• Bond Street Elizabeth Line station now opening October 24 (RailwayTechnology)
• Byford states driverless Tube trains ruled out by City Hall (EnfieldDispatch)
• TfL to restart schemes to improve London active travel infrastructure (IntelligentTransport)
• Net Zero: A very British problem, road transport: podcast (BBCRadio4)
• New high speed train will cover Lisbon-Porto in 1h 15m (TheMayorEU)
• Visiting Philadelphia’s unknown urban railway park (RailPark)
• The Airmail Gaze: Hawker aircraft ranked by beauty (HushKit)
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It may have been expectation self-managemenr on my part: but my first reaction on seeing “Bond Street Elizabeth Line station now opening October 24” was not that it was opening in three days, but that it had been delayed another two years!
There are a couple of lines that are obvious candidates for driverless, to comply with the terms of the funding agreement: Waterloo and City, and maybe the Romford to Upminster shuttle.
And maybe partial driverless on other lines for the penultimate and last station on some lines, for those lines/stations where drivers currently do “step back”. Instead of having two drivers doing stepback, have the driver exit the train at the penultimate station (handing over to a train captain if that is the GoA), launch the train driverless to the last station and back again to the penultimate one, where the driver rejoins the train he left (or another one if it has arrived earlier) and any train captain that was required exits the train to join the next one that needs driverless cover. Maybe also for trains turning on the Kennington loop (to allow it to work a bit like stepback).
Minimises investment needed in safety infrastructure such as platform edge doors (only needed for 2 stations where driverless turnaround is used, instead of a whole line).
This is similar to what is supposed to happen at Paddington for Elizabeth line trains that are turning, but currently isn’t enabled (not yet working as designed).
None of this will make a business case for labour saving, but that’s not the point anyway.
The airmail gaze is educational – had not realised the bankruptcy of the Sopwith Aviation Company allowed Sopwith test pilot Harry Hawker and three others, including Thomas Sopwith, to buy the assets of Sopwith and form H.G. Hawker Engineering in 1920.
I look forward to a Locomotive gaze episode.
There has been so much announced about a partial Bond St and entrance construction I would have expected a fuller announcement. Does anyone know if this is a full and final opening of both entrances at all hours?
The six 50 year old designed 315 units are to run until at least Christmas.
Apropos driverless trains, part of the challenge is having the infrastructure completely segregated from people. This is a challege for the Elizabeth line autoreverse west of Paddington as this infrastructure in not segregated from the adjacent lines operating to normal Network Rail rules. Perhaps the fact that Network Rail are increasingly prohibiting staff going on the track whilst trains are running will enable a safety argument to be made.