Some people never learn. In this case it’s the dwindling bunch of Nimbys who still oppose HS2 and think that their sense of entitlement somehow trumps the transport infrastructure needs of the UK, especially in this time of climate change, where we really do need the rail capacity to get folks out of planes and cars and onto carbon-neutral trains.
Despite everything that’s happened in the past few months, what with the Conservatives gaining a solid Parliamentary majority and half the MPs who previously opposed HS2 losing their seats since 2014 – the tiny band who fly the flag of ‘StopHs2’ haven’t learned a thing in a decade.
Short of any real plan, far less a cunning one, they’ve fallen back on the same failed tactics that have never stood them in good stead – even when there was lots more of them!
They’ve started another petition…
Because petitions have worked so well for them in the past, obviously!
Here’s a link to the latest one, which has got off to a less than stratospheric start (as I scribble this it has 867 signatures after 3 days). It’s been started by one Elizabeth Williams, whom I’m assuming is the same ‘Lizzie’ Williams who started StopHs2 until she had to hand over the reins of the groups as her behaviour was in danger of imploding it.
Why they still bother with these petitions is a total mystery as all they ever do is three things – get less and less signatures each time, prove the fact that the vast majority of folk signing them live in the 63 constituencies Hs2 passes through – and that the majority of those signing live on Phase 1! Here’s the petition map from today which (as ever) shows that – by total co-incidence – the most signatures are from constituencies on Phase 1. You can imagine my surprise….
This petition will do exactly the same as all the others. It’s doomed to failure from the start. It also shows that – despite have run several of these pointless exercises in the past – they’ve never actually twigged their limitations. Just say for the sake of argument they get 100,oo signatures (hell will freeze over first). What happens then? How will that stop HS2? It won’t. Here’s what it says on the front page of each petition.
“Considered for debate”. Debate, not vote. There is no vote. The petition is toothless. Mind you, even if there was a vote HS2 would win it hands down with a huge majority as the project has cross-party support! It’s an utterly pointless exercise.
Still, it does do one thing. It gives me a few numbers to crunch and empirical evidence of the weakness of the StopHs2 campaign. So, it will be interesting to compare it with the results of 2019, 2018 or even some of their earlier efforts.
Meanwhile, in the real world, construction of HS2 ramps up…
Don’t expect many updates on the progress (or rather lack of) of this petition. I may pop in once a month just to see how badly it’s doing, but it’s really not worth wasting more time on than that.
Sometimes, you really have to wonder. I’ve been occupied scanning old slides again this evening as Dawn’s busy on a Reiki course, so whilst I’ve been waiting for the scanner to perform its (slow) miracles I’ve been keeping an eye on social media – which is when I spotted this gem..
Seriously? F**k me, who knew that for thousands of years people have used various (mostly humane) methods to deter birds? Have the RSPB never heard of Scarecrows, or the farmers that set off shotgun cartridges on a timer – or Network Rail patrolling some of its stations like this? “Ethically dubious”?
If this is the desperate intellectual level some of our environmental groups are reduced to, you do have to start asking – what’s the point of you? What problems are you really going to solve with rubbish like this – and why on earth should we take you seriously?
Needless to say, it wasn’t long before arch HS2 critic Chris Packham piled in in his own unthinking fashion with this tweet.
Holding nature in ‘contempt’ by using birds to scare off birds? Talk about mental gymnastics! The sad thing is that knee-jerk rubbish like this only makes it easier for people to dismiss environmental groups as cranks. It gives ammunition to the opposition, nothing more, but nothing that Packham comes out with surprises me anymore. Let’s face it, a man who flies people half-way around the world on expensive bird-watching tours of the Gambia (for which he earns a pretty penny) trying to stop people in the UK from being able to travel on a carbon-neutral railway is the height of hypocrisy.
I’ll look forward to the next chapter of this madness, the RSPCA starting a campaign against people buying cats to scare away mice perhaps? For God’s sake – no-one tell them about Felix, the Huddersfield station cat!
It’s the 2nd day of the ACoRP conference and It’s a more relaxed one for me as I blitzed the event from a photographic perspective yesterday, so today I get chance to listen to the speakers and blog about some of the event.
The first speaker this morning was Neil Priest, Station Enhancements Portfolio Manager, Network Rail.
He’s given a very interesting talk about the perils and success of making stations more accessible and the fun and game of installing lifts on our Victorian network. He also exploded the myth that lifts can’t be installed at unmanned stations. As he explained. “When a lift breaks down, a bloke doesn’t come out of the ticket office with a bag of spanners, we call in a lift engineer” Nowadays lifts are monitored by CCTV and remotely, so it’s not an issue. Many of these schemes take years to complete and Neil explained why that happens, which can be anything from finding there’s disused mineshafts below the station to the fact someone else comes along and builds a new ticket office where you were going to site a bridge!
Afterwards, ACoRP’s Chief Executive, Jools Townsend gave a rundown of the organisations activities and coming programmes – as well as talking about the rebranding of ACoRP as Community Rail Network (CRN) later this year.
12:10.
A lot of the conference this morning has been taken up with three workshop sessions on very different topics. Youth engagement: Talking about ways to involve young people on a range of issues around the railways (including safety) and passing on life skills to teenagers are younger children. The second workshop was on involvement with the wider community, including the disadvantaged to encourage them to be involved through their local community rail groups – and also encourage them to use the railways. The session I’m sat in on at the moment is about tackling loneliness. Apparently, the UK is the loneliest country in Europe (and no, that’s not a political metaphor!) so the session is talking about causes of loneliness in the present day and how loneliness can be identified and counteracted. The presentation wasn’t just about facts, figures and methodology, it also included the experiences of a station group, the Friends of Beeston station, presented by the Secretary of the group, Sarah Hampton. Sarah gave some great examples of how the group has combated loneliness in their own community.
14:15.
We’re back after lunch in the hotel for the first session of the afternoon which is a look at a new reporting system that ACoRP are launching. The Impact Assessment tool, and how it can help organisations and the people involved in them to track their achievements and use the data in a number of ways, such as reports, data assessment and even fundraising.
During lunch I nipped out with ACoRP’s Martin Yallop, who knows my interest in architecture. He wanted to show me a couple of features nearby, including this…
During WW2 this length of tram track bexame a missle thanks to a German bomb. It was blown clean over a row of Georgian town houses and embedded itself in the nearby churchyard
17:10.
Conference finished mid-afternoon but by then my bit was done so I headed over to Temple Meads station early in order to make the most of the sunshine and soend an hour getting pictures before we caught our train North.
It was an interesting interlude as services have changed a lot since I last spent any time here. Now GWR green rather than FGW blue is the dominant colour. With many of the old DMUs having been displaced by former ‘Thames Turbo’ class 165 – 166 units and the HST’s with Class 800 series units from Hitachi although the venerable Class 43s haven’t vanished altogether as ‘Castle’ Class short HST sets (2×4) are used on Bristol – Cardiff services.
The lengthening of trains has also gone hand in hand with the four-tracking of the line North towards Bristol Parkway, enabling more services to run and allowing parallel arrivals or departures, which makes for some interesting photo opportunities like this, which isn’t the sort of sight you’d seen a couple of years ago…
166205 and 165119 arrive in parallel at Bristol Temple Meads.
17:45
Right now a group of us are speeding North towards Birmingham on yet another packed 4-car Cross-Country Voyager, all space has been taken and the vestibules are packed with bodies old and young.
18:50.
We’re now North of Derby on our way to our next stop at Chesterfield and I’ve lost count of the different passengers that have passed through this coach (D) on our trip from Bristol. I was glad to see the back of one at Birmingham, a young man who talked endlessly into his mobile phone and who reeked of BO…
20:27.
The numbers of folks on our Voyager thinned the further North we got. It was reasonably pleasent after leaving Sheffield but I wasn’t sorry to bail out at Leeds. We had 6 minutes to make our connection and hopped aboard the 20:12 to Manchester Victoria with a couple of minutes to spare. Only it’s now 20:26 and we’re still here! Lots of trains are on the move, just not us…
20:36.
Our Conductor has told us that our trains stuck because of a track-circuit failure, so we’ve all abandoned our nice warm, shiny Class 195 for a traditional Calder Valley classic in the shape of a Class 155 in the adjacent platform. We’re still not going anywhere mind…
20:42.
*Puts on best Victor Meldrew impression*…
I don’t believe it! We’d just settled in on our replacement train when it’s Conductor announced that – in fact – our original train was leaving first. Not only that but it had got the road and was leaving any minute now! There was a mad scramble as we all rushed back onto the 195, the only thing missing was the Benny Hill theme tune playing over the tannoy! We’ve even regained our original seats!
22:18.
That about wraps it up for today. We finally made it home around 21:30, considerably later than we expected due to the fun and games at Leeds. Now it’s time to relax and put the feet up ready for another busy day tomorrow. I’ll be working from home as I’ve a considerable amount of pictures from the conference to edit, as well as a new selection of rail shots. Then there’s paperwork to catch up on. At least there’ll be no track circuits to worry about! There might even be a bit of time for blogging on the latest funs and games with the anti Hs2 protests, which are generating a lot of hot air, but little else…
Ugh! The alarm went off at 05:30 this morning as we’re off to Bristol. Right now the house is buzzing with activity as we get ready to head off to the station ready to get the first train. According to the internet the trains are running to time this morning, so let’s see how things pan out. We’ll be meeting up with various other ACoRP shipmates on the train from Leeds…
07:20.
So far, everything’s going to plan on this fine, frosty morning. We took a taxi to the station (a luxury for me as I normally walk) and the 07:07 to Leeds turned up on time. Worked by a 3-car CAF Class 195 it had started at Hebden Bridge and had a healthy load of passengers by the time it arrived at Halifax. Now, leaving Bradford Interchange, there’s hardly a spare seat to be had.
As we climbed out of Bradford the skies were fascinating. A complex mass of grey clouds of different hues was turned orange by the rising sun as they appeared to be dropping a curtain of rain (or snow) across a quarter of the city. It was gorgeous.
08:55.
Changing trains at Leeds went without a hitch. We’d given ourselves plenty of time just in case, but the first day working day of Northern under new management didn’t present any problems. Thankfully we weren’t travelling down the West Coast Main Line as a landslip at Dutton viaduct has caused lots of grief as the saturated ground has started shifting, taking the line with it!
Back with Northern, I see that the Dft are already making changes. Former TPE Managing Director Andy Donovan has been announced at the new Northern MD, which sounds like a good move. He had a good reputation at TPE and eh knows the Northern patch. It will be interesting to if the change at the helm improves Northern’s reputation and the visibility of senior management.
Right now we’re on the 08:11 Cross-Country service from Leeds to Plymouth. It’s classic Cross-Country. This 4-car train was rammed into Leeds carrying commuters from York into work. Then it was busy taking other commuters from Leeds to Wakefield. We’ve just called at Sheffield and it’s only now that it’s starting to fulfil its long-distance role. Now there’s a few spare seats and I’ll be interested to see how the composition of our carriage changes along the route.
10:02.
We’re approaching Birmingham at a crawl after we were diverted via Water Orton due to a points failure. The Train Manager, a jovial Geordie, has been very good in keeping us all informed. It’s not a huge delay (4 minutes) but I’ll be interested to see if it has a knock-on effect in Birmingham.
Our two table companions (who’ve changed composition twice since Leeds) are preparing to leave. There’s only a handful of the original passengers left now and I expect more of an exodus at New St. Having been on this Voyager for 2 hours now and spent much of that time inadvertently playing footsie with the person sat on the opposite side of the table I’m starting to feel the cramp. These trains simply aren’t up to the job nowadays but we’re going to be stuck with them for who knows long now that the Dept for Transport has cancelled letting the franchise.
10:16.
We’ve just left Birmingham with only around 20% of the original passengers on board. I remember many years ago the average length of a journey on Cross-Country was around 50 miles. I wonder if that’s changed? I can’t help wondering if there’s not an argument for splitting the Cross-County network nowadays in order to improve resilience. How many passengers will travel all the way from (say) Aberdeen to Plymouth or Leeds to Penzance?
10:30.
Our late arrival in Birmingham didn’t cause us any problems as we still left on time. A crew change has meant the Geordie lilt of or previous Train Manager has now been replaced by a West Country burr of the new incumbent! More of the ACoRP team joined us too. There’s now 5 of us in the carriage.
11:20.
We’re currently heading for Bristol Parkway and the sunny weather we’ve had nearly all the way from Leeds is getting increasingly obscured by cloud. Like the rest of the country, the fields around the railways are muddy and waterlogged. I suspect we’re going to need a considerable spell of dry and sunny weather before they drain. Despite the fact it’s full again, passengers in our coach are remarkably quiet, mainly because most of them are plugged in and staring at one of a variety of electronic devices! Diagonally opposite me there’s on traditionalists old chap who’s actually reading a newspaper but he’s very much in a minority.
12:15.
We’re now ensconced in the Doubletree Hilton in Bristol, preparing for a busy afternoon with some interesting sessions to look forward to…
14:00.
ACoRP’s Chief Executive, Jools Townsend kicks off today’ Community Rail Conference.
There’s a good turnout for the conference too…
There was far too much going on at the conference to blog and take pictures, so picture taking came first. Hopefully, tomorrow will be more relaxed. AT the end of the day a few of us were given a tour of some sights of architectural merit. One of them was a CAMRA national inventory pub – the Kings Head!
Yep, today’s the start of a new month, not that there’s been much of a change, as we’ve had yet another storm warning! The only discernible difference is that the days are starting to get longer. I’ve spent much of the weekend scanning yet more old railway slides from 1990, which you can find in this gallery on my Zenfolio website. The latest batch of 60 are from Bristol and also the Tinsley loco depot open day, held on a dismal Saturday in September. Here’s a sample, featuring Bath Rd depot in Bristol – another place that’s long-gone.
BR Class 47 locomotives dominate this view of Bristol Bath Rd depot as the shed provided motive power for cross-country services from the South-West up to Birmingham and beyond, as well as passenger locomotives for the main line to London Paddington as well as servicing freight engines and local diesel multiple units.
As I mentioned in my last blog. I’m back in Bristol tomorrow for an ACoRP (Association of Community Rail Partnerships) conference. The programme shows that it’s going to be a busy event spread over two days but no doubt I’ll have some time to blog/tweet about what’s going on, as well as catch up with some old friends from the world of community railways.
To get to Bristol in time means the pair of us are up at sparrow-fart in the morning, so this isn’t going to be a long blog. I’d hoped to have time to compose one about the collapse of the StopHs2 campaign, but that can wait for another day! It’s not as if there’s anything going on with them anyway. They’ve been very quiet on social media since the Government announced the fact HS2’s been given the green light. Mind you, they’ve also been inactive in the real world too. Their ‘direct action’ campaign at Harvil Rd and Cubbington wood has been completely ineffective at stopping HS2. The penny finally seems to be dropping that they’ll never have the numbers of people on the ground they need. There’s only a couple of dozen regulars and a few ‘weekend warriors’ – who’re especially useless and HS2 Ltd don’t normally work at weekends so there’s nothing to stop! The fact that having a bunch of voyeurs’ watching you make fools of yourself on Facebook isn’t going to stop Hs2 seems to be slowly sinking in too – hence this rather revealing post of one of their Facebook pages.
I’ll blog about this in detail when I have the time. Right now it’s time to pack a suitcase…
Paul Bigland 