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Category Archives: Richard Wellings

Back to the keyboard…

07 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by in London, Musings, Railways, Richard Wellings, Travel

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To be honest, I never left it. It was just my energies have been directed at other things than blogging over the long weekend. I’ve got plenty of things to write about, just not the time to do it as I’ve been concentrating on picture editing and also time with my wife. Well, it was a bank holiday!

Anyone who visits my Zenfolio picture website will notice that rather a lot of recent pictures have been uploaded. There’s lots more to come as I’m going to be out and about quite a bit over the next few weeks. I’m back in London tomorrow for a meeting with a client, so expect both a rolling blog and pictures. Meanwhile, I’ve still got a blog about the rebirth of the station building at Mytholmroyd to complete. Expect that shortly. There’s one or two interesting jobs coming up soon too which should add more fun and I’ve not even touched on the continuing political farce that’s the Brexit shambles. No doubt I’ll have the chance to vent my spleen soon! I’d have loved to have done so after the local elections and the way ‘Magic Grandad’ (aka Jeremy Corbyn) managed to spin his party’s appalling showing as an endorsement of him wanting Brexit.

Right, it’s time to go, but I will leave you with one last picture. One of today’s chores was sorting out my picture database and filing all the backups to ensure nothing can get lost and also free up space on my laptop. Yesterday Richard Wellings, a self-styled transport ‘expert’ from the shadowy lobby group the ‘Institute for Economic Affairs’ tried to make hay out of an article claiming 500 Crossrail train drivers are getting paid for doing nothing because the central core has been delayed. Wellings knows sod all about railways, he just spouts whatever line his anonymous paymasters tell him to, so of course, he didn’t realise that Crossrail are already running trains under the TfL Rail banner either side of the core. Funnily enough I’d pictured several a few days before. Here’s one at Paddington on May day. Pop over to Liverpool St and you’ll see plenty more!

DG321914. 345003. Paddington. 1.5.19crop

Genuine rail expert William Barter put Wellings in his place on Twitter.

barter

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An example of how local media (& the anti Hs2 mob) will fall for anything…

06 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Crap journalism, Hs2, Richard Wellings, Rugby Observer

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Yesterday’s Rugby Observer carried a piece written by Lawrence Baker, proclaiming “HS2 opponents call for reopening of Rugby’s Great Central Railway“. The origins of the story came from a ‘press release’ that was alleged to come from the English Regional Transport Association. Their press release bears no address, no website details, no charity or other registration number – just a couple of telephone numbers and a picture of their ‘spokesman’ – a chap called Richard Pill.

This is what the ERTA had to say…

erta

The ERTA has decided? Wow! So who is this august body that their deliberations should carry any weight & make it into print?

They don’t exist.

Lawrence Baker has made the fundamental mistake of not bothering to do the slightest bit of fact checking. No alarm bells rang when all the ‘news release’ carried was a couple of phone numbers & no address. He didn’t even bother running Richard Pill’s name through Google. If he had done, he’d have saved himself & his paper a lot of embarrassment.

Why?

Here’s Richard Pill’s LinkedIn page;

Pill

And here’s the picture of Pill from the ‘press release’

pill 2

The Rugby Observer have been conned by a part time gardener.

Mind you, it’s not just the Rugby Observer who are so easily fooled by anti Hs2 rubbish. When he’s not making his own rubbish up, Richard Wellings from the IEA falls for stuff hook, line and sinker too!

wellings again

That said, Wellings is well known for falling for anything. He’s recently been caught out retweeting a load of cobblers from an anonymous anti Hs2 blogger who calls himself ‘Beleben’. This individual claimed half the WCML freight paths go unused. When presented with the real time data that proved otherwise Wellings ducked the issue & still does to this day!

What this says about the anti Hs2 camps intellectual & critical prowess is up to the readers to decide.

Richard Wellings caught out making it up again…

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Richard Wellings

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Those opposed to hs2 form the usual right wing rag-bag of folks who are opposed to public spending, so it’s no surprise to find both the Taxpayers Alliance and the Institute of Economic Affairs amongst their numbers.

Prominent amongst them is Richard Wellings, the Deputy Editorial Director of the IEA. Wellings likes to pass himself off as a transport expert (solely on the basis of the fact he got a PhD in transport, his practical experience is zilch). Wellings also likes making things up – especially numbers. It was he who invented the ‘Hs2 will cost £80bn’ claim. He did this out by totting up costs of projects that have nothing to do with Hs2 (like Crossrail 2) and inventing railway projects no-one is actually planning to build (Hs2 to Liverpool).

These nonsensical figures play well in sections of the media but anyone with genuine analytical skills & transport knowledge (or even economics) knows what a load of old tosh they really are.

But Wellings has a problem. He has form for making up ridiculous claims for the cost of rail projects – and one of those claims is coming back to haunt him, which is making him very sensitive.

Back in 2008 he wrote a blog for the IEA in which he claimed Crossrail would cost between £20-30bn. Like his hs2 figure it’s a complete fantasy. Even a fag packet would resent having such calculations written on it. You can find it here

Here’s a copy of the claim;

Wellings

It’s worth noting that this blog shows how crap Wellings is at predicting anything. Look at his comment about an interest rate rise!

Wellings big problem is that not only was Crossrail not cancelled, its also stayed well within the budget set for it. The project is 65% complete and all the (risky) tunneling is over. The bill is expected to remain well within the projected £14.8bn. That makes Wellings out by between £5.2bn to £15.2bn. That’s some fag packet!

So Welllings is starting to sweat. His credibility (never high) is on the line here.

He still insists on jumping in with both feet to the Hs2 debate on Twitter and today I challenged him on these figures. His response? He pretended he’d never made any such cost projections!

Wellings costs

Not only is the man no good with figures, he’s no good with the truth either…