• Who could succeed Andy Byford at the helm of TfL (NewCivilEng)
• The Up & Down Club: The sleeper train commuters (Telegraph)
• Europe’s kid friendly trains benefit all passengers (FamilyFriendlyTrains)
• Karlsruhe tram-train farm produce delivery service (HofladenTram)
• The largest urban rail system in the world – Tokyo’s urban railways: video (RMTransit)
• It’s the cars that are crowding us out in cities (ALUVer)
• Ultra rich using private jets to avoid traffic, but at great environment cost (Guardian)
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So the sleeper commuters are joining second-home occasional residents and adding to the housing problem for locals in Cornwall and elsewhere, and this is a good thing?
Subsidies for the Sleeper service enable Scottish residents like Kirsty Wark and Susan Calman to work at the BBC in London, or Scottish MPs to sit at Westminster.
Family spaces and fares are a greater utility than the motor car. We have them on ferries. Eurostar cooperated with Disney to transform the Saturday morning run to Marne-la-Vallée.
I’m ashamed to admit that I have never heard of these kidzones. What a great idea for a long journey: a reasonably simple and cheap area of distraction for tetchy toddlers and pressed parents.
How embarrassing that what we offer in the UK is the remarkably inspiring and utterly useful painted on the floor symbol of a buggy. Even for our too often unimaginative TOCs, this is a new low. Adult sized ball pits please. Now!
Sleeper commuters are just as much residents of a place as someone who works there and could equally have grown up there; I knew a travelling salesman in the 1980s who was Cornish born and bred, and came up each week on the sleeper to do business in London. Saying someone can’t move into an area to live if they’re going to work elsewhere is a slippery slope, and at least they’re not taking a local job from anyone.
Back when I were a lad, trains were pretty family-friendly by default. Mk 2 and early Mk 3 carriages had plenty of luggage storage behind most seats; this was before the craze for cramming them in “airline-style” started – did they think that would make it sound more luxurious than calling it “bus-style”? You didn’t have to make a special effort to book a group of seats around a table, and the seats were positioned so that you could enjoy watching the world going past outside the window rather than trying to catch a glimpse between a seat back and a solid panel.