The Bridge In Leeds Station

A few weeks ago, I visited Reading station and took pictures of the new overbridge there.

Today at Leeds I got a close look at the similar bridge over the tracks at Leeds station.

It is not so impressive as the bridge at Reading, but it is a few years older and probably built to a tighter budget.  I think we’ll be seeing a lot more stations being built or rebuilt on similar lines.

Leeds shows one of the advantages of this design, in that on the bridge at the station, is a large coffee outlet, an information kiosk and plenty of seating. This seems to put them all where they are needed on the walking route for passengers changing trains. As the sides of the bridge are to a certain extent closed in with glass, it is much better place to wait for your train, than on the draughty platforms below.

If there is a problem, it is that there is possibly not enough escalators, although each platform does have a lift.

The Hitchin Flyover Takes Shape

On my trip to Burnley today, I got my first look at the Hitchin Flyover.

It is a stylish structure and looks to be almost conplete.

To Burnley To See Ipswich

I went to Burnley today to see Ipswich play. I went up via Leeds, as in my opinion, First Class on East Coast is so much better than the offering on Virgin Trains.

I also didn’t suffer any delays, but apparently some Ipswich supporters, who took the Manchester route, got to the match at around half-time.

Do We Need More Runways In The South East?

This old chestnut keeps coming round and the London Assembly has produced a report, as is discussed in the Standard. Here’s the first few paragraphs.

The Government’s claim that the South-East faces an aviation capacity crisis was thrown into doubt today after an influential report suggested London has enough runways already.

The London Assembly study found the capital’s airports are currently underused with two — Luton and Stansted — having around half of their runway slots free.

Even Heathrow, at 99 per cent runway capacity, could fly an additional 20 million passengers a year if larger aircraft were used, it claimed.

To test their premise, that London has enough space, let’s look at Gatwick.  Two years ago, I flew out of Gatwick to Greece.  Read what I wrote in this blog. The last statement was.

Let’s face it, if I fly again, I’m not going out of Gatwick.

But in spite of that, I did use the airport to go to Budapest, where I had an excellent meal at Jamie’s Italian.

Gatwick seems to have improved immensely in the last couple of years, since the change of ownership, and it’s all been done by lots of small steps.  The other thing that helps me is the direct link from Dalston Junction to Clapham Junction.

I’m going out to Geneva on the 17th and it’ll be interesting to see how it goes. On every trip, Gatwick seems to get better.

Why Do I Like Travelling?

I was asked this question by a journalist this morning. But somehow it must be in the genes.

My father had been a great traveller before the Second World War and I know he’d gone all the way to the South of France and Geneva by train. One tale, that I can verify is that when he needed to buy a new guillotine from Griegs in Glasgow, he drove all the way up with his Scottish deputy and guillotine operator; Frank Black, of Mack the Knife, to see the machines in the factory. That was something not many people did in the 1950s.

Even at University, I was a bit of a traveller and one summer, I hitched to Glasgow to see a football match, before taking the train down to Manchester and then Paignton, to see friends.

C might have picked up the bug from me, but we were not beyond hitch-hiking together, as we did once to come to London, to tell her parents we were going to get married.  I was 20 and she was just 19.

Package tours were not for us and some of the first real holidays we had were when we took our Austin Maxi, down to the South of France, with the three boys in the back. And that was generally before they’d built the Autoroutes.

Later we would drive to Syros and Crete in Greece and Rome in Italy. On one trip we went over the St. Gotthard Pass in August in a severe blizzard and then came down the other side into Italy with rocks falling off the mountains in heavy rain.

We also swapped houses with a couple of Americans and we were in the States for six weeks, travelling as far East as Boston and as far West as Minneapolis.

We didn’t do boring.

After the children got fed up with us and left home, we continued to travel. We drove around Malaysia, took the train from Bangkok to Penang and I flew C and myself, all round Australia in a light aircraft.

We also had some memorable trips in my own plane.  Perhaps the longest was going out of Southend and reaching Naples.

Even when C was dying, she was planning another trip, where we would drive around Thailand.  Sadly, she hadn’t realised how ill she was, so this trip never came about.

Since her death, I have continued to travel and in fact, my stroke happened on a round the world trip in Hong Kong. I have visited every ground in the English League in alphabetical order by public transport and now I have started a series of fly out-rail home journeys.  The first was to Budapest.

Pencilled in to be done over the summer are Palermo, Sumburgh, New Quay, Lisbon, Stockholm, Odessa and Ferranfore.

This weekend it’s more mundane, in that I’m going to Burnley to see Ipswich in the last match of the season, by train from Kings Cross.

 

Bognor Is Just Like Felixstowe

it was an uneventful trip to Bognor, except for the loss of the pen. And all at a ticket cost of just £14.75 in a very clean train.

The only excitement on the way down was two Dutch tourists, who in killing time changing planes at Gatwick, decided they’d visit Crawley. Surely, there must be something better to do at the Airport!

Here are some of the pictures I took.

It could all have been Felixstowe, as I remember it as a child.

That town wasn’t the best place to be a teenager. Especially, where you had no transport, buses were rare and there were about three trains a day.

At least Bognor had a bus to get me back to the train station, which seemed to run about every fifteen minutes.  I needed the bus, as I’d probably walked about three miles.

Once off the sea-front, I only passed one pub. And I think, I only saw two in the first mile or so, whilst in the town centre.

Did King George V liked a drink, and couldn’t find any in the town?  Hence his supposed remarks.

Perhaps, James Joyce went there to stay sober enough to write Finnegan’s Wake.

An Event Driven Life

Yesterday, when I went to Bognor, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, when I saw the weather forecast, which said that Bognor would be the warmest place in the UK.  The hotspots today are Heathrow, Salisbury, Birmingham, Harlow and Barnsley.  I hsven’t been to Salisbury for years, but I don’t think I’ll be going today.  But who knows?

So every day, I look at the news and the weather and decide where I might go, if I feel a trip coming on.

I also try to sign up to offers, I get from places like Liverpool University.

It is a mildly exciting way to live.

Checking Up On King George V

It has often been said that King George V’s last words were “Bugger Bognor”.  Although, as this article says, it is probably a myth.

But today, the BBC Weather is saying that Bognor Regis is going to be the warmest place in the UK at 15°C

So as I’ve never been to Bognor Regis, I think this is a good day to see if King George V had the right thoughts about the place.

Not Very Correct French

French Railways or SNCF has just introduced a budget low-cost TGV service .  They’ve called it Ouigo, which I assumed is pronounced “we go”.

I thought the French had laws against the language of the dreaded rosbifs!

But it is a concept that might just have enough to succeed.

Would I use it?

Probably not, as it seems to be tied into French mobile phones and post codes. But I had read that the web site was only in French, but it’s now also in English.  So I suspect that in a few months, it’ll be as easy to use as easyJet or Ryanair.

I shall certainly try it on one of my trips back from somewhere in Southern Europe.

 

Lea Bridge Station May Be Reopened

Tucked away in the May 2013 edition of Modern Railways, is a statement that Lea Bridge station in Walthamstow may be reopened.

If they do reopen the station and the nearby Hall Farm Curve, this would link the Chingford branch directly to the Lea Valley Lines.  Wikipedia says this about the project.

Transport for London ran a study on the feasibility of reopening the curve for 2016 that produced a result with a benefit-cost ratio ranging between 8:1 and 14:1 depending on the length of trains involved. In 2007, the Greater Anglia Route Utilisation Strategy published by Network Rail suggested that construction of the curve could be possible by 2019 or later.

Designs for new services run using the curve have been suggested to reduce journey times between Walthamstow and Stratford or Tottenham Hale to 12 minutes from their current duration of 34 minutes and 43 minutes respectively.

It would appear that house prices  in Walthamstow and Chingford should soon be on the rise, if the project goes ahead.

I believe that small projects like this can often give great benefit to passengers and the railways. This one is one of three that have just been proposed.  The others are Ilkeston and Pye Corner.  They all follow Cambridge Science Park station, which will start construction next year.