Oh, what to pick today? Oh, I know – how about this one from Australia’s Fraser Island, which I took on the 21st January 2007.
This is the wreck of the TSS Maheno, which has been beached on the island since 1935 when it was en-route to Japan to be cut up for scrap and never made it. Here’s the story of the Maheno. Fraser Island’s rather a special place and I was lucky to visit it with Lynn and Alison all those years ago. If you want to see more pictures of the island, follow this link.
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Funny old world isn’t it? Late yesterday the Government issued details of a series of local ‘lockdowns’ in response to growing numbers of Covid cases. One of the lockdowns is here in Calderdale.
We’d been blessed with very few cases for many months but within the space of a couple of weeks the numbers doubled. I can’t say I’m surprised because whilst many people have been taking Covid seriously it’s been obvious some really weren’t. They seem to have been (mostly) young people and sections of the Asian community. The latter is especially daft as the evidence is that BAME communities are more susceptible to Covid than others.
I visited our local Asian supermarket a couple of days ago and saw the problem first hand. Only 70% of shoppers were wearing masks, the majority of those who weren’t were Asian women. As the Asian community here is overwhelmingly Muslim you can appreciate the irony.
We’ve had the hottest day of the year so far and I’m fed up of being cooped up so I packed the camera, a book I need to read for researching my next RAIL article and wandered down into Sowerby Bridge where I sat on the station for a couple of hours. It was like being a kid again – only it was a bottle of IPA I had in my bag, not Tizer and I had to break off for a Zoom meeting after an hour!
Whilst I was at the station I noticed trains were the busiest I’d seen them since Covid hit. What was depressing was to see the amount of people who were boarding without wearing masks. Sometimes I wonder how on earth you get through to some people.
At least this young lady had got the message about masks.
Train services are gradually returning to normal as the number of services continues to ramp up. More changes are due in September but what I dread is us returning to the levels we had pre-Covid where we’re running far too many trains on a network that simply can’t cope – so punctuality and reliability suffer. Now’s the time for a rethink, but do the Department of Transport have the imagination to do that? I’m doubtful.
On the bright side, it was good to see open access operator Grand Central running trains again – even if it was off their core route and shuttling between Leeds and Hebden Bridge running services for Northern!
Grand Central’s 180102 working 1T28, the 1343 Hebden Bridge to Leeds, passing through Sowerby Bridge.
It was lovely to be out and enjoying the sunshine and the heat, although there was no way I was going to be visiting any pubs as it was obvious the lockdown message was being widely ignored – especially by young white males who were packing the beer gardens of certain pubs. Mind you, some of the older generation were doing their best to make a mess of things, but that’s Wetherspoons customers for you…
Just an average Friday afternoon as a drunken Wetherspoons customer needs medical treatement in the street outside, blocking a main road out of the town…
Strolling home along a deserted canal bank I spotted this lovely idyll.
Shire cruisers are a narrowboat company based in Sowerby Bridge. It’s great to see their boats out and about again as life returns to the canals.
Finally getting home I had a blissful hour in the garden before the rain arrived! Yep – despite it being the hottest day of the year we still had a storm. At least it saved me watering the garden!
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This has been a really shitty day for a whole host of reasons that I won’t go in to, so today’s picture is coming from a ‘happy place’ that I love to escape to where I feel very much at home and miss – especially now we’ve all had our wings clipped, metaphorically and literally.
I took this picture of a hawkers food stall on Lebuh Chulia in Georgetown, Penang , Malaysia on the 15th October 2009. I first visited Georgetown in 1992 and fell in love with it then. I’ve been back many times since and never been disappointed. The old town is a wonderful mix of architecture and cultures and the food is sublime. This shot is of Lebuh Chulia, a street in the backpackers area, but it’s far more than that as the locals still hold sway. Each night the shops shut and foodstalls like this appear, serving Chinese, Indian Malaysian or Western foods. I love the local dishes, but one stall that always amuses me is a burger bar decked out in Manchester United banners! – but that’s for another picture…
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Today’s actually been quite a varied day. In these strange times that normally means the weather around here’s produced sunshine and rain, instead it’s meant that I’ve been juggling household DIY jobs, work, shopping and cooking as well as managing to get out for some exercise – oh, and I’ve finally finished scanning yet another album of old railways slides from 1995. There’s only 3 albums left to do now after 31 years (Woo – hoo!). You can view the latest batch here. They’re the first ones that come up in the gallery.
These mixed exertions have certainly passed the time and allowed me to play catch-up on a number of fronts so the day’s flown, which brings me to the picture of the day, which was taken Mid-Atlantic in April 1999.
Pictures through aircraft windows are always frought with difficulty, especially when you’re shooting into the sun because of the chances of flare in the window layers as well as the optic elements of the lens (which is why I use prime lenses in these situations), but this one worked quite well and it holds a lot of memories. It was taken from a Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angleles to London Heathrow on the final day of an epic 18 month trip around the world, from 1997-1999. Lynn and I were heading home with no idea how we’d feel about being back. As we crossed the Atlantic the plane banked just before sunset, allowing me to capture the final shot of the trip.
I’ve still many many pictures from our adventures to scan, but you can find the ones I have here.
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Today’s been another less than vintage summer day with a mix of sunshine, showers, high winds and temperatures that are more like October than July. The one consolation is that the Calder Valley always looks beautiful in the constantly changing light and the rain’s left the fields looking radiant with a painter’s palette full of shades of green. Sadly, I’ve not had time to get out with the camera as I’ve various deadlines to meet at the moment so I’ve spent most of the day working from home. Hopefully I’ll be able to tear myself away for a day and hope to make my first rail trip since March.
In the meantime, here’s the picture of the day, which was taken on an island few ventured to in those days. Komodo, island of the dragons…
I took this picture on the 2nd September 1992. I was on my long solo trip and had reached the beautiful Indonesian Island of Flores, where I based myself at the port of Labuanbajo for a few days in order to take a trip to Komodo with a local guide.
In those days small groups would take day trips to the island, sign in with the PHPA wardens, then your group (plus a goat, which was on a one-way trip) would trek out into the bush near the camp where there was a small viewing platform around a shallow depression which had several Komodo dragons of varying sizes hanging around waiting to be fed. The poor goat would have its throat slit and be thrown into the arena, which galvanized the dragons into action – as you can see here. It’s not a sight for the squeamish – and some of these dragons are big buggers!
When I returned with Lynn in 1998 the practice had been stopped at it was realised that it was making the dragons lazy! So, the chance to get photo’s like this anymore is long gone. Not that the goats mind…
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I don’t know about where you are right now, but here in West Yorkshire its been a thoroughly miserable day weather-wise. We’ve had heavy rail and gales, with just the occasional glimpse of sun to tease us before the next downpour arrived. So today’s picture is to break away from that. I took this at a beach on Ko Chang, Thailand on the 28th November 2011.
Enjoy a Chang on Ko Chang with me!
Sadly, It may be some time before I get to quaff a sunset beer on an Asian beach again…
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Regular readers will know of my growing cynicism around certain conservation charities, especially the single-issue ones like the Woodland Trust who play fast and loose with facts and deliberately exaggerate and distort the effects of HS2 on the environment. These organisations are doing the wider environmental movement no favours at all. People like me should be their natural allies (and donors) but I find there’s now a growing list of them I won’t touch with a bargepole and certainly wouldn’t dream of helping financially. Here’s the latest.
Tomorrow, HS2 is due to take possession of land on the edges of the Calvert Jubilee nature reserve at Calvert, Buckinghamshire to begin the early stages of constructing HS2. The reserve is bordered by the former Great Central main line on the East and the route of East-West rail to the North.
Here was the reaction on Twitter of Estelle Bailey, Chief Exec of the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust who manage the site in response to unrelated news about the IPA…
“Destroy” the nature reserve? That sounds serious! There’s only one tiny problem, it’s complete cobblers, as looking at a (publicly available) design map of the area shows. Calvert Jubilee is at the bottom of the map (link here)
When challenged about her comments and on being shown the above map, this was Ms Bailey’s response.
A “heck of a chunk”? That’s emotive nonsense and hardly a recognised measurement! The map shows it’s also completely untrue. The HS2 line itself passes the edge of the reserve in a deep cutting to cut down on noise and where that edge is on the nature reserve side the cutting will be constructed of vertical piles to minimise land take. The real impact on the reserve is a small auto transformer feeder station and service road, along with a landscaped cutting to drop the existing road under the E-W railway line, plus a narrow road to allow access to the inverted siphon pipes connecting the existing lake with the new ponds on the opposite side of HS2. “Heck of a chunk” Give over!
Here’s how the area looks now on Google maps.
Notice that for the little bit of the reserve that’s taken there’s massive compensation for wildlife in the fact that the monoculture farmland to the right of the railway on Google maps becomes a huge area of new planting which is ringed by ponds, meaning there’s no net loss of biodiversity. Exactly the opposite!
Of course, this doesn’t stop some of the local Nimbys bemoaning what they say is ‘irreplaceable’ loss, but there’s several huge holes in this argument.
For a start, Calvert Jubilee is a brownfield site. It used to be a brickworks! Calvert brickworks was a massive undertaking and major employer that finally closed its doors in 1991. The website of the Great Moor sailing club which occupies one of the five former clay pits that’s now called Grebe lake contains the history of the site, mentioning that “Pit No.2 was formally opened as a nature reserve on 20th March 1978 by Sir Ralph Verney, a local landowner, and owner of the nearby Claydon House (now run by the National Trust). This 50-acre lake with surrounding 30 acres of land is now run by the Berks, Bucks, and Oxon Naturalist Trust”.
So, this 80 acre site has only existed as a nature reserve for just 42 years, in which time nature has completely reclaimed it – which says a lot about how resilient nature really is. Not bad considering some conservationists insist it’s ‘irreplaceable’ once gone – as it was when the clay pits were dug and the brickworks was in operation (from 1902 -1991). The work HS2 will be doing will be far more sensitively managed and the disturbance it will cause will heal a lot quicker – as we can see from the experiences of High Speed 1 in Kent and Essex.
It’s the doom-laden predictions of ecological disaster by conservationists opposed to Hs2 that really get my back up. Calvert has proved they’re nonsense once and it will do so again. It’s these predictions of disaster that do the conservation movements credibility no good at all. Yes, we should all do our best to ensure these projects have the best environmental mitigation possible, but when you get such dishonest claims bandied around, it really doesn’t help anyone. Here’s an example from Facebook posted by one of the locals.
The only catastrophe here is the use of language! They’ve seen the plans, they know the plans, yet they still peddle scaremongering like this. I’ve been critical of HS2 Ltd’s PR and public engagement policies in the past but I’m using these as example of what they’re up against. No mater how open and informative HS2 is, when you’re up against people who deliberately distort and exaggerate like this, you’re facing an uphill struggle – especially when one of these people is the Chief Executive of a charity who supposedly has a professional duty to tell the truth!
HS2 Ltd have countered this misinformation before. They’re quoted in response to yet more scaremongering in this article in the local Bucks Herald newspaper, where it turns out that the ‘heck of a chunk’ is actually just 20%, leaving 80% untouched!
Of course, there’s another irony here. The old railway line that Hs2 will be reusing at this point is the route of the former Great Central. The very line some of them tout as an ‘alternative’ to HS2 that should be reopened instead. Only they don’t seem that keen on the idea when it becomes a reality! Is there any finer example of hypocrisy?
Let’s see if tomorrows threatened protests actually materalise….
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Today’s picture was taken in Calcutta, India in March 1992. I was staying in Sudder St, the backpacker area of this vibrant city. Sudder St is a bit of an institution as it’s one of those places that become a crossroads for travellers but it’s not to everyone’s taste as the standards of accommodation as are as run-down as the city itself. Even so, it’s a place that I’ve visited several times and really enjoy. Life is lived out on the streets as there’s little incentive to hang around in dark and dinghy hotel rooms. Instead, many travellers congregate at the street stalls selling food and drinks, where you can sit, chat and watch the world go by. They’re ideal for photographers like me. One one morning I was sitting outside a pavement stall eating curd and honey when I spotted this scene on the opposite side of the narrow street.
Whilst his washing dried on the line behind him against a wall covered with election posters for the Congress and Communist parties a man was taking a shower from a bucket on the pavement. As always, I had my camera with me, so I quickly grabbed a shot.
I’ve been back to Calcutta several times since, the last time in 2011 and it’d changed little in the intervening two decades. It was still as run-down and gloriously anarchic as ever, but I still think it’s one of my favourite Indian cities as it has a vibrancy and soul that makes it rather special. If you want to see more pictures from Calcutta over the years (including of their incredibly run-down tram network), follow this link. Calcutta (or Kolkata as it’s been renamed) holds a special title amongst Indian cities in that it retains two forms of transport you won’t find anywhere else on the sub-continent – trams and hand pulled rickshaws.
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I said that as the project progressed I’d do regular updates on what’s happening, so here’s the first one.
Since my last blog there’s been several things of note on the construction, design and contract fronts.
At the beginning of the month it was announced that Sheffield based firm 3Squared had won a three-year contract to supply its RailSmart software, alongside some bespoke modules, to form a supply chain management system, giving visibility of the complex freight supply chain, and providing live performance, cost management information and operational control data in real-time. This is yet another example of SME’s across the UK gaining work form HS2. You can read more here.
HS2’s also busy on the archeological front, with important (and also one rather gruesome) discoveries made at Wellwick Farm, Bucks. Archaeologists discovered a skeleton of an adult male buried face down in a ditch with hands bound together under his pelvis. The unusual burial position suggests the iron age man may have been a victim of a murder or execution. Osteologists are currently examining the skeleton for further evidence of foul play. A large ceremonial timber circle was also discovered, along with other burials. More here.
Archaeological discoveries at Wellwick Farm, Wendover. Copyright HS2 Ltd.
Archaeological discoveries at Wellwick Farm, Wendover. Copyright HS2 Ltd.
On the 21st July Hs2 released this excellent new video in conjunction with the Cappagh Group showing the benefits of railfreight and how HS2 will free up capacity for more freight services, helping reduce UK transport carbon emissions.
On the 23rd HS2 released pictures of the final design for the Chalfont St Peter vent shaft headhouse.
Set back from the road, the single-story building will be wrapped in a simple grey zinc roof with doors and vent openings picked out in a dark bronze colour to provide contrast.
Taking its inspiration from the style of local barns and other agricultural buildings, the headhouse is designed to fit into the surrounding landscape. The pre-weathered grey zinc roof will age naturally over time, without loss of robustness or quality, while the whole structure will sit on a simple dark blue brick base.
Below ground level, a 60 metre ventilation shaft will reach down to the twin tunnels below, with fans and other equipment designed to regulate air quality and temperature in the tunnels, remove smoke in the event of a fire and provide access for the emergency services. More here.
What you wouldn’t know is what lies beneath…
There’s also this excellent video on the size and complexity of the work on the M42 at Solihull.
The environmental side of the project has been busy too. The next day HS2 published details of a project which uses drone technology to aid ecologists monitoring the Skylark bird population.
Roadbridge, a sub-contractor to Align JV – the main works civils contractor that is delivering the portion of HS2 that includes the Chiltern Tunnel, has begun using the drones during its extensive environmental mitigation programme on the tunnel South Portal site next to the M25 in Buckinghamshire.
Monitoring nesting bird populations is crucial, providing accurate information which results in more effective ecological mitigation to protect the natural environment around work sites. At twelve metres above ground level the drone captures approximately a 9m2 area, providing a reduction in search times, and a clear perspective from a 90-degree view of the ground below. Using a thermal camera, the drone can calibrate to the ground temperature and other objects to lock onto a heat source and identify the bird nests. This includes birds on the nest, eggs on the nest and birds sheltering on the ground. More here.
So, another busy month for HS2 – and that’s without the continued work on construction sites along the length of the route.
And what of the protests against HS2? To say they’ve had little success would be an understatement. There are only half a dozen protest camps along the route and many of them are moribund, seeing little real protest activity or ‘direct action’. One (Crackley) is almost redundant now as the vast majority of vegetation clearance has been completed. There was an attempt to stop some work along the A413 at Great Missenden, but this was an abject failure and the protesters have now moved on as the work’s been completed. The major protest has been at the Denham site where National Grid are removing and re-siting electricity pylons and part of the work to divert services away from the HS2 route.
The focus of the protests over this past week have been a solitary Alder tree, which the protesters claimed was ‘ancient’. As the week went on it aged rapidly as their claims became more and more fantastical. In the space of a few days this one tree went from 400 years to 800 years old! There’s only one problem. These claims were utter cobblers! The thing about the protesters is that very few of them actually know anything about the environment they’re supposedly protecting. If they did, they’d know that ‘ancient Alder’ is an oxymoron. The average life of the species is 60 years – as their ‘friends’ at the Woodland Trust point out on their website!
Adding an extra zero to the trees age did them little good. Nor did the increasingly ridiculous claims on social media from the protesters, who were vastly outnumbered by HS2 staff, the National Eviction Team and both the Metropolitan and Thames Valley Police. Allegations against the police and HS2 ranged from the usual ‘ecocide’, ‘illegal’ arrests and reached new heights of absurdity with claims of sexual assault.
The whole sorry circus came to an end last night when the *cough* ‘ancient alder’ was finally felled after a day of to-ing and fro-ing between police, NET and the protesters which saw several arrests and a couple of protesters who were up on ropes across a chalk stream falling off and injuring themselves.
The irony? These environmental ‘protectors’ had spent several days charging back and forth across a chalk stream, supposedly one of the things they were meant to care about. How much damage they did to it during their confrontation is an interesting question.
Needless to say, the bluster from the protesters at the end was hilarious. Here’s what ‘Hs2Rebellion’ had to say!
Actually, the Hs2 rebellion Facebook page is good for one thing – their videos often inadvertently give the game away of just how preposterous their claims are. You can find it here.
Talking of preposterous, my last ‘Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week’ (William) who I featured here has been at it again. The man’s a fantasist who needs to carry a fire extinguisher at all times as his pants are permanently ablaze. This one from today amused me.
The idea that a serial liar is in any position to lecture others about ‘fair and balanced reporting’ is delicious! I take it he’s rather upset that the Guardian are ignoring his fantasies. But Murdoch? Really? I’m assuming our friend from across the pond is unaware that the Guardian is actually owned by the Scott Trust and is completely independent!
Somehow, despite all the bombast, bluster and lies, I doubt we’ll be seeing Hs2rebellion achieving anything at all. The number of protesters who’ve been arrested, injuncted or who are due to be sentenced soon grows, as does their failure to achieve anything at all. Meanwhile, HS2 is ramping up work across the whole of the phase 1 route.
I’m sure my next update will have lots more positive news…
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Another busy day today that’s seen us out shopping on the first official day of ‘wearing a mask in shops’ day. I’m relieved to report that most people seem to have got the message and are abiding by the instruction. We visited the Tesco in Sowerby Bridge and I only observed one person (a man) not wearing one. Our local Tescos had one or two more backsliders, but not many. Why did we have to go to two branches of Tescos I hear you ask? They’re on a couple of miles apart but the stock they carry is very different. No, I’ve no idea why either!
OK, here’s today’s picture of the day. If you’re squeamish, I suggest that you look away now….
I took this picture on the 8th February 2009 in Georgetown on Penang island, Malaysia during the Hindu festival of Thaipusam.
Yes, those are hooks in the mans back. He was pulling a wheeled cart with them! Although it’s a Hindu festival other religions join in and I’ve seen Muslims and the Chinese community carrying out such acts of devotional sacrifice (which are frowned upon back in India, where the festival was banned). It’s quite an event to witness and the atmosphere’s anything but painful – even if sights like this do make you wince the first time you see them!
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Paul Bigland 