Tag Archives: London

Today’s rolling blog

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Grand Central trains, London, Travel

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07:35
Expect today’s blog to unfold over the day as things happen. I’m currently on a fully booked Grand Central service (even 1st Class has no seats left) from Halifax to London for a days photograph around the capital. Fortunately (thanks to the crew) I’ve managed to secure a seat as I’ve an article to write and pictures to edit before I hit the capital.

It’s a beautiful morning here in Yorkshire so my mile and a half, thirty minute walk to the station was a pleasure rather than a chore – and the Yorkshire stone pavements and cobbled streets were quaint rather than being the death trap they can turn into in icy weather!

I’m going to keep this blog updated with thoughts and experiences throughout the day as and when they happen – and time permits. Let’s see what happens…

10:08.

A productive morning so far. One 1000 word article written, pix edited and to cap it all, the weather’s picking up. We’re about to pull into Kings Cross now…

12:36

Thanks to some Facebook friends who work on the railways I received updated information on which services the re-liveried South Western Railway trains were working. This gave me time to saunter over to Euston and check out progress on the HS2 work there. Workers were busy levelling the Western side of Euston Gardens to create the temporary taxi rank to replace the underground one which will close to allow demolition of the area.

DG293960. Temporary taxi rank. Euston. 21.3.18

From Euston I caught to tube to Waterloo and awaited my quarry to arrive in the shape of Desiro 450111 which was (allegedly) working the 10.24 Portsmouth to Waterloo. I filled my time sending pictures to accompany the article I’d written earlier, via the rather glacial station wifi – although to be fair – the file sizes I’m sending aren’t exactly small! I needn’t have worried as a check on ‘RealTime Trains’ showed me that 2P34 was running an hour late! It seems the signalling on the SWML is having another of its regular hissy fits. Still, it gives me time to update this…

14:40.

Ever had on of those days? When the train I’d been waiting for finally turned up it seemed there had been a unit swap and the sole re-liveried Class 450 I’d been waiting for wasn’t working it! Muttering under my breath, I abandoned Waterloo and headed down to Clapham Junction to make the most of the good weather instead. I’m here now and this is how it looks…

DG294010. 707016. 707026. Clapham Junction. 21.3.18

Hello, goodbye. Some of the recently introduced Siemens Class 707s which are going to be displaced as part of the new franchises massive new fleet order.

DG294014. 456003. Clapham Junction. 21.3.18

Old train – new skyline. The constantly changing face of London’s evident behind a BR Class 456 – another of the units which is due to be displaced and go off lease in the near future.

I’ve another bite of the cherry this evening when a pair of re-liveried DMUs are meant to be working the 17:52 Waterloo – Salisbury. Let’s hope I have more luck this time…

As luck would have it an old friend (Steve Upton) who drives for SWR got in touch and we had time for a coffee at Waterloo before he took his first train out. I used it to get back to Clapham where I exploited the dying rays of the sun and the London skyline to frame a few more pictures as I waited to see if the train I was stalking would turn up.

Thumbs up from the driver!

Finally – after numerous false starts and hours of waiting, one of the re-liveried trains (in this case a Class 158) passed through en-route to Waterloo, but fate had the last laugh. The damned thing was sandwiched in-between two units in the old SWT livery! I chased it back to Waterloo where I got my first look at the new colours.

Sorry guys and gals, but to say your livery choice is underwhelming is an understatement. I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of money on coming up with something that sets you apart from the previous incumbent. The problem is that SWT had vibrant liveries, blocks of colour that stood out in the landscape and also set apart their suburban services from long-distance. What have you come up with? Several shades of dull. The idea of barely distinguishable narrow stripes may have looked good on the drawings. The problem is that – when your train flashes past at speed, no-one will even notice them. From a marketing perspective it’s akin to a new Puritanism. You’ve taken all the fun out of things. Is this really the image that you wanted to project? OK, at the end of the day, liveries are just coats of paint (or, in your case, vinyl) that do nothing to enhance punctuality or reliability. But they still convey a message. So, what was the message you thought you were conveying, ‘cos fun – it ain’t.

DG294094

UPDATE: 22nd March.

OK, livery rant and day in London over, it’s time to move on to other things. Expect another blog later today when I’m back on familiar territory and I’ve crunched the final numbers on the Stop Hs2 petition which finally ran out of time yesterday. Did it reach 100,000? Did it heck as like…

 

Back in Blighty…

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Air Travel, Ride India, The Railway Children, Travel

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I flew into the UK from India last night after finishing the Ride India challenge for the Railway Children and I’m slowly getting used to the idea of being back. The flight from Delhi on a Jet Airways Boeing 777 was pretty good. The plane was packed but I managed to tick a few more movies off the list to keep myself occupied. Ride India was such a fantastic experience to share with a great bunch of people that it might take me a while to come down and adjust to being back. Britain seems such a grey place at the moment – and I don’t mean because of the weather.

By the time I’d been processed by the Heathrow bureaucracy and collected my bag it was too late to make the last train home so I booked a hotel in central London for the princely sum of £40. Despite the miserly price it wasn’t a flea-pit but a good hotel in Bayswater. I was even given a free upgrade from a single room to a recently refurbished Executive double! By the time I checked-in I was dog-tired. I’d been up since 06:00 Indian time and crawled into bad at 02:00 Indian time! It being a Sunday, part of the tube network was shut for engineering work, so I ended up having to take a detour and catch a bus which extended my journey even more.

Despite being ‘cream-crackered’ my body clock was stuck on Indian time so I was wide-awake before the alarm-clock went off at 08:00. Sadly, today’s weather was drab and wet. As there was no incentive to leap out of bed and run amok with the camera I used the extra waking hours to edit another tranche of Indian pictures whilst making a large hole in the rooms coffee supply and listening to the BBC news. Nothing much seems to have changed whilst I’ve been away other than the sad news about the death of Ken Dodd. The Brexitshambles continues apace – although it does seem that the scales are dropping from some people’s eyes about Comrade Corybn who seems to have made a less than well received speech where he indulged in what’s become almost a national pastime in Brexit Britain – immigrant bashing. Not that the BBC covered any of this. The real news I got through Twitter and the sources whom I follow. The BBC is fine for a few headlines and ‘fluffy’ stuff, but that’s about it nowadays. Don’t expect any real insights or analysis anymore.

Before heading North I decided to have a few hours topping up my rail archive with pictures from Kings Cross. This turned out to be a wise move as there were a few unusual workings to be seen (pix to be added shortly).

As usual, Grand Central are taking me home, this time on another of their second-hand, ex-GWR Class 180s. The train’s busy, but not overly so – even though it’s carrying some Hull Trains passengers to Doncaster as they’ve had to cancel one of their services. I’ve bagged a table seat so that I can catch up with blogging and also edit some of the thousands of pictures that I took in India. Sadly, the weather outside the train window doesn’t match that seen in the pictures, the farther North we get the grimmer it gets – and I’m not exactly dressed for it…

That said. I’m looking forward to getting home. There’s a lot of stuff for me to catch up with and pictures to get out to people – as well as a few articles to write. No doubt I’ll be getting itchy feet again once that’s done…

London calling…

30 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in I love my job, London, Rail Investment, Transport, Travel

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Despite having plenty to blog about the one thing I haven’t had is time. I’m 2/3 through my commission in private residential old people’s homes in North London and it’s absorbed nearly all my time, but here’s a quick update.

As expected, it’s been a fascinating couple of days. The staff at the two homes I’ve visited have been inspiring. The level of care and attention they give to residents (who all have different needs and levels of support) is bloody hard work. It’s not a job for the casual or the faint-hearted. I’ve also met some lovely residents and heard their stories. The whole experience has been uplifting  – if sometimes sad when you see the ravages of dementia on people who obviously shone before the onset of such a cruel disease.

I’ve also reacquainted myself with commuting across London by public transport. It’s not something have had to do for a long time. When I lived in North London but worked in the East my daily commute was by bicycle. It was the same when I did relief shifts on newspapers based at Canary Wharf. Once I turned to photography my commute was never normally to the same place more than two days in a row.

Since those days London’s population’s grown – as has the number of people commuting in. Today I was using Thameslink services from Herne Hill to Kentish Town & expecting that the new 8-car Siemens Class 700s might have provided a bit of breathing space compared to the Class 319s they’d replaced. Not a bit of it. The trains were rammed – despite all the extra space they provide. It was like being on the tube! It was the same with 12 car trains I saw passing through. Now, these trains are people movers. The 8 cars can carry 1146 and the 12’s take 1754 souls. If they’re already full it’s clear the full 24tph timetable through the Thameslink core can’t come soon enough…

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Despite the fact this thing’s a real people-mover and there’s several an hour, I had to flag the first two as I just couldn’t squeeze on. This was 3rd time lucky.

 

Going back to my roots…

28 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in I love my job, London, Photojournalism

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I’m working in London for the next few days and for a change – it’s nothing to do with railways. Instead, I’m going back to old haunts and shades of a former career.

Back in the 1980s-90s before I became a photographer I used to work and live in social housing. In fact, it was the focus of my life. I was a Housing Officer for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets as well as being very much involved in running the tenant management Housing Co-op in which I lived – which went by the name of ‘Wilfrid’ (after one of Beano comic strip Bash St kids). It’s over 20 years ago now as I moved out of the co-op in 1996 and left housing in 1997 but I always maintained an interest in the sector – helped by the fact my ex-wife worked for various charities at the time, including Homeless Network and the Big Issue. I look back on those days with fondness and treasure a lot of the memories. The stories that I could tell…

For the next three days I’m looking forward to combining my love of photography and interest in housing as I have a commission to take pictures in a trio of private homes for the elderly in North London. I suspect I’m going to meet some fascinating people and hear some interesting stories in the process.

London and the aftermath of yesterday’s tragic events

23 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by in London, Terrorism, Travel

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When I wrote my last blog entry about living in London during the IRA days of the IRA’s bombing campaign I never imagined that 24 hours later London would be the scene of another tragic attack which would cause the death of 3 innocent people.

Of course, as soon as it happened we had wall to wall media coverage and acres of speculation. Some sections of the right-wing media (especially in America) ramped up the hype and hysteria, aided and abetted their followers who hope to sow division and fear amongst people. Here’s an example of their bullshit.

Phares

No. One man didn’t ‘shut down a city’. No-one has ever shut down London, not the Luftwaffe, not the IRA, nor the far right bomber David Copeland – and no-one ever will.

I lived in London for nearly 25 years. At heart, I’m still a Londoner. The city made me who I am and I’m eternally grateful for everything the city gave me. I was still living there the last time their was a major incident, the 7th July bombings on 2005. I covered that horrific day for a magazine and I vividly remember the reaction of Londoners as events unfolded. It was one of stoicism and resolve. The resolve not to be cowed, not to be beaten. I was intensely proud of my fellow Londoners that day, I still am. I’ve no doubt that they’ll be showing those same strengths today.

People of many different faiths and nationalities were killed on 7/7. The same may well be true of yesterday as the killers really don’t care who they kill. All they want to do is spread terror – and that’s the one thing we must never let anyone do – including their right-wing friends in the media. So here’s a hat-tip to people like James Cleverly, who’s taken on the poisonous Katie Hopkins

MP

This is the true spirit of London, not ‘Hatey Katie’s’ warped vision.

tube message

 

 

Working from home, and other thoughts

21 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in London, Musings, Terrorism, Work

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– and it’s not a bad place to be today! The Spring weather’s taken a turn for the worse up in’t Pennines. There’s a chill wind, rain and threats of snow (in fact, as I typed this, it started hailing), so I’m happy to be catching up on paperwork, picture-editing and listening to the news – most of which is depressing.

The death of former IRA leader Martin McGuinness features in many reports. Understandably, his memory generates strong feelings from some, but there’s no doubt that , without the willingness of him and others to reject the bullet for the ballot box, ‘the troubles’ would still be with us. I lived in London for nearly 25 years and experienced first-hand the devastation that the IRA wrought. In 1996 I was still living in the East End. I was at home the night the massive South Quay bomb detonated. We lived over a mile North of the explosion in Bromley by Bow, but we though our windows were going to blow in. The blast rattled the hell out of them – and us. I’m glad to see the back of those times which were far more dangerous than today’s hysteria around Islamic extremism. The IRA killed for more UK citizens than Islamists ever have. So, I’m grateful to McGuinness for being part of bringing those days to an end. There’s a lesson in what he did for anyone who wishes to learn it. Who would have thought that two implacable enemies, McGuinness and the Unionist firebrand the Rev Ian Paisley  would form such a rapport that they would earn the sobriquet ‘the chuckle brothers’?

Right, enough of philosophising, I’ve work to do…

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