly lie much further east. The most established definitions usually involve the Caucasus Mountains and the River Ural. So which cities lie on the NE and SE corners? The common answers are the Russian cities of Salekhard (on the Arctic Circle, east of Vorkuta – famed for its gulags!) and Derbent (at the end of the Caucasus range and on the Caspian Sea western shore).

So if in a calmer future anyone wishes to travel by rail to these extremities, both locations have regular passenger services from Moscow. Salekhard is served from Labytnangi Station (on the other side of the River Ob). Derbent would also have been served by the Baku to Moscow service, but Azerbaijan has largely closed its land borders since Covid. Azerbaijan has only recently resumed the Tbilisi (Georgia) to Baku train service but only for those who need no visa. Again, in the sometime future it will be possible to travel by rail from Turkey through to Baku using the new link to Georgia currently under construction.
 
As it happens I have visited both the wider regions mentioned above in my previous professional work, but never these actual locations and always travelling by air, sometimes in quite “interesting” aircraft and helicopters.

So this can be a bucket list adventure for some influencer in future. I doubt Interrail ever covered the Soviet Union but who knows about the future. EU and many other European countries are members of Interrail currently. Seemingly citizens of EU countries with no rail network are not eligible to buy Interrail tickets!

That is the conclusion of Chapter 5 and the end of the saga. I planned to add two photos (non-rail) to prove I got there but I do not know how. Enjoy the read.






 

 

Ironically it's being reported that it was the Network Rail depot.

 
I have e-mailed a link to that post to Andy Burnham MP,  Heidi Alexander MP and Peter, Baron Hendy of Richmond Hill.

Let's see where that gets us. 

Chris from Nailsea. 

 
Minor derailment apparently.  Train has stayed upright.

 
From National Rail - Elizabeth Line suspended between Paddington-Heathrow-Reading (again)


Route(s) affected
Elizabeth line between Abbey Wood and Heathrow Terminal 4 / Reading, and also between Shenfield and Heathrow Terminal 5

Great Western Railway between London Paddington and Didcot Parkway

Heathrow Express between London Paddington and Heathrow Airport

Description

A failure of the electricity supply between London Paddington and Heathrow Airport / Reading means some lines are blocked. As a result, trains may be cancelled, delayed by up to 30 minutes or revised.

Disruption is expected until 16:00.

 
BBC Live feed

 
My how she's changed!

 
Given the Adelantes' propensity to self-combust, I suspect in this weather, the answer to "where would we/they be today" is "firmly locked inside the depot"...

But despite their well publicised troubles, Old Oak Common did a remarkable job of getting them to behave. I wonder whether the introduction of the 175s might have been a bit smoother if a team of engineers with experience on their sister units was still on hand.

 
He was only allowed around 60 seconds to grab that footage before the Police enforced a no-fly zone.

 
It would seem that the toilets were not involved in any of the refurbishment works carried out!..

 

And that's rubbish anyway! Their early morning 0615? to Stirling left London with NO working toilets the other day - Lumo even tweeted the news themselves & indicated extra-long toilet stops were going to happen.

 

What it comes down to, and it's evidenced time and time again, is a total lack of a customer service culture from top to bottom in the rail sector which is decades behind the curve in this area - that doesn't mean that there aren't pockets of excellence and staff who go the extra mile, but overall it's a systemic failure in an industry which in this respect is still stuck in the 1970s with an attitude that customers should be grateful for whatever they are offered, and where negative feedback is treated with scepticism and defensiveness rather than "how can we learn from this and make it better?"

Hopefully the onset of GBR will do something to address this, but culture is the hardest thing to change in any organisation, and as a monopoly supplier there is even less motivation other than a commitment, which will need to be addressed, to put the customer at the forefront of everything they do - the taxpayer and the customer (more often one and the same) deserve this at least.

 

Lumo are using Bombardier built Class 222s on the Stirling services. Not Hitachi Class 8xx.

 
Alterations to services between London Paddington and Oxford

Due to forecasted severe weather between London Paddington and Oxford fewer trains are able to run.
Train services running to and from these stations may be delayed or revised. Disruption is expected until 20:45 14/08.

Customer Advice
As a result of the forecast severe weather today (potential high temperatures) we have had to make some revisions to the train service.

 
Just for clarity, the LUMO service does not use IETs but refurbished Class 222 (meridians) from EMR

 
Quite a lot not going on today...


and later:


and also:

 
To give them credit, using the loos on the Class 80x, the door locks are good. Simple, mechanical, effective, robust & quick to use.

Mark

 


It should be that when [tolilets / trains] enter service for a day's work, it should be highly, highly unusual for them to fail during their diagram.  That does not seem to be the case with Lumo toilets or Transwilts trains.

 
What a chapter. Those fantasy easy connections at Salisbury breaking down very badly too.

A friend travelled back from Brighton to Bath at the start of the week, lamenting the lack of the through train. Changing at Fareham I think it was on to a GWR train to Bristol with the air conditioning out of service and the staff weary. They asked if it had been out of action for their entire day - the response being that it hadn't been working all summer - and once home, they were moved to phone GWR and have a conversation about the temperature on board the train and how bad it was for staff morale and working conditions.

Mark

 
Toilets on trains should be a mature technology and providing reliably working examples should therefore be simple.
I wonder in what way hitachi have over-complicated the design and added extra points of failure ?

 
"On this day" brings up Adelante (class 180) testing at Hull on 14th August 2009 - one of many pictures at http://www.traintesting.com/Class_180.htm

The Adelante fleet of 14 x 5 car trains was new to Great Western (the old, smaller franchise) around 25 years ago - the turn of the century, at it intesting (and hypotherical) to ask where we would be today if those trains had remained as paet of the franchise / management contract to this day.

 





I don't think that "GWR" condsiders all of its passengers to be idiots.  However, there is a lower standard of provision of data than one might wish at times, whatever that's due to.   Sometimes the staff operating the system day to day may be taking the easy way out, but very often they are frustrated themselves.  And at a management level, there are frustations too and the inability to manage as they could if there weren't other tiers.  This is compounded by the systems which seem to be crude, fairweather only, and designed to keep cost down rather than service up and thinking customers undertanding and informed.

I too have been stopped at Chippenham and have missed rail replacement options because I did not seek out staff and they were not running to an announced timetable, to then have to await others to share a following vehicle. 

The system is not clever there.  The real solution would not be to send off the train that had been running the service to Portsmouth, of course. It's just possible there was a cab fault and it could only be driven from one end, or that it was running out of fuel and had to be put on a diagram that got it back to base.  It's also possible that 2 cars on 1F19-  the Cardiff to Portsmouth train - with the local trains cancelled too - was a bit of a problem, and so the TransWilts train was commandeered and the service cancelled for the rest of the day.   That of course is a scurrilous suggestion bearing in mind that senior GWR managers informed us and our MP in person that this does not happen, so it must be cab fault or fuel level?

 
Superb drone footage taken by Eddie Mitchell on another forum.

 
Armchair pilot here. So the engine sent the flight deck crew a memo saying "I'm sick, I need to go to engine hospital right now please." but after giving it a bit of a rest they put the autopilot back at the controls to continue the flight? Hmm.

Mark

 
It does not appear to have been made clear that Lumo have stated categorically that none of their Stirling trains enter service without at least some working WC's and the issue seems to be one of 'mid-journey' failure.

 
An update, from the BBC:

 
I get several messages of this ilk every day; usually about either my expired McAfee contract - which hasn't existed for at least a decade - or the fact that my BT Cloud service has run out of space, which it certainly has because the system was permanently closed around two years ago.

Other favourites concern a variety of issues with the motor vehicle that I don't have.

I hate to think how many entries my Blocked Sender list now contains!