AN OUTSIDE VIEW

More East Coast Magic.60163 Tornado , originally uploaded by FlyingScotsman4472 . The Tornado Trust has done, and does, a great job, and today I received a letter from the Chairman to the covenanters about a proposal to build a replica P2 locomotive. The thinking behind this is that the expertise developed by the Trust should be directed towards further construction. This sounds like a good strategy. However, there are many possible options and in my view, at this stage a feasibility study should consider at least a few of the alternatives. In addition to a straight replica of the 1930s design, some of the obvious ones include a small production run of tank locomotives, suitable for use for the actual traffic on preserved railways round the country. This struck me recently when travelling on Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway, where a 9F was used for to haul five mark one coaches at a top speed of 25 mph. Whilst it is nice to see a 9F in action, this is extravagant and does not p...

Lewes bonfire night , originally uploaded by ec1jack . Good old British anti-Catholicism seems to be in full flood following the current problems. It is well explained on a Marxist interpretation. After the Conquest, lands were granted to the church to enable it to provide services such as education, health and welfare. At the Reformation, the lands were transferred to those nobility who supported the king, in some cases by fraud. It was in their interest that the new status quo be held and so the old one was demonised. The case of the Westminster Abbey lands is typical of what happened in the century after the dissolution of the monasteries, eventually forming the basis of the present Duke of Westminster's fortune. There was in fact strong popular resistance to the Reformation in England and elsewhere on the Continent, in particular the Pilgrimages of Grace, which were brutally put down by the authorities. This does not suggest that the pre-Reformation Catholic church was the evil...

Sinister plot to wreck UK economy Britain's Catholic bishops have produced a booklet called "Voting for the Common Good". It gives no clear guidance on who to vote for. This shows yet again the sinister control the church exercises over its simple-minded members. It is a blatant bid to land Britain with a hung parliament, leading to economic collapse and poverty, and driving people into the arms of the church's evil priests.

Piazza St.Pietro / St. Peter Square , originally uploaded by sandercw . It is not generally known that during the 1960s, under secret protocols involving the CIA, Cardinal Marcinkus and the US defence establishment, and in flagrant violation of non-proliferation treaties, a nuclear launching silo and huge control room was constructed under St Peter's Square with a battery of Minuteman missiles paid for out of church collections from all over the world. The installation, which is still fully operational and manned 24 hours a day by Jesuits, is concealed by the central obelisk which slides aside on tracks just before the missiles are fired.

Volcano erupts in Iceland - 21. march 2010 , originally uploaded by jovinsson . It is obvious that the Pope was behind the volcanic eruption in Iceland. Why is there a large Catholic church in Rejkyavik when there are hardly any Catholics there? It was built by Nazi agents during the war, with a crypt which goes down into a long underground tunnel directly connected to the magma chamber under the volcano, originally as a terror weapon to poison the air over Britain when the wind was blowing in the right direction but the Americans occupied Iceland before the plan could be put into effect. The volcano was set off on the Pope's personal instructions.

Journalists are talking about coalitions involving the LibDems, but I wonder if a Labour-Conservative coalition is so improbable? They are not so very far apart in their stance, ie lack of principles apart from an overwhelming desire to get into power and stay there, and they could stitch things up nicely between them. It's worth thinking about.

The election campaign has brought out the undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the electoral system, to the point that one of the themes is proportional representation. Against, it argued that one of the biggest problems of PR is in minority parties either keeping unpopular majorities in power. However, with first past the post, with first past the post, all the parties are bidding for the few hundred thousand decisive votes. That is why so many of their policies are so similar and fail to address real issues. It is corrupting. Of course the PR system has to be the right one, and that will be difficult. We don't want voting lists filled up with hacks selected by the party machine, which is what happened at the Euro election last year, and it would not be a good thing to lose the connection between a smallish constituency and its representative. Single transferable vote is probably the best way to keep the best of the present system. Of course no voting system will produce a satisfa...

Getting on an off trains these days is still not always as easy as it might be. If the station platform is at the correct height (915mm) and on a straight stretch of line, there is not usually a problem. Otherwise there can be difficulties, which vary according to the type of stock and the configuration of the platform, especially whether it is concave or convex. This exhaustive study by the Department of Transport discusses the issue in detail.

Vapour Trails , originally uploaded by seadipper . Under de sista få dagarna har vårens väder blivit soligt men inte för varmt, och resultatet är att vårens vackra blommor stannar kvar. Dessutom har vi dragit nytta av både den ovanliga tystnaden och den rena blåa himlen. I Londons syd-västra delar får man får höra sjungande fåglar vilket är mycket ovanligt. Dessa saker är resultaten av Islands vulkaniska utbrott som släppt ut ett jättestort moln av ånga och ask. På grund av molnet ställdes all flygtrafiken i norra Europa in. De rena himlen var mycket märkbar här i Brighton, eftersom staden ligger rakt söder om Gatwick flygplats. På morgnarna brukar man kunna se flygplans molniga spår överallt i himlen och de skymmer nästan solen. I områden omkring flygplatserna är förhållandet många gånger värre: luften är allvarligt förorenad och ljudet fruktansvärt högt. Själv kunde jag aldrig bo i närheten av någon flygplats. Men under åren har vi vant oss vid sådana störningar och lugnet och ron va...

Southall rail crash - reproduced from the London Emergency Services Liaison Panel (LESLP) Website [1] , which states: You may use the information and pictures contained herein for educational purposes in a non-profit making and non-commercial environment. A letter in the latest issue of Rail questioned the crashworthiness of mark 3 stock. The most serious example of failure of this type of stock is the incident at Southall in 1997 (above), where a signal passed at danger resulted in an HST travelling at high speed receiving an impact from a freight locomotive, with 7 fatalities. But is there any stock would have performed any better in such an event? As in any accident, there is always an element of luck, and the circumstances at Southall were a very particular and unfortunate combination; they are analysed in detail in this informative video . One aspect of crashworthiness is the strength of the bodyshell structure, and despite Southall, mark 3 stock may be as good as it gets....

Prison gatehouse , originally uploaded by captainbonobo . I was talking to a friend who had gone to collect someone who had just been released from prison. The procedure, apparently, is that prisoners are released with a few pounds and a train ticket to their place where they previously lived. That's it. The individual concerned has been in and out of prison for years, mostly for drug offences. I have come across him myself and he is not the kind of person I would want to have much to do with. As a child he had been in the "care" of a local authority and abused regularly. Then he took to drugs. It would be very difficult for anyone with a past like this to get their life in order. But it would help if, once having been brought into the prison system, a coherent post-release plan was put in place to give people like these the best possible chance. If there was a serious intent to cut crime, that is what would be happening. It would also help if what is a medical problem wa...

I bought a book about the work of Abram Games today. Who today has ever heard of him? Games was the designer of the 1951 Festival of Britain logo. He did a lot of work for public bodies such as London Transport. Games, with others such as Mischa Black, worked within an ethos of public service excellence. It seemed in those days that things could only get better. And they did, for a time. Somewhere around the late 1960s it all went sour, first with a property boom and then with a bust that lasted all the way through the 1970s. After that came the Thatcher years and greed took over. Nowadays, managerialism rules and passengers have become "customers". But we do value your custom, a recorded message tells us. I don't think.

There was a time when Linux was just for geeks. Then the developers sorted things out and as recently as a year ago it all just worked. Now it seems to have gone bad again. Sound and video are broken, especially in some of the browser plug-in modules, and so Skype doesn't work. Nor does the "suspend to disk" function on laptops. There are problems related to Pulse Audio and Flash player, also KDE4 was released long before it was stable, and even if one selects KDE 3.5, some of the unstable KDE4 components get installed anyway.

Quasi modo geniti infantes, Alleluia, rationabile, sine dolo lac concupiscite, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

I have written about this before but the subject came up in an article in the latest issue of Rail. Surely the solution is to fit all train doors with a simple detector in series with the locking system, so that they cannot be opened unless they are adjacent to a station platform? This would be simpler and more robust than GPS location, avoid the need to lengthen platforms, and could be retro-fitted to all stock, including, for example, mark 3 vehicles with slam doors and secondary locking.

"Yes but "is a phrase I do not like but am using frequently at the moment. Statements are being made that are perfectly correct as far as they go but there is much more to be said that has been left unsaid. Hence YesBut.

03_23_5 , originally uploaded by tarunhuria . If there is to be any new railway construction in the UK, shouldn't the lines be designed to accommodate double-stack containers like this on Indian Railways? It will of course take time before even a useful basic network is established but one has to start somewhere. A worthwhile initial aim would be to develop routes from Felixtowe and Southampton to the Midlands.

Seat reservations are popular with train companies, but less so with passengers. Research by Transport Watch has revealed that many passengers do not sit in the seat that they reserved. A glance down any carriage will reveal that many of the reserved seats have not been claimed. If one travels on a long journey, for example, from Cologne to Hamburg, it is like a game of musical chairs as passengers move from one place to another. There are probably two main reasons why people swap seats. They may not like the look of their neighbouring passengers - a broadcaster on "Thought for the Day" once said that passengers always walked past his compartment if he was wearing his clergyman's collar! And there is the design of the rolling stock. People prefer a seat with a view out of the train even if they spend most of the journey watching a film on their laptop computer, but in many types of rolling stock introduced since the 1970s, windows and seats are misaligned and the v...

Easter Vigil communion , originally uploaded by seadipper . With the new ruling on the use of the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy - formerly know as the Tridentine Rite - the ordinary liturgy is also beginning to change as it is being influenced by the old rubrics. A good sanctuary layout is a big help. Changes over the past year at St Mary Magdalen's, Brighton, have also contributed to the re-shaping of the ceremonial, which is now more orderly and dignified than it has been for many decades. The photograph below shows what it looked like a year ago, when it was as re-ordered in the 1970s.

Botafumeiro_4009 , originally uploaded by jm salaber . The justified calls for action against paedophile priests are now rising to a point of shrillness that suggests that it is motivate more by good old-fashioned No Popery sentiment than concern for the victims. But there could be other skeletons about to fall out of the cupboard. Incense, for example. How many people are dying from it? As well as being a fire hazard, burning incense produces harmful particulates and tarry substances that may be carcinogenic.

Jag har nyligen läst två översatta böcker. Den första var “Bilbo – En hobbits äventyr”, ursprungligen skriven av den engelska författaren J R R Tolkien, och den andra var Snö, skriven av den svenska författaren Ellen Mattson, översatt till engelska av Sarah Death. Bilbo Den första historien sker i Midgård, där hjälten, en hobbit som heter Bilbo, bor i ett trevligt hål under kulen som ligger utanför en liten by, Hobbiton. En dag dyker trollkarlen Gandalf upp och de snackar om äventyr. Gandalf skriver något hemligt tecken på Bilbos prydligt grönmålade dörr och några dagar senare kommer fjorton dvärgar fram. De vill att Billbo ska hjälpa dem att vinna tillbaka deras skatt, som blev stulen av ett förskräckligt odjur, draken Smaug. Draken bor långt borta under det Ensamma Berget, som en gång var dvärgarnas gruva och underjordiska palats. Bilbo drömmer om äventyr men samtidigt gillar han lugn och ro i sitt bekväma hem. Resan börjar på en vacker april dag. De får många äventyr. Den mest betyd...