AN OUTSIDE VIEW

71001 and 46258 respectively. Good names for replica steam locomotives, eh? Which just about sums the whole thing up - an atavistic display. And I am not against the monarchy, but this show could backfire in the end.

There is something about Easter that brings out the atheists. They just cannot leave it alone. To not believe in gods because they are just a human construct is irrational. Everything we know about the world is a human construct. It cannot be anything else, since all knowledge is mediated through the use of signs and symbol systems that are humanly constructed, above all through language. What one "knows" about the world as a French speaker or a German speaker, for instance, is a little different from what one "knows" as an English speaker, even though all three languages are closely related and arise out of a shared historical experience. An engineer "knows" the world differently from the way a chemist "knows" it. If one thinks of religion as a descriptive system of signs and symbols, the question that then arises is how well they map to one's experience. Or not. From that point one must judge by results and one's own experie...

Articles in the April issue of Modern Railways were a cogent presentation of the arguments for HS2, but they scarcely made the case for a 300 km/h railway rather than a 200 km/h one. The conclusion to be drawn is that the need is for capacity. It is seems to be taken as given, that the costs of building, equipping and operating a high speed railway, complete with a fleet of bespoke high speed trains for running on Britain’s classic routes, would be little more than those of a conventional railway. Where is the evidence? In addition, there are interest costs that will build up during the ten-year construction period before the first revenue-earning train starts running. The arguments actually presented point to a strategy of providing additional capacity through a rolling programme, mostly by reinstating what was lost in the 1960s, as 200 km/h and local railways, including much of the alignment chosen for HS2 itself. Beyond this, before making firm commitments, the entire deba...

I am no republican but am off to France for the day - the tickets have been booked. In my view the monarchy is not helped by letting itself become soap opera. Or perhaps that is part of its strength, since it fulfills a psychological need. However, republicans need to appreciate that a monarch has an essential important qualification for the job - they never wanted it. Horrible things can happen under democracies. They are vulnerable to take-overs by rabble rousers, as we are seeing at the moment with the rise of the far-right all over Europe. I can think of one important democratic country which is run for the benefit of a military-industrial complex and is on a permanent war footing. It is a safe assumption that Hitler would never have happened if Germany had turned into a constitutional monarch after 1918.

There is a knotty question surrounding the IEP. The train that is now being offered by Hitachi is very different from the one on which it won the competitive tender. So much so that the other train manufacturers could argue that they never had the opportunity to bid for a train in its present form. This could lead to a legal challenge. We shall see. Certainly the European train manufacturers have a lot to fear from Hitachi. The Japanese company has promised to build an assembly plant, and nothing more than an assembly at Newton Aycliffe, in the depressed north-east. If it does this, the other manufacturers could find themselves locked out of an important part of the UK train market for decades. This will be a serious threat not just to UK train manufacturing but also to the UK railway research and development industry that is associated with it. I do not agree with economic jingoism but this looks as if the UK is about to find itself at the receiving end of a colonialist coup.

Bi-mode vehicles are electrically driven, but have an auxiliary diesel generator so can run on routes that are not electrified. An example is this modern Skoda trolleybus running in Riga, Latvia. It has just lowered its collector poles and is now running on its diesel engine. Given the reluctance in Britain to invest in railway electrification, civil servants at the Department for Transport have been keen to apply the same principle to trains. This sounds like an excellent idea, as there is no need to waste time changing locomotives. A bi-mode train could run under electric power from London to Edinburgh and then continue on diesel power to Aberdeen. The train would have many electric motors and their associated controllers, distributed along its length. These would get their electricity either from a vehicle fitted with a pantograph and transformer, or from on-board generators. But when the idea is looked at in detail, the concept falls apart. For trains more than five cars long, it i...

A friend of mine has a teenage son who is classified as handicapped. He apparently has trouble with remembering when to do things so was issued with an electronic reminder device. After a while he got fed up with it and was curious how it worked. So he booted into the operating system which turned out to be some cut-down version of Windows, deleted the programme (which had cost the authorities fifteen grand), and discovered that he had been actually been handed an HTC mobile phone. He is now planning to install Android and once he has put a SIM in, he will have a useful little gadget. However, this should not impress anyone since his hobby is building and programming robots.