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  • Pearl Harbour’s Little Brother – The Battle of Taranto

    Dear reader, it is customary, in the opening paragraph of one of my articles, to remind you of something you may know, as a springboard to letting you know about something that I think you don’t, but may find mildly interesting. Today differs only in that I have inserted this paragraph before that usual first paragraph, which is now the second.

    You are, dear reader, most likely aware of Pearl Harbour, the US Navy base in Hawaii that was attacked on the 7th December 1941 by aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy, taking the US forces by surprise and putting a serious (though as it proved, rather short term) dent in the naval capability of the United States. This attack brought the United States into the war, and is thus considered quite important. What you may not know is that the Japanese plan was based on the success of an attack just over a year earlier – by the British, on the Italians.

    Let us take a step back and consider for a moment why Britain was attacking Italy in 1940. The war had begun in 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany. Poland had quickly succumbed, and then in early 1940, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and then France were all conquered by Germany in quick succession, leaving just Britain on the allied side. Following a victory in the summer of 1940 in the Battle of Britain, the UK continued to fight.

    Meanwhile, Germany’s ally Italy had not been idle, and was already engaging the British in British Somaliland and then Egypt. While the Italian army was not up to the same standards as the British, the advance continued and the British were pushed back as September progressed. It was immediately obvious thatย  the Mediterranean sea would also become a battleground, as both the British and Italians needed to send supplies using it.

    Here there arose a problem – the Royal Navy may well have been one of the most powerful navies on Earth at the time, but it had ships all over the place, to guard the Empire (which was still rather large). Increasingly, there was a need to protect convoys of supply ships from America to the UK, and so ships had been diverted. If that wasn’t enough, there was still the threat of German invasion of the British Isles, so ships had to be kept at home.

    It became clear that the British would not be able to gain control of the Med simply by having a naval battle with the Italians – they would have to get sneaky. And so they decided to use aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm (the arm of the Navy whose job it is to fly aircraft, generally from aircraft carriers) to sink the Italian fleet in port at Taranto. The attack was codenamed Operation Judgement.

    Originally, the force was to have comprised 36 aircraft from both HMSย Illustriousย and HMSย Eagle, but in the end sinceย Eagle was battle damaged she had to retire, leaving only 21 aircraft fromย Illustrious. I should explain that these were not cutting edge, fast mono-planes, but instead slow, rather outdated Swordfish bi-planes, from the delightfully named Fairey Aviation Company. They could, however, carry a torpedo and they were very durable.

    Nonetheless, on the night of the 11th November 1940, 21 of the brave little Swordfish took to the air from the deck ofย Illustrious. 11 of them carried torpedoes, the remainder armed with flares and bombs. The plan was rather simple – light the Italian ships up with flares, and then send in the torpedo bombers to put nice big holes in the sides of them.

    At around 2300, the first wave arrived, minus one aircraft that had turned back (possibly due to engine trouble, but they were in complete radio silence so none of the others would find out why). Italian ships were duly lit up and the torpedo-armed Swordfish began their attack. Over the next 10 minutes, and despite heavy anti-aircraft fire, 7 Italian ships would be crippled, including the battleships Littorio (she suffered 3 torpedo hits), Caio Duilio (she suffered one torpedo hit) and Conte di Cavour (she was sunk in harbour, having suffered multiple hits).

    The second wave of Swordfish began their attack around midnight. The Italians, now realising what was going on, had 800 anti-aircraft guns awaiting them, and these opened up as the flares once again lit up the night. It is surprising that these guns had little effect, although to be entirely fair, the second wave was formed of just 8 aircraft, and it was, as previously stated, the middle of the night.

    As the time reached 0120 on the morning of the 12th, the first Swordfish returned toย Illustrious. Over the next 90 minutes, 17 more would land safely on her flight deck, leaving only 2 aircraft shot down. Tragic though this sounds, it must be remembered that this was an extremely low casualty rate for an operation of this kind. 2 of their crew were killed and 2 taken prisoner. It must also be remembered that this pales in comparison with the severe damage to 3 battleships and 2 cruisers of the Italian navy, along with oil stores and other shore facilities destroyed or badly damaged by bombs.

    Though the Italians had detected the aircraft sent on reconnaissance for the attack, they did not have good radar with which to detect the Swordfish, and were thus caught almost completely off-guard. Their vigilance was also poor.

    What did the world learn? Well, this was the first time a fleet had been defeated without ever sighting the opposing ships, and proved what some had already begun to suspect – that aircraft, not battleships, would be the weapons of the future. Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet at the time, would say: “Taranto and the night of 11 November 1940 should be remembered forever as having shown once and for all, that in the Fleet Air Arm, the Navy has its most devastating weapon”.

    Alas, this topic should really be given a much more thorough perusal, so if you are interested, I would highly recommend looking into it – I am sure there are many more interesting details than revealed here. If not, you can at least pass this article on to someone else who might enjoy it.

     

     

    December 2, 2018
    Fairey Swordfish, Fly Navy, Navy, Swordfish, War, World War 2, WW2

  • The Great Train Reverse-Snobbery


    2023 DISCLAIMER: The following article was written in June of 2020 but never published for fear of touching a (sort of) controversial topic in a (very) controversial time. While some of the specifics have changed, and certain claims I may shy away from now, the general thrust of the article is still valuable and you may find it interesting.

    (original) DISCLAIMER: This one is very public transport heavy, and might bore the pants off you if you have little interest in the topic. I wrote it mainly to make a point for other aficionados of transport, but for general consumption, it is a little less than ideal. There, please do read on, but consider yourself warned.


    Dear reader,

    It has been some time (in fact just over a year) since I posted anything on this worthy if neglected little blog. I offer no excuses for this rather sorry state of affairs, but I would ask you, dear reader, to bear in mind that life can get in the way.

    Now, this article concerns public transport, which is hardly surprising if you have been around here a while. However, if you have been paying attention to the United Kingdom or indeed the world recently, you may have noticed that the use of public transport has been discouraged. You all know why, and frankly I cannot be bothered to discuss it here.


    New Trains; Basic Problems

    If you have travelled on (so-called) LNER (no relation whatsoever to the actual London & North Eastern Railway, which was wound up in 1947) or (so-called) GWR (no relation whatsoever to the actual Great Western Railway, which was also wound up in 1947), you have probably noticed a change in trains.

    Furnished by the Intercity Express Program, these operators have taken delivery of brand-new trains supplied by Hitachi. The majority of these trains are bi-modes, meaning they can run on diesel or electric power, and they represent a sizeable investment, being designed to last for the next 30 years.

    This sounds like a good thing, but sadly these trains have fallen a bit short of the mark. Apart from the front, the exteriors are a bit… workmanlike. There are, for example, large gaps between coaches where various cables are strung, which is not only a bit ugly but also potentially dangerous (Network Rail pointed out that in theory, some vagabond could climb up them and access the train roof, leading to a lot of faffing around trying to find a solution). I suppose these gaps might also add drag, but I’m no aerodynamicist.

    Another questionable aesthetic choice is having doors which are set a few inches back from the bodyside of the train, rather than being flush (that is, in line with the bodyside) on the older trains. Again, I do ponder how good that is for aerodynamics, but I can understand this as an engineering choice; all the door has to do is slide to one side or the other, rather than having to push outwards and then slide. Complexity, as they say, is the enemy of reliability, but in the context of some of the other design choices, this one is slightly baffling. (I might also mention the lack of rain strips to keep the doors free of dripping rain, but this problem may now have been solved since).

    All the above said, it’s inside the trains where things start to fall apart (thankfully not literally, they’re actually pretty well put together).

    Inside one GWR example I had the dubious pleasure of travelling on, I was first presented with a toilet, which, having not sensibly planned the trip, I was in need of. Most normal (non disabled) toilets on trains feature a normal push door to go in, that springs shut just in case. Not so here, where the door slides aside on runners. It is still spring loaded, but I do have to question why this design was adopted; in theory it saves space from the normal door, but in practice most people shut the door before using the loo (even if they don’t it springs shut). The extra complexity of having runners that chewing gum and other detritus can get stuck in just doesn’t seem worth it to me. Still, the toilet worked fine and, unlike a lot of trains, washing and drying my hands was a doddle.

    Moving into the passenger saloon, I noticed that on both the LNER and GWR examples, the interior is very bright (goodness knows what the harsh LEDs are like at night, but they’re fine in the day), and legroom is good. Unfortunately, that’s where the good points end. Both examples have a rather cheap-looking bright green dot matrix screen for destinations. LNER’s trains have a garish bright red strip above the windows, and GWR’s have a garish green one instead. Both look very cheap and naff.

    The seats are famously uncomfortable. Having travelled on both the LNER and GWR examples, I can confirm both are bone-breakingly hard, and bolt upright. Seat padding has been kept to a bare minimum. Hitachi claim they have been “ergonomically designed” but for whom I am unsure; being an average height man of average build, if they don’t feel comfortable to me, I doubt they’re going to work for most people.

    I mentioned earlier that simplified doors seemed bizarre, given some other design choices. Apart from the toilet doors, this one really rubs me (and many of the traincrew) up the wrong way. There is a reservation system which has both a light (red, green or orange depending on potential occupancy) but also an LCD screen showing where seats are reserved from and to. Quite apart from the fact that the light is redundant because of the screen, this fails on numerous occasions; many GWR examples I observed going around with tickets in the back of the seats, like the old trains did.

    Why, if the aim was simple and reliable, was such a reservation system fitted? If they were desperate to have an electronic system, Cross Country’s “Voyager” trains have been going around for nearly 20 years with one that seems to work reliably, and LNER had just invested in an e-ink based system on their old trains. Besides, if reliability was key, why not just stick to the old system that the traincrew are already having to switch back to? A ticket, after all, doesn’t have any electronics to go wrong. The mind boggles.

    That’s standard class, but first class, I’m sorry to report , is no better. Both GWR and LNER (in their case thanks to the ill-fated Virgin Trains East Coast) had refurbished old trains with very nicely done first class sections. Such sections included leather seats, generous padding, beautiful carpets, curtains, window views from all seats, among other delights. The new trains have none of that. 

    I have been told that the new first class seats are designed to be more supportive, and get more comfortable as the journey progresses. I would humbly submit that this is a cop-out answer; a first class seat should be comfortable from the moment one sits down to the moment one alights at their destination, even if that’s only a short distance away.


    For Comparison…

    So, why am I telling you all this? Why, I hear you cry, are you complaining about new trains? Well, it’s because of all the ways these new trains have been spun to look like the best thing since sliced bread (or colour television, depending on your preferred analogy). I have been reminded time and again of Hitachi’s pedigree in Japan, and of the fantastic electrical efficiency of the various systems, and of the excellent availability rate, and of the operational advantages of splitting and joining trains.

    Lo, you cry, that’s all good stuff right? Yes. But passengers do not ride on pedigree, or electrical efficiency, or availability rates, or operational advantages. They ride on seats on trains. All these small (and not so small) niggles serve to remind the passenger that they are, after all, a number on a DfT spreadsheet. The attention to detail in the passenger experience has been sorely lacking, as I have demonstrated, especially considering the changes needed are not huge. Comfortable seats, until recently, were not too much to ask.

    One of course could say, ah, well, you said first class was rubbish, so maybe just get rid of it? The argument often goes that since so few actually use first, it should be dispensed with. I think this argument is, frankly, total bollocks.

    To explain why I think this, we have to look at car manufacturers. For the sake of example, let us pick Audi. Most cars that Audi sells will be fairly ordinary hatchbacks, saloons and SUVs. However, Audi also makes the R8, a supercar that is both extremely fast and luxurious. A very small percentage of Audi’s customers buy R8s, but they still make them. Why? Because it’s aspirational; one day, if you worked extremely hard and got very lucky, you might be able to own an R8. For now though, you’ll settle for an A3.

    The same is true of airlines; you might not be able to afford to fly first on a top airline, but you know that it is a fantastic experience, and you’ll get a small slice of that in economy.

    And the same really ought to be true of trains; it certainly has been at certain points in the past, but the idea that first class should be desirable seems to have fallen out of fashion. Instead it seems to be considered an extra that is thrown in, to spend as little money as possible on, because (the thinking goes) people only pay so they get a seat and the rest is frivolous. Not so, as we have seen.

    Ah yes, I hear you say, but that’s all very well for airlines and car manufacturers, but it won’t possibly work in boring old public transport like buses and trains. But the thing is, it is working for the former.

    Let me introduce you to the No. 36 bus, operating between Ripon and Leeds, in West Yorkshire. The list of high spec features on the 14 buses operating this service is mind boggling. Leather seats come as standard; but not just any. On the lower deck, one will find normal bus seats, but in quilted leather (yes, quilted) with plenty of padding. 4G WiFi is standard, as are USB charging points and wood-effect floors, as well as a crisp, glass-framed staircase. The rear seats even have tables.

    Upstairs, one will find full leather coach seats, lavishly padded and placed in a 2+1 configuration for extra space. To top that, the ceiling has glass panels to allow extra light during the day, and a view of the stars at night. All of this is wrapped in slick branding, and in fact the whole design was coordinated with transport design firm Best Impressions.

    The price for all this? For all 14 vehicles, ยฃ3.3 million. This sounds high, but per vehicle this works out at just under ยฃ236,000. Compare with the cost per vehicle of the Intercity Express trains mentioned earlier, which cost between ยฃ2.4 – ยฃ2.8 million per carriage. Obviously, the engineering needed is far more complex for a fast train than a bus, but the point is, these kinds of features do not have to be that expensive, in the grand scheme of things.

    In the bus industry, these ideas are far from niche; in Birmingham, National Express West Midlands have implemented a large number of “Platinum” routes, with buses at a much higher spec (Wi-Fi, charge points, leather headrests, comfier seats, more space, better floors, a well coordinated identity throughout, and so on and so forth). In fact, all the major bus operators either have premium brands or have made significant improvements.

    Ah well, you say, but that’s still a different industry. And besides, don’t railways have different safety standards? Quite aside from the fact that train collisions are far less common, these safety standards have not prevented operators in the past from coming up with fantastic interior design. Or, indeed, refitting existing trains.

    I will reference here the rather ill-fated (for numerous reasons, but not this one) Virgin Trains East Coast. Despite knowing their trains were going to be replaced in just a handful of years, VTEC decided to spend ยฃ21 million refurbishing and overhauling every single carriage in their fleet, in what they called “Project 21“. ยฃ21 million sounds like a lot, but this had to stretch over 401 coaches; this means that per carriage, they were only spending on average just under ยฃ53,000, cheaper still than the No. 36 bus (just a quarter of the price, in fact).

    For this money, they managed to afford new carpets throughout, new first and standard class seats (first class seats wide, leather clad and heavily padded, standard in cloth, but still with a good deal of padding). New table tops were also added, along with repainted toilet fittings, new artwork, new finishes in multiple areas, and improved toilet doors. Outside, the striking new VTEC livery (designed by Sam Jessup, at the time working for the same Best Impressions we mentioned earlier) was applied quickly using a vinyl wrap.  The overall effect was a dramatic update in comfort and general appearance, a much more professional impression than is gained with the newer trains.


    Conclusion

    And now, many, many words in, I shall come to my point. I’m not the first to observe this, but many in the industry and more widely feel that any money not spent on “making the trains run on time” is wasted, and sneer at those who suggest any other course of action. It is true that the basic product of the railway is punctual travel, but there are many limiting factors, and throwing more money at the problem does not appear to be working. I hope it’s also clear that in the grand scheme of things, making passenger experience better does not have to be expensive.

    And, while I did say I would not touch on Covid 19, I will say this. Before this crisis, there was great concern about the capacity of railways; trying to squeeze yet more people onto limited trains. In all this excitement, people began to be viewed increasingly as a commodity to be transported. However, people are now being discouraged from travelling, and it is uncertain whether they will return; point being, the task is not now merely to accommodate; we must attract passengers back onto trains, and a properly presented, comfortable service will help us do that.

    May 11, 2023
    Britain, British Rail, England, Great Western Railway, GWR, LNER, London, London & North Eastern Railway, Scotland, Train, Trains, Wales

  • Some Interesting Ideas From The 1930s That Never Really Caught On – Part 1

    Dear reader,

    It has been rather a while since we last spoke; nearly three years in fact. To give some perspective on how much I have been putting this off, and the spectacular laziness with which the phrase “we’ll get around to that” has been bandied around by myself, the last time I sat down to write an article for this site, the UK was between Covid lockdowns, Boris Johnson was still very firmly Prime Minister, and if one mentioned Russia, all people thought about was their slightly dodgy Sputnik vaccine then in development.

    Nobody, least of all myself, can tell how long this sudden burst of activity will last, but at the very least, welcome to the rather redesigned, slightly newspaper-like Peculiarly Pete, where the rambling will continue.

    In numerous ways, the world we live in today has been defined by the Second World War. For example, take the device you are reading this article on now; no matter whether it is a laptop, desktop, smartphone, tablet, or even a ZX Spectrum, it is some form of digital, reprogrammable computer. This technology, so dominant over the world today, may well never have come to be had WW2 never occurred. Indeed, both the British and the American programmes which resulted in the first digital computers had military applications in mind (although ours was kept a state secret until many decades later).

    But there are umpteen examples. About a week ago, I took a trip to Portugal, and to get there I spent several boring hours on a Ryanair flight; boring hours they may have been, but they were cheaper and shorter hours than would have been possible before the invention of the jet engine. While it is true that several different teams were working on these before the war, it would have taken far, far longer for these to come to production without it, and it is possible that their early issues may have proved too expensive.

    Meanwhile in the field of geopolitics, almost nothing makes sense without the Second World War. The People’s Republic of China we see today is the end result (after many, many twists and turns) of a chain of events which would have turned out very differently had Japan not invaded the country. Many other events in the modern world lend themselves to the Cold War, a direct result of the strange relationship between the allies in that war.

    It is clear therefore that the Second World War was a truly watershed event. Logically it follows (as you, my intelligent and very perceptive reader will have noticed) that the world beforehand must have been very different, and this logical assumption is largely true.

    In this world the defining event was the First World War. Perusing the issues of Popular Mechanics of the time, it is very clear that the threat of gas warfare was present in the 1930s imagination, just as it was present in the WW1 reality, and with 20 years of technical developments their descriptions at times sound apocalyptic.

    Fortunately, we know now that all powers involved in the eventual conflict refrained from using gas on the battlefield. Why was this? It is difficult to say precisely. While the Nazis did use gas in the Holocaust, even with their enemies closing in on Berlin, they did not use it against enemy troops or even enemy civilians. This was despite developing the first nerve agent, Sarin, a far more deadly and painful substance than anything any of the First World War armies had access to.

    I suspect the reasons are partially ideological, and partially practical. Ideological, because Hitler had himself been gassed during WW1 (and indeed at the end of it was in hospital recovering from such an attack), and may have decided not to inflict such on other soldiers; and practical, because quite apart from the problem of protecting one’s own troops, it was very clear that the allies could produce more of everything, including gas, than the Germans.

    Meanwhile, those with an eye on the future terrified themselves with visions of aerial bombardment from new, fast bombers that no fighter could possibly hope to catch. Casualties, it was assumed, would be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands from each raid; thankfully, their assumptions on the speed of bombers, the uselessness of fighters, and the accuracy of unguided bombs, proved to be unfounded. World War 2 bombing raids largely had to pick city-sized targets to give them a good chance of hitting, and even then, it would take the invention of the atomic bomb to give a realistic chance of the expected casualties.

    Of course many had much more immediate concerns; the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression plunged millions into poverty, and even by the end of the 1930s many were still struggling. Just like today, governments were trying various schemes to create skills, employment and opportunity, but also like today, these met with varying degrees of success. But now it has been acknowledged, we shall not spend this entire article going on about it; partly because others would do a much better job, but mostly because it is already a very recognisable part of the 1930s.

    One of the revolutions already underway was that of motor vehicles. In previous times, the default (and largely only) form of land transport was the railway, but cars were improving substantially and becoming available to a far wider audience than ever before. Even if you were not lucky enough to be able to afford a car, new roads, paved with materials like asphalt and concrete, offered other possibilities; buses and lorries offered employment and indeed enjoyment to many. That many of these modern roads were constructed on the taxpayer’s dime, and in pure profit and loss terms were quite poor investments, was not mentioned.

    It thus became imperative that the railways develop a response in order to retain passengers and absolutely crucial farebox revenue. At the same time, the idea of using aerodynamic design to reduce drag (in various ways, many of which had almost no scientific value) was in vogue, to the point where even everyday household items such as radios and toasters were being ‘streamlined’.

    It was thus that the streamlined train was born. Starting with smaller items (railcars, the odd locomotive etc.), and eventually developing into complete trains, streamliners came of age in the 1930s. In many cases, this was merely a marketing exercise; the streamlining designed by Henry Dreyfuss for the 20th Century Limited (touted at the time with the nicely unprovable moniker of ‘World’s Most Famous Train’) almost certainly had no effect on drag, but it was sufficiently striking that it has become iconic of the era and indeed it graces the head of this article.

    Other approaches were more scientific; following a visit to Germany to see the new diesel railcars there, Sir Nigel Gresley, the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the LNER in Britain, decided to combine the drag reduction effect of streamlining with the greater power then available from steam engines. The result were the A4 class of Mallard fame, whose streamlining did have a measurable impact on performance.

    The idea of special, much, much faster trains with facilities unavailable elsewhere (for example, the A4-hauled Coronation of the period featured swivel armchairs in first class), did not last, at least not in streamlined form, for very long.

    Again, there were many different reasons. Quite apart from the fashion for streamlining beginning to die away after the war, there were myriad operational difficulties, at least in the UK. Having a small handful of extremely fast trains with all the rest still travelling at the same speeds makes for a signalling nightmare, and the braking technology of the day compounded these issues, with stopping distances making life extremely difficult.

    In the US, with steam swapped for new diesel power, streamlined trains survived for many years following the war. The market was rather different, with vast distances being covered by a small number of trains (for example, Union Pacific’s City of Los Angeles only became a daily service in the late 1940s), and with less dense traffic to get in the way of, the extra speed was less of a problem. Unfortunately, with the advent of interstate highways and the aforementioned jet aircraft, such services would struggle and few made it into the 1960s in any form, let alone streamlined.

    In the years since, particularly as regular speeds have increased, the use of aerodynamic design has made something of a comeback, and certainly today’s high speed railways would not be feasible without at least a token nod to drag reduction. Still, the modern (and far more sensible) fashion is to have more consistently timed trains, and the kinds of luxuries the streamliners of the 30s exuded are now present only rarely on charter trains.

    Elsewhere in the world of transport, things were even more different to today. Transcontinental travel was a far more difficult prospect given the limitations of technology; aeroplanes did of course exist but they were slow, their range was generally small, and air travel on them was a noisy, shaky, and often dangerous experience at the start of the 1930s.

    But things were beginning to change; monoplanes (that is, aeroplanes with just one set of wings) were replacing biplanes, and speed and range were increasing as a result. Engine power was constantly increasing, and by the end of the decade engines which could touch or even exceed 1,000 hp were becoming commercially available. Further, navigational aids which could make flight safer, particularly based upon radio, were beginning to be introduced, even if they could not always be relied upon (the last flight of Amelia Earhart is evidence of that).

    The world was still not ready for commercial air travel, however. There were very few long, paved runways anywhere in the world; these were even rare in the United States in which the most progress had been made. As an alternative, for the few who could afford to use aeroplanes, the only solution was to use a completely different medium from which to access the sky; the sea.

    Thus it was that the flying boats of this era at last crossed the Atlantic in one flight (with passengers, that is), with a rivalry developing between the Boeing-built ‘Clippers’ of Pan American airways and the Short-built ‘Empire’ flying boats of Britain’s Imperial Airways. Just like with the streamlined trains, it was imperative to justify the high ticket prices, and therefore luxury features like berths, dining rooms, even promenades (albeit rather small ones) proliferated.

    One might wonder why flying boats are so rare today; after all, why would one rely on runways when the sea is so abundant, not to mention all the lakes in the world?

    Well, there are downsides to the flying boat idea; for a start, if the aircraft has to float also, the shape that must be arrived at is not the ideal one for aerodynamics. There are other issues too; seawater is highly corrosive, and the sea is a bit wet and un-solid, which means that flying boats can be tricky to maintain. The crew must be trained in how to manoeuvre both in the air and on the water, which is a lot more difficult than it sounds.

    All this said, the main reason they disappeared (despite brave attempts such as the Saunders Roe Princess) is the proliferation of prepared runways following the Second World War. The Allies in particular made great use of airborne transport and built or substantially improved hundreds of airfields across the world, which would form the basis of the explosion in civil aviation in the 1950s and later.

    Many of you, dear readers, might think this is where our airborne stories end, content to watch land planes sail along today and make wistful comments about a 90-year old world none of us were a part of. But no, we are not finished, not just yet, because there are other ways of travelling in the sky.

    Back in the 18th Century, long before the Wright brothers, the first demonstration of human-carrying flight occurred when the Montgolfier brothers discovered that if air was heated, its density was reduced, and thus it would float above the surrounding air. To put it briefly; they had invented the hot air balloon. Such things were initially put to use either for amusement or for allowing militaries to see over the horizon, and in both roles their invention met with moderate success.

    However, the 19th Century would see two key developments which would turn an amusement into a somewhat serious form of transport. Firstly, gases even less dense than hot air were discovered and generated (notably hydrogen and helium), which could therefore lift even more weight in the same vehicle; and secondly, a device which could turn a dense, liquid fuel into movement was created: the internal combustion engine. With these developments in hand, the Airship became a possibility.

    While numerous countries experimented with airships, undoubtedly the most successful nation to build airships was Germany. Even before the First World War, it was possible to travel across Germany by airship, long before the advent of commercial airlines using aeroplanes, and during the war Zeppelins (named after their designer von Zeppelin) even became some of the first aircraft of any kind to engage in strategic bombing.

    Following the war, Germany’s airship industry was forced to build airships as part of war reparations, while other nations (notably Britain) tried to turn the technology into a viable transport system around their colonial empires. While the other nations failed, with high profile disasters such as the R101, Germany dug deep, having to support the ailing industry with subsidies and even public subscriptions; the end result was LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, first flying in the late 1920s.

    The exploits of this airship in the 1930s are deserving of their own article, and perhaps I will write one in future, but suffice to say she was successful, becoming the first airship to circumnavigate the world, being repaired in flight in an extremely daring fashion to complete the trip. She would go on to maintain a regular airship service between Germany and Brazil, something which would have been absolutely impossible with aeroplanes of that day.

    But Germany’s airship industry was planning bigger and better things; in 1932 construction was begun on an even more capable ship, and this one you may have heard of; LZ 129 Hindenburg. Eventually requiring substantial backing from the Nazi party (whom the Zeppelin company chairman, Hugo Eckener, personally disliked), she was completed in 1936, and in a matter of months pressed into service on the Atlantic runs to New York and Brazil.

    Hindenburg offered a far smoother, more luxurious alternative to the still-developing flying boats, and was around twice as fast as the ocean liners steaming down below. Some of the trappings of the ocean liner were retained; she featured promenade decks, a grand piano, a restaurant with silver service, even a smoking room and cocktail bar, and despite the price of the tickets (several thousand pounds each way in today’s money), Hindenburg was a compelling option.

    Unfortunately, the end came for Hindenburg on May 6, 1937. While attempting to land at Lakehurst Naval Air Station following an electrical storm, a small spark caused the lifting gas, hydrogen, to ignite, and the whole ship was consumed by flame in seconds. The incredible fact of the day was not that this had happened; but that some of the passengers and crew survived; alas, transatlantic airship travel did not, with even the ever-reliable Graf Zeppelin being retired shortly thereafter.

    While the issues with hydrogen as a lifting gas could have been solved (helium, another lifting gas, was what the Hindenburg was originally designed to use, and is inert), there were some fundamental problems with the idea of airship travel.

    Firstly, even assuming everything worked, airships were very labour intensive to operate, really more like a ship than a conventional aircraft. The bridge crew, for instance, included separate people working both the elevators and the rudder, not to mention an officer of the watch, and a gas board to monitor to check for leaks and purity of the gas. There were also 4 diesel engines to be monitored, not to mention separate navigational equipment, and yet more crew on standby to make repairs to the canvas. Once the ship’s crew had been assembled, they then also required stewards to look out for the passengers in the luxury expected; combine all this and it was not at all unusual for the crew to outnumber the passengers.

    Even without the crew, these ships were farcically large for their capacity (as required by something literally lighter than the air it displaces); Hindenburg could accommodate a measly 70 passengers, but was over 3 times the length of a modern Boeing 747 (which can accommodate literally hundreds).

    There have been numerous attempts to revive the idea of commercial airships since (their huge loiter time and ability to come to a stand do potentially have uses), but so far none has succeeded, and it seems very likely to stay that way.

    In any case, with the word counter having merrily ticked to well over 2500, now seems as good a time as any to sign off. Next time in this little series, we’ll have a good ramble about some other interesting airships, take a good look at their sea-based counterparts, and ponder some of the might-have-beens had history taken a slightly different turn.

    All that remains now though is to wish you an excellent day, thank you for reading, and hope that if you did enjoy this, you might pass it on.

    May 1, 2023

  • The engineering that makes the world go – shipping.

    Dear reader,

    It may not have escaped your notice that I focus heavily on railways on this corner of the internet. This is perhaps giving you a false impression, if for some reason you use my blog as your only indicator how the world works; much as I would like it to be the case, trains worldwide do not make up the majority of transport, although in places they are significant.

    The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of stuff that you buy has to go by ship at some stage. It is worth, before we continue, considering why this might be, by considering the other options.

    I have gone on and on and on about the low rolling resistance of trains, and how this makes them ideal for all manner of things. But a train can only be so wide or long before it starts affecting other trains, infrastructure and so on. Roads have all the same issues and also much worse rolling resistance, although the greater freedom of movement is handy for deliveries. Both modes, of course, require there to be land, or some kind of physical infrastructure, which is not always terribly obliging.

    This leaves us with ships and aeroplanes. I could get into some tangent about the possibilities for airships, but that is a story for another day. Aeroplanes are a wonderful invention, and are by far the fastest way of transporting stuff. That said, they are not without their issues, not least of which is the limitation on weight; even a very large freighter like a Boeing 747 8F only has a maximum payload of 134 tonnes, quite pitifully small compared with the thousands a train might be able to carry. The fuel consumption is also quite high.

    The only real option then is shipping. Ships have huge advantages for long distance transport – no infrastructure outside ports, no worries about the ground being able to support the loads and no worries about allowing freight to pass in each direction.

    Since the invention of iron and later steel shipbuilding in the 19th century, ship sizes have been able to increase enormously. Even when sail was still the common method of propulsion, the famous Cutty Sark (and her lesser known, slightly older competitor Thermopylae, which she was suspiciously similar to) had a frame of wrought iron, although everything you can see on the outside is wood.

    It is worth here saying something about how one measures the size of a ship. Thanks to Archimedes we know that in order for a ship to float, it must displace the same weight of water as she weighs. This is how a ship’s basic displacement is calculated, as is her deadweight tonnage (DWT), the maximum weight of the ship fully laden with cargo, crew, fuel, provisions and so on. However, you may also hear the term gross register tonnage, or GRT, which is actually a measure of volume inside the ship, each registered tonne being considered equal to 100 cubic feet. Net register tonnage refers to the actual cargo volume inside the ship, and so is just like GRT minus all the engines and so on.

    The Cutty Sark and Thermopylae had displacements of around 2100 tonnes. In theory, one could tow the ships on rails on a modern train quite easily. Each could carry several hundred tonnes of tea from China or wool from Australia.

    For comparison, a large modern container ship such as the Maersk Triple E class vessels have an empty displacement of 55,000 tonnes, and fully laden the deadweight tonnage is 196,000 tonnes. Since the Ford Fiesta has become something of a yardstick, I have done some quick sums and worked out that the deadweight tonnage is equivalent to the weight of 161,983 and a half Ford Fiestas. In other words, if you tried to make the weight of this one ship out of brand new Ford Fiestas, and you bought every single new one produced for Britain for a year, you would still have to buy every single new one in Britain for another 58 days to complete the job.

    Another useful yardstick is the Blue Whale, adults of which weigh somewhere in the region of 150 tonnes, meaning that to make the deadweight tonnage one would need at least 1,306.7 adult Blue Whales. Even assuming the most optimistic estimate of the population, this means that the total tonnage of just this class of ships exceeds the weight of all the Blue Whales in the world.

    I admit, it’s a slightly extreme example; until quite recently the size of the locks on the Panama Canal limited the size of many container ships, and this limited size became known as “panamax”. Various other “max” sizes also exist, as ports do not have infinitely deep water or infinitely sized docks. That said, ports are now bigger than ever, and the problem with Panama has now been solved, or at least improved with numerous upgrades to the canal.

    But how on Earth are such large ships even possible? Well, the obvious answer is to go on about the structure of such things, like the torsion box that goes around the ship, and how the huge holds support containers stacked enormously high, and how one can’t actually see most of the containers inside the ship. I know, dear reader, that while some of you might find such things interesting, what you really want to know is how you push something that vast along. As usual, I will not get to the answer straight away, and instead meander through some other interesting but only tangentially related topics.

    What shape do you think the front bit (the bow) of such a ship should be? Now many of you would simply reply that it needs to be pointy to push water out of the way. Surprisingly enough, this is only half correct, because as a ship so built travels through the water, it creates a bow wave, and a large wake. This wake causes a significant amount of drag on the hull, for complicated hydrodynamic reasons I can’t be bothered to go into here.

    In modern large ships, this is counteracted by having a large, blister-like structure just under the water, called a bulbous bow, which creates its own bow wave. As the two bow waves interact, they cancel each other out, reducing the wake and reducing drag, saving a lot of fuel along the way. This only works at certain speeds, since the bow waves are affected by speed, but you get the picture.

    The beating heart of these ships though are the diesel engines. The Maersk Triple Es are a little unusual in that they have two engines, rather than one big one, but to give you some sense of scale each of the two diesel engines produces 42,000 horsepower. They are so large, it is actually possible to stand inside the cylinders, and it is absolutely essential to have stairs and walkways around the outside. These drive the ship along via a propeller directly connected to the output, with no reduction gearing at all. Surprisingly enough, each engine actually runs very slowly (less than 18 rpm), to reduce mechanical wear, as well as noise, and these engines are rather efficient, with 50% efficiency being not uncommon.

    I will return briefly to our Ford Fiesta comparison here. The most powerful diesel engine ever offered in a Fiesta was a 1.5 litre with 118 hp (now discontinued). This means that you would need to connect about 356 Ford Fiestas to match just one of these engines (in production terms, this is just 27 short of a year’s production for the UK).

    You might be wondering why in an age of environmental consciousness, ships still rely on diesel. The answer principally is the energy density of diesel fuel, which is far, far better than a battery or hydrogen or any other alternative fuel. Bio-diesel fuels are not yet available on the scale necessary, and so the only thing that can really be done for the moment (without compromising on the space available for cargo) is to improve the efficiency of the ship and her engines.

    And it is these engines, beating slowly in the hearts of mighty ships, that move containers across the world. Containers are such a standard unit now that you, dear reader, may sometimes hear ships described in terms of twenty-foot equivalent units or TEU, the size of a twenty foot container; over 20,000 of these can fit on newer ships (although 40 foot containers are far more common in all fairness).

    In these containers come nearly everything you buy, from electronics to clothes, to some food, to consumer products, to virtually every computer, phone or tablet you have ever laid eyes upon.

    But this is not the only kind of thing we require to live. These products must be made in the first place, from raw materials, and these raw materials are seldom found conveniently next to where things are produced. Iron ore, for example, is found in many places around the world, but not much in China, despite the fact that most steel is produced there. Even the bread we eat doesn’t last long without going stale; it is produced from grain, which lasts much longer, and this too has to be transported from where it is plentiful to where it is not. And the lifeblood (much as we would wish it not to be) of our modern civilisation, oil, that too must get to where it needs to be used, where pipelines don’t exist.

    For such tasks, we need bulk carriers. These ships are much the same as container ships, but optimised to store large bulk cargoes in enormous, cathedral-like holds. Many of these are extremely heavy and unwieldy when they are fully laden, which often necessitates the use of tugs to maneuver these behemoths in port, notably for oil tankers.

    These ships and their crews, braving oceans many thousands of miles across, deliver the modern world to you. I am repeating myself here, but it really is true. Even 200 years ago, this kind of global trade would only have existed in the minds of dreamers and lunatics, and yet we all enjoy its fruits now, simply by driving a car (I neglected to mention car carrying ships here, but I did at least remember to mention oil tankers briefly) or shopping in a supermarket.

    I do hope, dear reader, I have entertained you at least somewhat, and that at least some of the wonder I feel at the world has been rubbed off on you.








    August 23, 2020
    Bow, Bulk, Engines, Ship, Shipping, Ships, Trade

  • Why the U.S. has a terrible but brilliant railway system.

    Dear reader,

    If you are of the internationally minded type, and know much about the United States of America, you will notice that Americans very rarely reference going on a train. You have probably heard of the New York subway, and you might have seen some very lucky American making some journey on a metro somewhere, but on the whole, Americans get around by car or by aeroplane (what they would, quite incorrectly, call an airplane).

    It might surprise you, dear reader, to find out that once America’s railroads were the primary mode of transport, and that this state of affairs continued until well into the 1940s. This was no Victorian obsession.

    The story of how things went from that state of affairs to that it is now is complicated, and involves many surprising parties, some measure of betrayal and more than a little cold war suspicion. I am not an expert on this period, but I will attempt to do it some justice in the limited space here.

    Our story really begins in the late 1930s. It is not true to say that cars were not a factor during this time; in the country that had given birth to the Model T Ford 20 years earlier, automobiles were nothing new. Nor were automobile focused streets and highways a particularly new concept; many schemes were already under construction.

    It is also not true to say that at this time there was no competition from aircraft. And I do say aircraft because at the time there was a distinction made between lighter than air (airships, though they were on the way out) and heavier than air aircraft (aeroplanes, helicopters were not yet a thing). Mail by air was reasonably common, and the transport of passengers not uncommon, at least among the very rich.

    Despite this, though, the railroads were still large, complex, and powerful. It was possible and indeed desirable to travel from coast to coast by train, as well as to innumerable cities across the country. Competition between companies was rife, famously between the Pennsylvania and New York Central, each with its glamourous flagship train (Pennsylvania had the Broadway Limited, and the New York Central had the 20th Century Limited, which it confusingly dubbed ‘the most famous train in the world’).

    U.S. railroads led the world in numerous ways. While in Britain, most freight trains were still loose coupled affairs with minimal brakes, in the U.S. continuous braked freight trains had long been the norm. Further, while British train guards and firemen would be climbing down between coaches to couple trains, automatic couplers were entirely standard on US railroads.

    Steam engines were still very common but diesel power was being pioneered in many different forms, from streamlined railcars to multi-unit locomotives.

    Speaking of streamlining, this was very in vogue in this period. Although much of the work was to make trains look more stylish, some had a serious point; reducing aerodynamic drag. The U.S. railroads excelled not so much at ultimate top speed as sustained speed over distance, as befits the wide distances between cities, and speed and comfort over what the rest of the world might consider rubbish track.

    This gives you, dear reader, a flavour of how things were, but does not explain why that’s not the case today. The answer really begins at World War 2, as so much of the 20th century does.

    World War 2 spurred a hitherto unheard of level of technical innovation, particularly in the field of aviation. At the beginning of the war, biplanes had finally given way to monoplanes, and piston engines were pushing 1,000 hp. By the end of it, pilots were flying around in some parts of the world in swept wing jet fighters that could touch well over 400 mph. Pilots who were less lucky could expect to fly in aircraft with piston engines with over 2,000 hp.

    One other unexpected side-effect of the war was the construction across large parts of the world of high quality paved runways, in order to service the large air forces of the various powers. Combine this with the large factories used to mass producing large all-metal aeroplanes, and the stage was set for a post-war aviation boom.

    Large airliners were going further, faster and more comfortably between airports that were capable of serving them. Further, the U.S. government continued to subsidise the air mail business, hoping to encourage new air routes and continue U.S. innovation in aviation.

    These were beginning to make inroads into the railroad’s business, at least on long haul routes of many hundreds of miles. It would take the arrival of the jet airliner in the late 1950s to almost completely destroy this market, but in the meantime, the shorter haul routes between nearby cities seemed safe.

    Or were they? I had mentioned before that cars and highways were nothing new, but after the war, both were taken to new heights. The large factories that had fed the U.S. war machine could in peacetime be turned to other things, one of which was cars. Cheaper, more capable cars rolled off production lines and onto the driveways of new suburbs, which had been created primarily for the benefit of car drivers.

    By itself, this might have been a challenge that the railroads could rise to, but they quickly found that the game had been rigged, by a rather unlikely source. And to explain that, we have to take a detour into a world of Cold War paranoia.

    Following the end of the Second World War, the world found itself with two principal superpowers; the U.S.A and the U.S.S.R, each keen to demonstrate the superiority of its economic system (if Soviet Socialism can even be described as such), and expand its global influence. To this end, the world became increasingly split into nations that supported one or the other, and the Cold War began.

    The two principal nations in this battle of wills had nuclear weapons, and, while this made a conventional military conflict impossible, it left a few problems. Not least of these was the possibility that one side could cripple the other’s capabilities by taking out its nuclear weapons first, the so-called ‘first strike’ scenario.

    In the early days of the Cold War, when each side relied heavily on aircraft dropping their nuclear weapons, the vulnerable points were airfields. But what if there was some way of having large, flat, straight, paved areas as a standard feature? What if there was just so much pavement that destroying it all was practically impossible? What if they could also use these for other military vehicles? What about for rapid evacuations and troop movements?

    And so, what some in the car world had dreamed of for years finally came to pass. It would be, and remains, the single largest, most expensive infrastructure project in history: the Interstate Highway System. With Department of Defense funding, this became a reality.

    Ah, you may say, with all this investment and good fortune for the other modes of transport, surely the railroads got something good too? Well, they certainly got some extra freight business during the war, keeping the war machine turning, but beyond that… not much. Suffice to say, the 1950s saw the railroads in decline, and the 1960s saw almost a complete collapse.

    Eventually, in the 1970s, what passenger trains remained were combined and nationalised to form AmTrack. AmTrack owned very little track of its own, just the North-East corridor (which would later be reborn into the almost European-style mainline railway it is today). But this story is not about passenger trains, at least not from this point.

    Because, while for passengers the railroads were no longer a good option, there is one inescapable property of railways that counts in their favour. Railways run trains with steel wheels on steel rails, producing very low rolling resistance. Much lower than a road vehicle, and without the immense power needed to achieve flight. This can be exploited to transport very heavy loads without much force being needed, ideal for freight.

    Particularly in the last 30 years, U.S. railroads have become possibly the greatest, most efficient freight transport system in the world. They transport a far greater proportion of freight by rail than in just about any other developed nation, with private companies competing to slash freight rates and get ever more efficient.

    Part of this is due to the extreme train lengths and weights they achieve. In Great Britain, for reference, a very heavy freight train might be pushing 2,500 tonnes, no small amount compared to the few tonnes a lorry might carry. In the U.S. certain types of freight train average over 10,000 tonnes, and even their container trains can achieve averages of nearly 5,000.

    This sheer scale, mated to low rolling resistance, means efficiency unheard of elsewhere. For example, Union Pacific estimates that it can move a tonne of freight 480 miles with just 1 gallon of diesel. If you drive a Ford Fiesta, this is roughly equivalent to getting 397 mpg, a huge improvement over Ford’s claimed best of 65.7 mpg.

    Of course, we do have to mention the rather lower standards of trackwork in the U.S., as well as the rather poorer safety record of their railroads. I appreciate that given recent events this might not sound true, but in Britain we have by far the safest railway in Europe and worldwide we are amongst the best performing for safety. U.S. standards and safety devices (or lack thereof) are, I must admit, a bit shocking to a British audience, but the fact of the matter is that with the vast majority of trains being freight, through routes largely in the middle of nowhere, the potential for injury and loss of life is lower.

    By finding a market that very few others can touch them in, that is, long distance, heavy freight for very low prices, the U.S. railroads have become world leaders once again. While in Europe we may scoff at their lack of proper high speed routes or even passenger trains at all in some parts, it is undeniable that nothing in Europe can touch the Americans for freight.

    Either way, dear reader, I do hope you have come away from this article marginally better informed than you were, and that you have a splendid day.






    August 22, 2020
    1930s, 1940s, 1950s, Brakes, Cargo, Couplings, Economy, Efficiency, Freight, Market, Markets, Passengers, Rail, Railroad, Railway, Rates, rolling, Rolling resistance, Safety, Train, Trains, Transport, U.S., U.S.A, Union Pacific, UP, US, USA

  • Some thoughts on architecture, modern and otherwise.

    Dear reader,

    Today’s topic really is a controversial one. Or is it? Certainly in the discussions online, there is a sizeable minority, either of genuine architects or fans of their ilk, who support modern architecture, and scoff at any attempt to recreate the styles of the past. But they are, I will argue, in the minority.

    I think it is important to remember that what we might term “modern” architecture is a bit older than most people think. Certainly it can trace its roots to the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s, and in some cases even earlier. The trend for large sheets of glass on buildings began much earlier, in fact the first buildings constructed in this manner were in the Victorian era (though it is true that at the time the practice was far from common and widely derided).

    Many would say that the rise of bad architecture really was in the 1950s and 1960s. It is obvious that during this period, many quite horrifically ugly buildings were put up. Bare concrete looks can look an attractive off-white when first applied, but alas, it water stains badly, and besides, the ugly geometric shapes did little to enhance the appeal of such buildings.

    One of the aesthetic horrors of this period was pebbledash. Large panels filled with stones, while vaguely reminiscent of a shingle beach, looked very bad indeed on flat, boring panels. I suppose at the very least, the attempt to use natural patterns was welcome.

    But a lot of people are prepared to give any building that isn’t concrete a free pass, no matter how ugly or downright insulting it is. Many large buildings are now constructed using a steel frame, onto which large, flat panels (usually either glass or some god awful cladding) are placed mounted.

    I do not dispute that this is an effective building method; it is far easier and quicker than most other methods, and allows pre-fabrication of virtually everything before it arrives on site. Coupled with modern surveying methods, this allows for astounding levels of precision in construction (I was taught, for example, that being even 5 mm out is often unacceptable).

    I also do not dispute that glass is useful; natural light is good for you, and can often reduce the energy use of the building. Depending on the location, the view can also be quite the advantage too.

    Unfortunately, while these buildings are quick and effective to construct, and quite light, they have the enormous disadvantage of being universally terrible to look at. Modern “architects” seem to have got it into their heads that the only appropriate shape for a building is a geometric one. Detailing has become something of a lost art; the modern fashion is minimalism; of showing off clean, uninterrupted lines, or, in real terms, showing off nothing, displaying nothing but a cold reflection.

    Ah you may say, does this not also make the building cheaper? The answer is neither yes nor no. It is true that traditional buildings require craftspeople who need to be paid. Stonemasons in particular can be very pricey, but this is partly as a result of the fact that there are very few of them; one cannot escape the laws of supply and demand.

    However, one underestimates the level of craftmanship that goes into minimal buildings. The extreme precision I talked about earlier is in fact essential if these buildings are to look as they are supposed to. There can be no scruffy joints between ceilings and floors, for example, because there are no skirting boards to cover this up, necessitating skilled (and therefore expensive) plasterwork. Each panel has to fit perfectly because there are no details to cover up some small imperfection, and therefore the engineering standards required are so much higher. For these reasons, I would object to the idea that buildings have to look boring because we cannot afford anything else.

    All this is a form of preamble, to give some general points and background. Now I must make the point that inspired me to write this article.

    The simple idea is this; most people vastly prefer traditional architecture to the modern alternatives. People flock to see the beauty of Paris, but very few want to see Munich. Tourists wonder at the grandeur of St Paul’s cathedral; a vastly smaller number, I suspect, want to look at the Gherkin.

    It is simply an irrelevant point to say that beauty is subjective. While it is true that every person has a slightly different conception of what they find beautiful, there are things that most people would agree are beautiful. Since public buildings have to be viewed and used by the majority, it baffles me that organisations choose architects and designs with such niche and baffling tastes.

    But what exactly is it people like about traditional architecture? There is, after all, a huge variety of architectural styles, but all of them share certain things in common. These are mainly to do with human scales; details are often modeled on things that humans can relate to like leaves. Partly due to limitations of technology, many old buildings are never particularly tall, nor do they have huge, unsupported overhangs. The appeal appears to come from the fact that they are intuitive and obviously human.

    To illustrate the points that I am making, let me show you Birmingham, certainly not a particularly romantic city. Now, while many would deride the city, she is not without her highlights. For example, look at the details on this wall

    Wonderful, isn’t it? Very neat brickwork, detailing, coats of arms, interesting but not overwhelming shapes and colours. Truly, a superb little gem in the middle of Birmingham. Unfortunately, this lovely piece is somewhat overlooked due to its surroundings…

    Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the walls enclosing Snow Hill railway station. This place is the tragedy of (at least some aspects of) modernity in microcosm.

    Snow Hill station can trace its roots back all the way to the 1850s, when it was built by the Great Western Railway company as a temporary wooden structure, on the site of an old glassworks. It was rebuilt several times over the years; the most significant of these rebuilds took place between 1906 and 1912. This rebuild was designed to allow the station to compare with New Street, the other large railway station in the city, and its grandeur and luxury was such that reportedly Harland & Wolffe, builders of the Titanic, were jealous of the first class waiting rooms.

    The route the station served, from London Paddington, was in direct competition with the London North Western Railway’s route from London Euston, which went (and still in fact goes) to Birmingham New Street.

    Snow Hill, however, was able to survive two world wars, and remained reasonably competitive well into the 1960s, by which point the world was beginning to catch up with the railways as a whole. Two factors would lead to the downfall of Snow Hill; Post World War 2, the Attlee government had nationalised the railways, but perhaps more importantly, a new, exciting form of transport was beginning to show itself; the car.

    Cars had been around for quite some time, but by the 1960s they were faster, more reliable and, essentially, more affordable to buy and run than ever. Exciting new infrastructure in the form of motorways was springing up everywhere to provide for these new cars, and thus people were buying them in droves.

    This was causing a drop in passenger numbers on the railways, not to mention freight volumes lost to modern, capable lorries. British Railways, as it was then, was struggling to catch up with the modern world, and hemorrhaging money in the process.

    Into this melee stepped Dr Beeching. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of his career, but he felt that the way to fix the railways’ money problems was to economise. Where there had been two previously competing railways, he proposed, there should only be one. Why have two stations when one would do? After all, money could be put into improving the remaining one.

    And so it was in Birmingham. Much of Snow Hill’s traffic was transferred to New Street or simply dispensed with altogether. Snow Hill was left to rot, its grand canopies now sheltering a car park.

    It will surprise some readers to learn that this was not the real tragedy of the piece. Left to rot it may have been, but the buildings remained. Their heritage was not, at least in the early 1970s, completely lost. No, the real tragedy was that they wanted to have a railway station on the site.

    Yes, you read that correctly. It was decided that the old station was subsiding, and that the car park needed to be kept, and therefore the old station needed to be demolished in order to make way for what we now see. That the new one could scarcely have been uglier, or that the passenger environment could scarcely have been less inviting, seemed to not be on the agenda.

    If you are wondering about what happened to New Street, you are also in for a disappointment; the station was rebuilt in the 1960s, to a rather horrible but higher capacity concrete design, with the platforms all under concrete with little ventilation. The station has become more pleasant in recent years, but very little remains of the original.

    The case of Snow Hill is by no means unique; much of the Birmingham skyline has been transformed over the past 50 or so years. Fairly modest traditional buildings like this:

    The corner of Corporation / New Street. Plenty of detail here. Everywhere one looks the craftsman has been at work.

    Have been replaced with this kind of thing…

    Primark, Birmingham. There is nothing about this building one cannot appreciate at a glance. It is simply made up of triangles crudely wedged together.

    That this is a downgrade is obvious. One other thing to appreciate is the vast gulf of asphalt road between where this photograph was taken and the building. This is yet another mistake that has ruined a lot of cities, replacing charming cobbles with plain black tarmac with large markings and road signs designed exclusively around cars, rather than the people actually in the city.

    Other mistakes in Birmingham include this:

    Cornwall House, Birmingham. That the photograph is not correctly focused is irrelevant; even if focused, the building has virtually no interest.

    Large, unfriendly glass panels, small, grotty openings inexplicably on their own to the left, waterstained pebble dash… one can scarcely conceive an uglier building.

    Not that they haven’t tried. This rather bizarre affair is actually in the possession of the Teenage Cancer Trust, a very worthy charity, but I do have to wonder just what the architect was smoking when he came up with this:

    Teenage Cancer Trust Building, Birmingham. Angles, angles galore. Oh and windows. And a bit of green. And a railing. What are we making again? Oh yes, a building? Ah. Right.

    It seems even the statues despair at this monstrosity, as evidenced outside:

    Statue and pond outside the Teenage Cancer Trust Building, Birmingham. A rather moving illustration of grief and despair amongst a host of ugliness.

    Some architects have tried to ape past styles, but do so in a modern way. These buildings really demonstrate the phrase “so near, and yet so far”. Let’s take a look at one.

    Unidentified building near canal, Birmingham.

    Forget for a minute the bizarre bridge over the canal in the foreground. It is also terrible, and completely out of keeping with the industrial heritage of the canals, but it is not the point of our discussion.

    Well, you might say, this has some old building materials, a bit of brick here and there, and a few details, what is the problem?

    Well, the first issue is the large, flat expanses of glass in between the brickwork. The natural light is good, but the rather blank reflection in them does little for the character of the building, not to mention being expensive, difficult to transport and fragile.

    The other major issue is the brickwork itself. An attempt has been made to make it look traditional, but it looks wrong, and indeed you will see this on many buildings. This has to do with the way that the brickwork is put together, and the principal problem is the “bond” of the brickwork, or its arrangement.

    You see, bricks have several faces. There is the shiner, the largest face, which is usually faced downwards, the header, which is the smallest face, on the end, and the stretcher, which is the other face.

    Why is this relevant? In the old days, most buildings were single-brick, that is, there was only one wall. Therefore, this wall needed to be very strong as it alone had to hold up the building, and the brick “bond” must include some headers faced outwards alongside the stretchers. This type of construction is not without its problems, as it is quite a poor insulator both of heat and sound.

    The more modern way of doing it is to build cavity walls, effectively two walls with a gap in between. This is a much better insulator, and it means that neither wall has to be as strong as the old ones. Therefore, it is possible to use a “stretcher” bond, just made up of stretchers facing outwards, which, while weaker, saves bricks.

    It is, however, one reason why modern brickwork never looks quite correct, coupled with thicker modern mortars. One other problem with modern bricks is that they are often made to look “rustic” by printing patterns into the brick, but in reality if you look at the wall you’ll notice the supposedly random patterns repeat and the illusion falls apart. Suffice to say, these walls do not actually fit in and look hopelessly generic.

    Perhaps I am after all an old fashioned sort of chap. Perhaps I am just resisting “progress” or some such. In any case, dear reader, I do hope I have made some decent points, and I do hope you enjoyed this rather rambling explanation of my opinion.

    August 21, 2020

  • Le Mans 2019 – In Numbers

    Believe it or not, dear reader, this is not the first time that I have sat down to write an article on this topic. However, I fell into something of a trap with that article, trying to get across every single nook, cranny and detail I could, along with a plethora of photographs. This may eventually have been released, but alas, I find myself rather short of time.

    This left me with the problem of how to tell you, my dear and valued reader, about the greatest motor race on earth. It occurs to me that since the race begins this Saturday, I am running low on time, which means that this article you are reading right now must be delivered very soon.

    What I eventually decided to do is to describe the race in terms of something which (hopefully) everyone can understand, something very simple indeed; numbers. Starting with…

    24

    No. ofย hours the race takes place over. This has generated some of the greatest drama in motor racing history, since a car that has a problem may still be fixed and come back to be competitive. Last year, for example, the car that came first had a shunt on the first lap.

    3

    No. of drivers for each car. You didn’t think that one person would be driving for the whole thing did you? Well, in the past people did, but these days, each car has 3 drivers assigned to it, who take turns (called stints) to get in the car and drive.

    62

    No. of cars on the entry list. The shear numbers mean that there is bound to be close racing somewhere throughout the race; it also means that the faster cars have interesting high-speed traffic to deal with, which is exacerbated by the fact the next number is conveying…

    4

    No. of “classes” of car in the race. There are two forย Prototypes, that is, cars that are specifically designed for endurance racing (LMP1 and LMP2) and two forย GTs, or Grand Tourers, that is, highly modified road cars (GTE Pro and GTE Am). To briefly explain these classes, from slowest to fastest:

    • GTE Am: These are run by privateer teams, who don’t manufacture their own cars. The drivers are not professionals, and so although the cars are similar to the other GT category, they tend to be somewhat slower.
    • GTE Pro: Similar cars to GTE Am, but cars are run by professional teams; mainly manufacturer-backed.
    • LMP2: Cars here are procured by teams from one of three manufacturers, and then run by the team privately. Since all the machinery is similar, the competition is fierce.
    • LMP1: The fastest category, teams here are allowed to develop their cars to go as fast as possible, within certain rules. Hybrids are also allowed (and we’re talking more like a Maclaren P1 than a Prius), although these days only Toyota are still using them.

    3544

    No. of tyres allocated. Each class of car gets a slightly different allocation, but the cars are allocated around 50 – 60 tyres each for the race. Granted, not all of them will get used; one will not of course use wet weather tyres in the dry, for example, but it does give a good sense of scale.

    8.467

    No. of miles of track. The track itself, the Circuit de la Sarthe, is a circuit partly made up of converted roads, and partly specialist race track. It is steeped in history; almost every corner has become a famous motorsport name.

    9

    Largest no. of victories a driver has attained at Le Mans; this record was set by Danish driver Tom Kristensen, though he hasn’t raced here since 2013. He managed this over a 17 year period, which goes to show just how tough this race is.

    19

    Largest no. of overall victories for a single manufacturer; this record is held by Porsche, but again, they achieved this over around 50 years.


    This years race begins, as I write this, in around 10 minutes. I would of course highly recommend that you give it a look, but other than that, all that is left is to wish you a pleasant and interesting day, until the next time.


    Picture credits:

    – Featured Image: United Autosports via Wikimedia Commons (Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

     

    June 15, 2019
    Circuit de la Sarthe, GTE, GTE Am, GTE Pro, Le Mans, LMP1, LMP2, Racing

  • The New East Midlands Franchise & Associated Fallout

    Dear reader, as you may be aware, I frequent the East Midlands railway network. This activity brings a variety of experiences, some good, some bad, and some ugly. For example, while I have had some excellent journeys on the Midland Mainline on various fast trains, I have also witnessed the rather tragic state of affairs that is the regular single-coach train between Derby and Crewe. I was also aware that with changes to disabled access regulations, and increasing passenger numbers, the Inter-City rolling stock could not stay as it is.

    Against this backdrop I looked forward to a new franchise being awarded. We now know who the winner of that competition is, but there has been considerable fallout from decisions taken surrounding it, and so this article will come in two parts:

    Part 1: The New Franchise

    After much pushing back of the date it was to begin, the winner of the competition, to take over in August, was announced as Abellio. Now, Abellio are not complete newcomers to running trains in this country – they already run the Greater Anglia and ScotRail franchises – and indeed they are the commercial arm of the Netherlands’ state railway operator, so we naturally expect great things.

    That’s all very well and good, but what are they promising? For the purposes of this article, I shall split the proposals up into 2 broad categories:

    Inter-City

    These are the trains serving London, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield and so on. At up to 125 mph these are considerably faster than all the others run by the franchise, and they serve a slightly different market.

    Apart from a smattering of timetable changes and tweaks (for example more trains calling at Luton) Abellio propose to replace the existing fleet (a mixture of decades-old High Speed Trains and more recent “Meridian” trains) with a completely new fleet of bi-mode trains. “bi-mode” means that these trains will run on electricity where there are overhead wires and diesel engines the rest of the time.

    This wasn’t their idea, as the Department for Transport has been pushing for these on the Midland Mainline for quite some while now. I personally think this is somewhat unwise – the bi-mode train must lug about a diesel engine and fuel when running on electricity, both of which are useless to it when running in this mode. Equally, it must lug about a whole host of useless electrical equipment when it is running on diesel. This naturally has an impact on the train’s performance, particularly on diesel.

    Such problems are further compounded by the fact that as it stands the route is only being electrified as far as Market Harborough, meaning that about half the route will have to be done on diesel power, with potentially worse performance than the existing “Meridian” trains. Giving the trains better performance on diesel only is likely to be expensive and make them heavier, passing the cost either onto the train leasing company or Network Rail who maintain the infrastructure.

    Ideally, the entire route would be electrified, and pure electric trains (which are lighter and cheaper) would have been ordered. Alas, we may only hope that whoever gets the contract to build these trains has been very clever in their design.

    Regional

    These trains go all over the East Midlands, stopping at all kinds of smaller stations. This is a very different market, in fact, most of these trains were once upon a time operated by a completely different franchise called Central Trains, but I digress.

    The proposals here are somewhat less ambitious. Apart from the usual timetable changes and other service tweaks (notably more Sunday services), Abellio propose to introduce “refurbished modern trains”, a phrase which gives little away as to what they might turn out to be. We do get some clues in the list of features these trains are supposed to have, as alongside WiFi and all the other mod cons is air conditioning.

    Air conditioning is significant because currently a good chunk of the East Midlands Trains fleet does not have it, relying instead on opening windows for ventilation. Thus, without heavy modification, we are going to see many of these trains go.

    What will replace them? My money would be on trains drafted in from elsewhere, which is not necessarily a bad thing – far better to give perfectly good trains a stout refurbishment and put them to work where they are needed than to scrap them.

    The wildcard of all the proposals is the trialling of hydrogen fuel cell trains. I am of course very pleased about this development, but I really have talked about Hydrogen quite enough on this website.


    Part 2: Fallout

    The big news did not end with the ascension of Abellio. The incumbent, Stagecoach, were banned from bidding – not just for this but also for the Southeastern and West Coast Partnership franchises. This was because the Department for Transport was not happy with the pensions arrangements in their bids.

    Railway pensions are a looming issue that has thus far gone largely unnoticed. Some sources claim that the pensions deficit for the rail industry could be as large as ยฃ5-6 billion, a not-insignificant cost I am sure you will agree. Even if it is not quite that large, there is a bill that will need paying, and an argument over who should settle it.

    Who is responsible will depend on your reading of the situation, but I do think it was unfair to simply ban Stagecoach from bidding for 3 franchises. For a start, on the West Coast Partnership franchise (that will include HS2, by the way) Stagecoach were bidding with Virgin – banning their bid could see the end of Virgin Trains, an operator that has done an enormous amount to raise standards on the Great British railway.

    This also further discourages British companies from taking part in the rail market in their own country. Already, due to increasing premium payments and increasingly rigid franchise contracts, National Express has rid itself of all involvement, despite once being among the largest owning groups. With Stagecoach (and possibly Virgin) now potentially also soon to leave, and more contracts going to foreign state-backed enterprises, the picture looks even more bleak.

    These foreign state-backed concerns (including Abellio and Arriva, who are backed by German State rail operator DB) can afford to take on more risk because they have the backing of governments. This might be convenient for a Department wanting to move risk away from itself, but it isn’t fair on foreign taxpayers and leaves British companies (in fact, private companies of any kind) struggling to compete.

    We can at least take heart from the fact that Stagecoach are not taking this lying down. They are challenging the decision, as are Virgin, and I do hope they succeed in getting the decision reversed. I believe they have a strong case – after all, the Department for Transport has had all these bids for months, and nothing was said at the time of submission. It does seem rather strange to take months to notice something apparently so glaring.

    Even if they lose in a legal challenge, Virgin have a trump card – among a consortium of companies, they recently acquired domestic airline Flybe. The airline is to be rebranded as part of Virgin Atlantic and promises “improved connectivity at Manchester and London Heathrow”. Manchester and London, oddly enough, are prominent on the existing Virgin Trains route map, and will also be under the West Coast Partnership franchise. Coincidence? I think not.

    Alas, the time has now come for me to end my incoherent rambling and thank you for reading. Please do leave a comment if you feel inclined, and have a sublime morning/afternoon/evening/night (delete as appropriate).

    April 17, 2019
    2019, East Midlands, East Midlands Railway, East Midlands Trains, HST, Hydrogen, Meridian, Midlands, National Express, Rail, Railway, Railways, Stagecoach, Train, Trains, Virgin, Virgin Trains

  • Some Miscellaneous Myths

    Dear reader… gosh it has been a while. I had intended to write more, but alas life has been quite busy recently and the inspiration isn’t quite so easy at the moment. I’m sure you understand. In any case, it is a pleasure to once again have your company, at least for the next few minutes.

    The top item on today’s agenda (which you may have guessed if you read the title, you clever thing you) is myths. Given the rich tapestry of topics I usually mention here, it is rather unsurprising that from time time people believe things which are not quite true, and, this afternoon, I shall try to convince you, dear reader, not to believe them.

    (You must understand, before we begin, that I’m not trying to be a smart alec here; I genuinely used to believe some of these too)

    Myth 1: U-Boats Were Submarines

    Not that I would ever suppose to know your thoughts, dear reader, but I suspect many of you are thinking that I must have, in my over-month-long break, finally lost it. One might point out, with just a dash of indignation, that they submerged, didn’t they? Was this not what made them dangerous? Did we not hear that rather amusing story of a U-Boat being sunk by its toilet?

    The answer to all of these questions is at least a partial yes. However, most U-Boats spent most of the time on the surface, making them more boats that could submerge (submersibles) than submarines which could surface (a true submarine).

    This was because while U-Boats were powered by batteries underwater, they charged these batteries using diesel engines. These diesel engines needed (as diesel engines have an annoying habit of needing) oxygen, which they got from the ambient air, which the sea has an alarming lack of. The exhaust gases also need to go somewhere, and again the air is the ideal place. Hence they had to surface to recharge.

    While not exactly quick on the surface at a rather underwhelming 17.7 knots (that’s 20.4 mph), a Type VII U-Boat could only crawl along at an agonising 7.6 knots (just 8.7 mph) under the waves. There are many reasons for this, but one is that the hulls were really designed more for being boats on the surface, and didn’t cut through the water so well under the surface.

    Eventually, U-Boats were fitted with snorkels (no really, that is the term) which allowed them to take air and expend exhaust gases without having to surface. Newer types had much larger batteries and were much faster beneath the waves, thanks to better hydrodynamic design, but these types, while among the first real submarines, were a small minority.

    Myth 2: The Americans Spent Millions Developing a Space Pen; The Soviets Just Used Pencils

    This one is almost true. Both sides of the space race (the big one, not the Hydrogen one I mentioned last time) did initially use pencils.

    The pencil is of course a very simple device; when you use one, some graphite is scraped off the end, which gets stuck to the page and shows as the familiar dark grey mark. Not all of this graphite immediately adheres to the page, however. Some is dislodged and becomes dust, which isn’t really a problem on Earth since it falls to the ground harmlessly. In space, however, where the effects of gravity are far lower, this dust gets trapped in ventilation systems, gets stuck in instrument panels, and, since it’s also conductive, can cause electrical problems. This problem gets much worse if you snap the tip of the pencil.

    While pencils are sometimes not quite that risky, the space environment can also throw some other problems at the traditional writing instrument. There can be huge changes in pressure and temperature, and there is the risk that any gas dissolved in ink may diffuse out. Thus the Fisher Space Pen was developed to avoid these issues, but that really is a story for another day.

    Myth 3: You Can See the Great Wall of China From the Moon

    I admit that most of you probably do not believe this, but for those that do, let me explain.

    The Earth is actually quite small from the moon, and seeing any man-made object from that distance on the surface of Earth is near-impossible. None of the Apollo astronauts recorded seeing anything on the surface of Earth while on the moon.

    In fact, while we’re on the subject, it is really very difficult to see the Great Wall from space full stop. You see, it is made from stone which is not altogether different in colour from the stone in the mountains surrounding it. It also is relatively narrow (in the order of a few metres) making it hard to discern when seen from directly above at a distance of over 60 miles away while travelling at several thousand miles per hour.

    Much easier to see from space are cities, if we’re picking man-made objects. On the light side of Earth their much greater area makes them easier to spot and on the dark side the lights from cities make them extremely easy to spot. Indeed, this has given rise to many interesting phenomena, including the fact that you can always spot East from West Berlin because the former east Germany used lightbulbs that give off a slightly different colour of light.

    Myth 4: Bumblebees Shouldn’t Be Able to Fly

    This one is an odd one because, as is fairly obvious to anyone who has enjoyed a summer in England, Bumblebees do fly. The claim is that according to the “laws of aviation” (whatever that means) the Bumblebee should not be able to fly. I suppose the implication is that nature is way better than us at things, or perhaps someone was just trying to sound clever. We may never know.

    This is pure nonsense. As far as anyone can tell, the calculations that “prove” that bees shouldn’t be able to fly were very rudimentary, and were not intended for aircraft of that small a scale. They also ignore the interesting ways in which bees move their wings, and several entomologists (people who study insects) have spent considerable time debunking the myth.

    If there’s one good thing we can take out of the myth, it is this; always check your calculations – they may have limitations.

    Myth 5: Aircraft Flush Toilet Waste Out

    Again, not a difficult one to debunk this (when was the last time a frozen icicle of urine fell where you live?). This is quite obviously not the ideal solution to the problem – instead, toilet waste is retained in tanks on the aircraft and then removed at an airport by specialist vehicles. It isn’t completely unheard of to have a leak of the waste retention tank but it is quite unlikely.

    BUT: (some) trains do

    While almost all modern trains have retention tanks for toilet waste, this has not always been a requirement. Indeed, there are still many trains in the UK that do just flush toilet waste straight onto the track (this is why you should never flush the toilet in stations) and although they are due for replacement in the next few years this may take longer than planned.


    Well, I do hope you enjoyed that detour through some of the many small falsehoods people believe. Now, dear reader, we must part company again (unless of course you choose to read some of my other stuff), and all I can do is wish you a very pleasant day…

    April 11, 2019
    Air, bee, Bees, Bumblebee, Myth, Myths, Rail, Submarine, UBoat

  • The Hydrogen Train Space Race

    Dear reader, you may not be surprised to learn that I mainly talk about the past on this blog. Not that I am uninterested in the future; it’s just that there is quite a lot of past, and many stories I think warrant bringing to your attention. However, in a change to our scheduled programming, this article is very much about the present and future; it is a story of technology, innovation, and most importantly trains.

    Though I have talked about this before (see this article), our story centres on the hydrogen fuel cell, a device which combines hydrogen with oxygen from the air to create electricity, with water as the only waste product. The best part is that although hydrogen can be a dirty fuel, it can also be produced by passing electricity through water, much greener than extracting and burning diesel.

    It might surprise you to learn that for such a modern technology, hydrogen fuel cells are nothing new. They can trace their origins back to the 1800s, but did take a very long time to become useful, especially in vehicles (though interestingly a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine vehicle may have been built in the early 19th century) and so we really had to wait until the 21st century for a practical hydrogen-powered car.

    As far as trains go, aside from small light rail vehicles and one-off prototypes, the first big statement was made in 2017, when European engineering giant Alstom announced the iLint (yes, I agree, a terrible name) version of their Coradia train. The big difference was that this was intended from the start to be a production vehicle, and indeed has entered service in Germany, with more trains to follow.

    At this point, you might be wondering why you haven’t seen a hydrogen-powered train in Great Britain yet (well, unless you happened to see Hydrogen Hero this summer, which yours truly was involved with). The crucial factor here is what train engineers call “loading gauge”. In simple terms, this is the area of the train, looking at it head on, plus an allowance for the train swaying over track and so on. Because the railways of Great Britain were built by a multitude of companies mainly in the 19th century, most of whom wanted to build their railways as cheaply as possible (with narrow tunnels, low bridges, awkward platforms and so on), this area is smaller in Britain than in most of Europe.

    Why is that a problem? I hear you ask. Well, the trouble with hydrogen is that it takes up a lot of room, as it’s not very dense, at all. Since hydrogen also has a horrible habit of exploding when in combination with oxygen and some form of ignition, it also needs protection, which takes up yet more room. Which is fine when you’ve got the large German loading gauge, but not so good with the small British one. Hence the very literal “space race”.

    Still, with the cancellation of electrification up and down the country, and the failure of batteries to provide a long range (at least long enough for the kind of duties a train will do), hydrogen seems the only “green” option left. Step forward the competitors in this new space race, to get a hydrogen powered train in service over here.


    Porterbrook / University of Birmingham

    (picture credit: Porterbrook)

    Competitor number 1 is, rather surprisingly, train leasing firm Porterbrook, who (along with the University of Birmingham) have decided to modify one of the old Thameslink trains to take electircity from a hydrogen fuel cell, rather than from the standard methods. This has the advantage that they do not have to invest in a completely new train, and they have something that they know already works. No doubt Porterbrook felt very happy to be pulling this eminently sensible move, until January this year, when their competitors finally woke up.


    Alstom / Eversholt

    (picture credit: Alstom)

    Their first competition came from Alstom, the company behind the German train, along with Eversholt, another train leasing firm. Instead of using an old Thameslink train, they’re using a relatively similar class 321 train, and in a move that will no doubt go down very well with overheating commuters, their design will feature air coinditioning. Now I agree that in itself isn’t tremendously exciting, but the interesting thing here is where they’ve put the hydrogen tank; Alstom want to put their hydrogen inside the body of the train, in its own compartment. This may allow the Alstom design (called “Breeze” for reasons not immediately obvious) to travel much further on a tank by dint of the the extra room, but this remains to be seen.


    Vivarail

    (picture credit: Vivarail)

    The last company in this race (for now) is a small outfit called Vivarail, who have decided to turn old (but updated a few times along the way) D-Stock London Underground trains into “new” trains powered by a variety of means, including diesel engines, batteries, and now hydrogen. The best thing about these is that fitting stuff under the floor is easy thanks to “rafts” that can fit the hydrogen in. Now, given the relatively small space available, one might expect them not to be able to get far, but they are claiming a range of 650 miles on a tank of hydrogen.


    So the question now is, who do I think is going to succeed? Or, if I think they’re all going to do it, who’s going to get there first?

    I ought to lay my cards on the table from the start, as someone who has worked with the Hydrogen Hero project for the University of Birmingham, I do have a slight bias towards the Porterbrook option, since they are working with the University. That said, I shall do my best to be objective.

    Porterbook claim that testing runs will start in “summer 2019”, which, though it sounds rather vague, could definitely be achievable, given that the old Thameslink trains have already been withdrawn from traffic, and work can already be done. However, “testing” does not necessarily mean carrying passengers. It may be much longer before you’re going to work on one, but if things go well an early 2020s introduction could be on the cards.

    Alstom have the huge advantage of being an engineering giant, with the resources to match. They also are the only company in the race who already have a hydrogen train in service, albeit one in the nice big German style. The big stumbling block here is that although Eversholt do have experience of upgrading class 321 trains, none have currently been withdrawn from service. They might be able to work on one, but this does require that it is withdrawn for a long while, which is hardly going to go down well with the train operators using them. All that said, they do claim that their train could be “running across the UK” (whether they mean carrying passengers is anyone’s guess) by 2022, so don’t discount them just yet.

    As for Vivarail, they have the advantages that they have easy access to trains no-one minds them tinkering with, and they know already how to fit stuff to the underside of trains. They also have test facilities at Long Marston they can use, but they have never built a hydrogen powered train before or partnered with anyone who has. That said, it will be very interesting to see how their design develops, especially given the rapid development pace of their other products.

    In conclusion – it’s anybody’s race. I think we’re in for a very interesting decade for railways, and I shall be following this with particular interest…

    February 20, 2019
    Alstom, Fuel Cell, Hydrogen, Hydrogen Fuel Cell, Porterbrook, Rail, Technology, Train, Trains, Vivarail

  • Some Reasons Why Trains Are Late

    Dear reader, if you have ever travelled on Britain’s railway network, you will probably have noticed that there are sometimes delays. While many complain about these delays, the truth is that most trains arrive within a few minutes of the time promised. Not that it is not annoying when your train arrives late, especially when you have a connection to catch.

    The question, therefore, is why there are such delays. Is it incompetence on the part of the operators? A lack of Government investment, perhaps? Or is the answer a bit more complicated? While there are many causes of delay, I hope to illustrate a few using the medium of storytelling. While the story I am about to tell is entirely fictional, all of the events in it have unfolded in real life in one form or another. So without further ado…

    The time is ten past seven in the evening, the location Birmingham. Birmingham New Street to be exact. It is a relatively calm autumn evening, and the sun has long sunk below the horizon. Inside the rather uninspiring confines of the station, passengers wait eagerly for their various trains. The evening peak has begun to subside, and off-peak tickets are once again valid. In one of the platforms, a graceful Virgin Pendolino sits, doors open, ready for another smooth trip to London. Local trains scurry in and out, moving the commuters and the families, and those out for the evening. Somewhere, the slow train to Wales crawls in too, looking slightly out of place in its old Arriva colours, soon to be replaced by white and red.

    Meanwhile, on Platform 11, the 1912 to Plymouth has just departed. The platform, however, is not empty. The passengers still waiting are for the 1922, to Stansted Airport. This train is rather important since it links no less than 4 main lines, and the advance tickets for it are rather cheap. Duly, the little diesel train rumbles in at 1920, and digorges its passengers.

    Unfortunately, before the incoming passengers have finished getting on, the outbound ones are already boarding. There is an awkward shuffle when a passenger getting off with a suitcase tries to force their way off through the crowds streaming on. The passenger manages to squeeze their way off after some passengers on the platform decide to let her off. But they have lost time. By the time the last few people (running from the stairs, as it happens) have jumped on, it is now 1924. 2 minutes late, but no matter, the New Street dispatch staff are quick off their mark and the train rolls out of New Street losing no more time. For now.

    Meanwhile, miles down the line, a contractor has a problem. There’s a temporary speed restriction here because train drivers are reporting rough riding. This was eventually tracked down to drainage issues under the track, which could probably be solved if the current drains were renovated, but the railway was built over a hundred years ago and there are no proper drawings showing the drains. The contractor would rather not put in new drainage, since this will cost a lot more, and that money will have to come from somewhere, so the temporary speed restriction remains, while they search for the drains.

    The 1922 loses more time negotiating this speed restriction, and arrives at Nuneaton now running 4 minutes late. However, the train is not dispatched promptly as expected. The signal at the end of the platform remains at red. The driver and gaurd are confused, since the train is already late, and there should be no freight or passenger trains holding them up. Eventually the station staff speak to the guard. He nods and walks to the front cab to tell the driver.

    About 4 miles distant, a car lies crumpled and distorted just beyond a railway bridge. The occupants, a man and a woman, got lucky escaped with just cuts and bruises, but (though we are heartened to hear of their good fortune) this is not their story. With the car having struck the bridge at high speed, Network Rail needs to inspect the bridge to ensure it is safe for rail traffic. While they arrive quickly, the inspection, though it concludes that there is no serious damage, also concludes that a temporary speed restriction should be put in place, while repairs are carried out.

    The signal turns to yellow, and the train is dispatched, but this adds another 12 minutes to the delay. Our poor Cross Country train is now 16 minutes late, but worse is to come as Leicester (and the junctions around it) is coming up fast. A train coming from London (this one running on time) is already nearing the junction, and the signalling system’s automatic route setting has set the route for it already. Once again the nose of the train is illuminated by the glow of a red signal, and another minute and a half is lost. Frustrated passengers are beginning to get restless when Leicester’s platform 3 welcomes the train, 17 and a half minutes late.

    Stops at Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford go well, but at Peterborough our heroes must wait once more for a Greater Anglia service to leave the platform, losing yet another 2 minutes. Meanwhile, to compound the tragedy, the freight train behind the Cross Country has to wait even longer. The freight customer will not be happy.

    The observant among you will have noticed that I mentioned that the season was autumn. This means (to the great surprise of absolutely no-one) that leaves fall from the trees. These leaves get turned into a very slippery mulch by trains crushing them, and this in turn means rail conditions akin to black ice. Now our train does have wheel slide protection, but because it can’t put the power down or brake as hard, the train loses a further minute on its journey…

    So what went wrong for our now 20 and a half minute late passengers? Well, a series of events, none of which were the railways’ fault. First the impatient passengers at New Street, then poor Victorian record keeping, and then an unsafe road system. All the delays after that were caused by trains that were themselves on time, and then the poor freight train behind was made late for doing nothing wrong. Indeed, this freight will go on to cause delays elsewhere – it isn’t just going to Peterborough.

    Next time you are on a delayed train, perhaps think about all these things. There is not always incompetence to blame, or profiteering or any such thing. All that remains is for me to wish you an excellent day, and hope that you will pass this on to someone who may enjoy it.

    February 13, 2019
    Autumn, Delays, Passengers, Rail, Train, Trains

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