AN OUTSIDE VIEW

The opposition to HS2 is now gathering momentum, as articles such is this , one of no less than six on the subject, published the Daily and Sunday Telegraph in the past few days. Part of the case is made by those speaking up in support for local transport. But argument for HS2 on the grounds that we need increased capacity is not still not being countered effectively. The argument is simple. The cost of building, equipping and operating a high speed railway is proportional to at least the square of the running speeds. That is a consequence of the laws of physics, as applied in an engineering context. At a conservative estimate the cost of a 200 mph railway be double that of a 100 mph one. Advocates of HS2 would have us believe that as we need extra capacity which can only be provided by building a new railway (true), it might as well be a high speed one as it will only cost a teeny-weeny bit more (false). The optimum speed for inter-city trains in Britain is between 100 mph and 130 mph...

An experiment by KLM, though it is not clear why it only applies to business passengers.

Whatever conclusions can be drawn from the high speed rail accident in China, doubts over safety are not one of them. The Japanese and French safety records are outstandingly good. A German ICE trains were involved in a single incident in 1998 which was due to the use of a type of wheel technology developed for use in tramways. However, that accident would not have happened had the conductor applied the emergency brake when a passenger reported what was obviously a serious problem. What the Chinese accident does demonstrate, however, is that corners cannot be cut and that everyone involved needs to know exactly what they are doing. High speed rail cannot be done on the cheap,

Oslo Royal Palace , a photo by seadipper on Flickr. In 2007, the Royal Palace in Oslo did not even have railings around it. It would be nice if last Friday's tragedy did not change this, but it is unlikely. Although the attack turns out to have been by a lunatic with allegiance to the extreme right, with an overtone of Christian fundamentalism, it is telling that the first assumptions were that it was the work of Islamic terrorism. That is not course not to say that events like that in Oslo require any ideology at all to motivate them - personal grudges and hatreds are often sufficient. However, the perpetrators of these kinds of atrocities often turn out to have fed on a diet of hate literature. It comes in many forms. The extreme right has its own canon of this material, founded on a paranoid fear of difference. The far left looks to Marx and his insistence on the necessity of class warfare. Islam looks to the Koran, which, if not hate literature, contains passages which are p...

I went somewhere different for mass today - a church built about twenty-five years ago. The design was a break from tradition, with a short wide nave so that everyone was close to the sanctuary. The interior was exposed facing brick, the acoustic lively and the general ambience light and airy. The liturgy was spoken apart from the hymns. Thus it can be said to be an expression of the predominant theology of the post-Vatican II movement. Attendance at this, the main Sunday High Mass, was poor, with less than one-third of the places occupied - though it could be that many people were away on holiday. It would be more difficult to construct such a building today, as there is a growing movement towards the use of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, which in turn is having an influence on the way that the Ordinary Form of the Mass is celebrated. One thing that needs to be recognised is that whatever growth is taking place within the Catholic Church is focussed around the Extraordinary Form,...

First reactions to the terror in Oslo assumed that it was the work of Islamists. It then turned out to be the work of what appears to be an - apparently lone - maniac with links to the extreme-Right". In other words it had more in common with those rampages that deranged men (they are always men) embark on from time to time in the US, with a close resemblence to the McVeigh bombing. It has naturally come as particularly shocking that it should have happened in Norway, which, like the rest of Scandinavia, has been regarded for the last decades as a haven from the nasty things that happen in the world. Yet every human society has a dark underside and there is no such thing as a safe place. On the other hand, these events do not happen in a vacuum. There have long been strange right wing movements throughout Europe and the US. In the latter case, they hark back to the ideal days of the early US where sturdy independent homesteaders lived simple honest lives as horny-handed sons of th...

Network Rail faces a battle with its staff over proposals to close nearly all Britain’s 800 signal boxes and replace them with air traffic control style computerised centres. NR held talks on the plans this week with unions representing its 5,000 signallers. The company refused to confirm claims by the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union that the changes would reduce the number of signal staff, which the union puts at 6,000, to 2,000. The changes are intended to boost punctuality and save £250m annually. Full article in FT It is not clear from the article whether this refers to the introduction of the European Train Management System (ERTMS), which still has a long way to be developed before it can be said to be beyond the experimental stage. Whilst I have nothing against the introduction of new technology, I would question whether it is sufficiently robust to withstand the kind of things that can happen in the long run, such as extreme weather, solar flares and other unusual and pot...

Yet another abuse and cover-up story surfaced at the weekend, this one concerning the Irish Diocese of Cloyne. But to what extent it can be relied on is another matter, as the comment from Thirsty Gargoyle points out. However, over the past few years, the skeletons have been tumbling out of the cupboard in Ireland. One disastrous consequence is that the once-solid Irish Catholic church is now on the verge of collapse. With the Catholic priesthood so tainted, who would want to be a priest in such a situation? Although the abuse has been described as "paedophilia", strictly speaking, it is not, since the abuse has mostly been directed against pubescent boys, from which it can be concluded that the priesthood has accepted into its ranks homosexually-orientated men who could not control their inclinations. A look around the world reveals a mixed picture. The Irish-influenced church in the USA seems to have suffered similarly. In England and Wales, nasty cases have come to light ...

A report today states that as many as 12,000 troops could be needed to provide security during the Olympic games, to protect the games themselves and key venues in London. The decision to bid for the games was taken by the Blair government around 2003 and is an example of the then-prevailing megalomania. The same hubris produced assurances that boom-and-bust had been defeated. Yet this was already after the attack on the World Trade Centre and it was obvious even then that the games would present a security problem.

The Neo-Libertarians in the Conservative Central Office think tank are presumably the driving force behind the proposals to privatise more public services, as set out in the new White Paper. But the big private consultancies will just muscle in. These outfits cannot provide the continuity and local and specialist knowledge essential if the job is to be done well. Nor are they particularly innovative, except in devising the kind of asset-stripping deals that caused the trouble with Southen Cross. The public sector is often indifferent but that is ultimately preventable with good democratic control and accountability. This is a recipe for disaster.

I am not an advocate of Buying British in principle, but Derby would almost certainly have got the Thameslink train order if there had been some rational thinking about Thameslink itself. There is no conceivable train that can operate the route satisfactorily as it comprises two inter-urban routes, two airport links and an inner city metro all in one. Thameslink should have been cut back to operate within the area of the Greater London Authority. Anyone who has used the service regularly and thought about it must realise this. A problem at, say, Brighton will result, a couple of hours later, in disruption at Bedford, and vice versa. This is not unusual as both the Brighton and Midland main lines carry dense traffic. It would have been better to cut back the route and transfer it to London Overground which is a similar type of service. The trains could then have been a further build of Bombardier class 379 Electrostars. For the long distance routes a further build of class 377 Electrost...

The Pentagon has disclosed that it suffered one of its largest ever losses of sensitive data in March when 24,000 files were stolen in a cyber-attack by a foreign government. There is talk of military responses against this kind of thing. William Lynn, the US deputy secretary of defence, said the data was taken from the computers of a corporate defence contractor . Am I unusual in thinking that a military response is the wrong response to attacks on the US government's computer systems? It seems to me that a more effective way of discouraging the problem would be to make computer security the direct responsibility of the military. In the event of a breach of security those responsible could then be tried by Court Martial, just as a soldier would be if he neglected his rifle so that it failed to fire when required. The simplest way to secure a computer or computer network is to disconnect it from the internet. But even if the network is connected, there is no excuse for information ...

The Catholic Church is often criticised for its wealth and its betrayal of the teaching of Christ, but I have not personally noticed that the Catholic church is particularly wealthy - we are always having to scrape around for funds to keep buildings in good order. A few of the religious organisations are perhaps better endowed than is good for them. The so-called treasures of the Vatican would go nowhere if they were all sold and the money given to the poor. The present pope Benedict appears to be committed to propagating the authentic teaching of Christ. There have indeed been bad popes but that is beside the point which is that Jesus Christ is really and certainly present in the sacraments of the Catholic Church (and Orthodox ie non-Protestant churches). What would Jesus Christ think about the Catholic Church if he came back today? He might find the vestments and ceremonial a bit ridiculous, but it is not a question of IF Jesus Christ came back today. He IS back to day and present on...

That the News of the World was Britain's best-selling newspaper says much about the British public, and none of it complimentary. As an editorial headline in today's Observer puts it, "Murdoch's malign influence must die with the News of the World" However, Murdoch's is far from being the only malign influence in the British media. One the right, we have the pervasive "me" culture, that manifests in the championing of motorists' rights and home ownerism, whilst at the other end of the political spectrum, the discourse is permeated by a low level Marxism, typified by proposals for policies based on job creationism, and the championing of allegedly progressive causes such as "women's right to choose". The Observer editorial continues " The scandal over phone hacking has exposed a rotten empire and the urg...

Bombardier announced today the loss of over 1,400 jobs at its Litchurch Lane factory in Derby. This follows the award of the £3 billion train order to the German company Siemens. Diana Holland, assistant general secretary of the trade union Unite, has written to Philip Hammond and Vince Cable, demanding an urgent meeting. Of course, without detailed inside knowledge one cannot possibly comment on the particular situation inside the Derby plant, but the tendency within the UK, in contrast to industry in countries like Germany, and Japan, is for management to keep a certain distance from the people on the factory floor, issuing orders from on high and failing to put sufficient value on the knowledge held by those in the front line. It is largely a consequence of the British class system. I wonder if the Bombardier factory is a shining exception?

Charismatic pentecostal worship is characterised by repeated cries of "Alleluia, Praise the Lord" and speaking in tongues. Rather like this.

1967 Tube Stock at Pimlico , originally uploaded by bowroaduk . After 43 years, the end of an era: the 17.10 train from Seven Sisters to Brixton, the last 1967 Tube stock in passenger service, 30th June 2011. The design was the product of Design Research Unit, the company headed by Mischa Black, professor of industrial design at the Royal College of Art. Sadly, these days, design has been degraded to become very largely, and little more than, an adjunct of marketing, though the old tradition lives on in Scandinavia. So this example of honest functional design deserves to be celebrated.

According to an article in the Daily Telegraph , 'The future of the planned High Speed 2 rail link has been thrown into fresh doubt after Boris Johnson dubbed the project "perverse" and "inadequate" and said he "cannot support" it.' I don't think anything Boris Johnson says is going to be decisive in this but he is a big and influential gun. The trouble with the Anti-HS2 lobby, however, is that too much of it consists of Nimbys and elements from the roads lobby such as the RAC. The pro-rail lobby needs to speak up for a sound alternative strategy of investment in rail. The country could end up with nothing at all.