AN OUTSIDE VIEW

I came across a piece by Stratford Caldecott just now - this is an extract... Perhaps what is missing in much religious formation is the vital instruction to look for God within ourselves. That is to be distinguished from identifying ourselves with God, or thinking that God is Myself. As G.K. Chesterton said, “ Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. ” No, what I mean is that we need to discover God at the root of ourselves if we are discover him anywhere at all. Within ourselves, but beyond the self , is the living presence of the God who creates ...

The Pope has come under criticism for lifting the excommunication of "Bishop" Williamson of the Society of St Pius X. However the "Bishop" was excommunicated for being a member of a sect which by its actions denied the authority and discipline of the Catholic church. "Bishop" needs to be in quotes because the person who appointed him had no authority to do so and he had no authority to deny it. The excommunicated sect to which he belongs was established to maintain the so-called Tridentine Mass at a time when the liturgy was being dumbed down by priests acting on their own initiative, aided and abetted by many bishops. and have prayers in badly translated and crass English instead, with jolly folk tunes instead of the traditional ones with Gregorian Chant and music by composers such as Palestrina. Rather like Orthodox Jews suddenly being told to stop using Hebrew. A significant minority of Catholics then started to attend these traditional services, which ...

So go the words of a popular hymn, based on Psalm 46. However, stillness in the modern Catholic liturgy is more notable for its absence. I have attended a variety of liturgies at different places in the past few months. At my local church we usually have a Novus Ordo mass with Latin chant. This is a dignified celebration and as good as it gets when most of the prayers are in English, which is always mildly irritating due to the bad translation and the kitschy "and also with you" response. At the end of last year I was in Marlow one Sunday and went to mass there, in a nasty 1980s church with a bare brick interior, with unpleasant modern hymns which I had never heard before, sung by a small choir because nobody else present seemed to know them either. Then, in mid-January, I was in Salisbury, which the liturgy used to be quite reasonable but has been distinctly odd recently. On my previous trip, the music was 1970s, and the priest delivered his sermon whilst walking up and down...

The picture above shows what the new fleet of trains for Britain's inter city routes should have looked like, not what has actually been ordered. The contract for the new fleet of inter city trains has now been awarded to Hitachi. 1400 new carriages will be purchased at a cost of £7.5 billion, which works out at £5 million per vehicle. The best thing that can be said about this is that the government has not given in to the "British jobs" argument. But given the present mix of electrified and non-electrified lines, and no firm plans for electrification, this is not the right train for the job just now. The electric fleet on the East Coast Main Line was introduced in 1992 and there is no urgency about replacing it. The refurbished HSTs are also good for another 15 years. The first priority should have been to get on with electrification to Bristol and Cardiff, and probably Aberdeen. Electrification to Exeter would also be desirable, but there are three possible routes to c...

This piece will discuss some general aspects of passenger vehicle design. There are several interacting parameters which need to be considered together. The first of these is what is known as the static loading gauge. This can be thought of as the aperture through which all railway vehicles must be able to pass when running slowly on straight track. In practice, tracks are curved and railway vehicles cut across and project beyond the chord of a circle. Within the wheelbase, the distance cut across the curve is sometimes known as the overthrow and the projection beyond the wheelbase is referred to as the kick-out. A long vehicle cuts off more of a chord than a short one (diagram below) Taking curvature into consideration in this way leads to the concept of the dynamic loading gauge, which, however, also takes account of the suspension characteristics of the vehicle. The diagram shows how gaps between the platform and the train will arise differently at concave and convex platform face...

This is an example of the Swedish X11 suburban train. It has swing-plug doors with handles which rotate out over the gap between platform and train, and a drop-down step which covers the gap. These are desirable features for all new trains, not just for safety, but because they promote faster boarding and alighting, thereby reducing station dwell times. Although there is a big variation in station platform heights, getting on and off trains in Sweden is usually quite easy especially with newer stock. Above we see the doorway of London Underground's District Line D78 stock. These have never been considered successful. These have four single-leaf doorways instead of the traditional two-doubles and two singles at each end. It was thought that the provision of good stand-back space on either side of the doors would have sufficed to promote a good flow of people at stations but in practice these proved inadequate. A similar single-leaf door configuration was adopted for the 1983 J...

Earliest days With new trains on order and a widespread re-allocation of rolling stock, it is an opportune time to ponder rolling stock design. From the earliest days of railways, British trains were based on the design of the stage coach. From this was evolved the Victorian compartment coach, with bench seats running across the width of the vehicle and a hinged door to each compartment on each side. First came four-wheelers, with a wheelbase of 15 feet and a length of not more than 27 feet, having up to five third-class compartments; these were the characteristic vehicle on, for instance, on London suburban railways such as the Metropolitan District Railway (above) and the North London Railway. They were also the standard for long distance trains until well into the 1890s. In the later nineteenth century the standard length of British passenger coaches was progressively increased. First, came six-wheelers about 30 feet long, and then, from the 1870s, came bogie vehicles , initi...