RMT calls three one-day strikes over Midland Main Line safety

The latest news on East Midlands Rail's unsatisfactory new trains is that the largest railway trade union has called three one-day strikes over its concern that they are unsafe. As BBC News puts it:

A union that represents railway staff has announced plans for its members at East Midlands Railway (EMR) to take strike action over "growing safety concerns the company has failed to address".

The RMT union said it had been in dispute with EMR since April following the rollout of the 810 fleet (Aurora), which it said had been operating with a "significant number" of faults.

It said its members planned to take strike action on Saturday 1 August and the following two Saturdays.

I find these paragraphs in this report particularly worrying:

According to the RMT, EMR has been sending trains into service that are "likely to fail and require a full reset which leaves the train with no active safety systems".

The BBC has seen an operational briefing, which informs control, signalling and operations staff about undertaking an Aux Off / Aux On reset on EMR class 810 units - which may be required to recover certain faults.

"The process takes approximately 20 minutes and results in the temporary loss of several safety-critical systems, creating an increased risk of an uncontrolled evacuation and removing the driver's normal means of communication with the signaller," it states. 

This does tend to cast doubt on EMR's assurances to BBC News that the Aurora trains' shortcomings have no safety implications.

And I can't be the only person who is thinking again about the rail collision near Bedford last month.

There, according to a later Guardian report, an Aurora service from Nottingham to London halted unexpectedly because a fault caused an automatic application of its brakes. This train was then struck in the rear by a Corby to London service that had ignored a red signal:

Investigations continue but it appears that another train protection and warning system (TPWS), widely used on the railway system and designed to automatically stop trains if they pass a red signal, was not installed on this stretch of the Midland mainline.

No wonder RMT is up in arms.

It's not as if EMT has been candid over its problems with the Auroras. It's less than a week since BBC News published a story with the headline:

East Midlands Railway cancellations – is it really just the hot weather?

Navigating for Change calls for more investment in Fenland rivers

A flotilla of boats will make its way up the Great Ouse from St Ives to Bedford this month to highlight a critical lack of investment in the river and in Britain’s inland waterways generally.

Organised by the Great Ouse Boating Association and Fund Britain’s Waterways, the Navigating for Change campaign cruise will take place from July 13-18, travelling some 25 miles along the Great Ouse.

The flotilla will stop at riverside towns including Huntingdon and St Neots before arriving at the Bedford River Festival on July 17

The cruise is intended to draw attention to the growing funding crisis affecting waterways managed by the Environment Agency, which is responsible for maintaining the River Great Ouse in a safe and navigable condition.

According to the organisers, the Environment Agency has identified an annual funding shortfall of between £6m and £11m across the Anglia region. They say that around 40 of the region’s 60 locks and weirs are approaching the end of their operational lives, with no capital renewal programme in place.

Campaigners argue the consequences are already being felt across the network. Navigation on the River Cam was suspended for more than 18 months during 2024/5 following the structural failure of two lock islands, with repairs estimated to cost £10m. Meanwhile Brandon Lock on the Little Ouse remains closed because of a lack of funding for repairs and channel clearance.

For more information on the flotilla and Navigation for Change, go to Towpath Talk.

The Joy of Six 1528

Tom Williams reports from Southampton: "The demonstration descended into rioting as protesters clashed with police. Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. They marched to Belmont Road, where Nowak was killed. Riot police prevented them reaching Digwa’s family home."

"I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull." Andrew Page pays tribute to Michael Meadowcroft.

Matthew Pennell analyses last month's local election results and looks forward to future conquests: "What are the key battlegrounds in England? In 2027 we’ll see if we can build on long term gains in North Yorkshire and East Riding, whether we can retake Bedford and if there’s a chance of completing jigsaw in the far West of England by flipping the status of Herefordshire."

Ellie Davies talks to three Bristol academics about the impact that villages – both literal and metaphorical – have on our health and happiness.

"She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives." Lara Feigel salutes the continuing relevance of Laura Knight.

"There is an unavoidable ethical dimension to all this: though Payne’s deeply-considered and expert work on the sketches was clearly much more than the 'tinkering' Elgar was worried about, we have to acknowledge that the composer’s wish needs to be more-or-less disregarded if we are to perform or listen to the completed work." Jeremy Benson on Elgar's unfinished third symphony.

Charlotte Cane on the long campaign for improvements to the Ely North Junction bottleneck

Charlotte Cane, the Liberal Democrat MP for Ely and East Cambridgeshire, is right:

"Every new government or [rail] minster wants to look at everything again.

"You do a business case under one set of criteria and then, five years later, you're asked to do a business case under another set of criteria.

"Governments need to be less fixated on making new announcements which are their announcements, and more willing to continue things that have already been started."

She was talking to BBC News about the often promised but never delivered improvements to Ely North Junction, a bottleneck on the main railway route from the port at Felixstowe to the Midlands.

As the BBC report says, it's where lines from Norwich, Cambridge, King's Lynn, Peterborough and Ipswich all meet.

I once complained after a journey from Market Harborough to Cambridge, the railways want you to travel to London and nowhere else. Things will be better, at least for me, if the Oxford to Cambridge line is reopened, but I'm beginning to doubt if the final stretch, from Bedford to Cambridge, will ever materialise.g

The state of play with Ely North Junction, says BBC News, is that Network Rail was given £13m by the government in 2020 to develop options for the junction and prepare an outline business case. The report was submitted to the Department for Transport in 2022 and is still awaiting a decision.

Ely North Junction is close to a village called Queen Adelaide, which lends its name to the remarkable Queen Adelaide's Curve. This is a loop of line that allows trains to travel through the area from east to west (or west to east) without going through Ely station.

When I was a lad, every train from Leicester to Norwich (and from Norwich to Leicester) went round it, but almost all the workings that use it now are goods trains. The video above shows a rare exception and also gives you a good view of the area around Ely North Junction.

Oxford to Cambridge by train: past, present and future

Dr Beeching, who saw it as an important freight route, didn't want the Oxford to Cambridge line closed. But closed it was, to freight as well as passengers, on New Year's Day 1968, apart from the middle stretch between Bletchley and Bedford.

This video looks at the history of the line, its current condition and, close to the end, the prospects for full reopening. Given the need for what is largely a new line between Bedford and Cambridge, this is looking increasingly expensive, increasingly unpopular, and thus increasingly unlikely.

Reopening between Oxford and Bedford, however, is well in hand.

The Joy of Six 1068

"It’s subversive of constitutional democracy. It’s peddled by wealthy and privileged people to discredit reasoned government and distract the disadvantaged. Populism is a powerful poison, with the potential to kill off liberal democracy." William Wallace says we need to work harder to dispel the right-wing myth that Britain has a "liberal elite".

"Outsourcing has ... broken the link between care and local communities, with thousands of children in care sent to live many miles from their families and friends because no local homes are available. Companies maximise returns by locating their business where homes are cheapest - not where children need them." Martin Barrow on the many dangers of allowing private companies to look after children in public care.

Emma John finds that the South Asian Cricket Academy has already shown why it was needed: "The Academy was born out of a conversation between Kabir Ali, the former England all-rounder, and his club teammate Tom Brown, the Birmingham City University researcher whose work revealed that while British Asians make up 30% of the recreational game in England, they constitute only 5% of professional cricketers."

East West Rail, the project to restore direct services between Oxford to Cambridge, is under threat, reports Greg Pitcher.

"The Third Policeman is the perfect philosophical novel and you must read it," says Clare Moriarty.

A London Inheritance tales us on a journey into the city's past: "If you walk past 193 and 195 King’s Cross Road, take a detour into St. Chad’s Place. Walk up to Gray’s Inn Road and you will cross the River Fleet, the original Metropolitan Railway and the site of St. Chad’s Well – not bad for a couple of minutes walk. And with some imagination, perhaps you will also see the waters of St. Chad’s Well still running beneath a small, four hole grating."

Rediscovering the Bedford to Hitchin line

Before the Midland Railway opened its London terminus at St Pancras, it used Euston and then King's Cross.

To reach the latter, trains south from Leicester took the current line as far as Bedford, then ran on Great Northern metals to Hitchin and took the East Coast main line from there to King's Cross.

This arrangement survived until St Pancras opened in 1868, after which the Bedford to Hitchin line dwindled to become a rural branch line.

It closed to passengers in 1961 and to good traffic in 1964. This video follows the route today to see what survives of it.

You can find another on this blog that shows the last days of the Bedford to Hitchin passenger service.

Aspley Guise: The least used station in Bedfordshire

It's a while since we had one of these videos, so let's head for the Bedford to Bletchley line.

Joanna Southcott and the Panacea Society

The Panacea Society is no more, but you can visit the Panacea Museum in Bedford.

Hitchin to Bedford in 1961

Before the Midland Railway built its own London terminus at St Pancras, its trains used this line to reach King's Cross.

Look for the vast airship hangars at Cardington ("the Bedfordshire pyramids" as James Hawes has called them), a crossing on the level with the Oxford to Cambridge line near Bedford and an arrival at an unreconstructed Bedford Midland

The last passenger train on this line ran in December 1961, but goods services lasted until 1964.

Later. You can see what remains of this line today in another video on this blog.

Rediscovering the Bedford to Northampton line

This video traces the line that ran from Bedford to Northampton and finds a number of lineside railway buildings surviving on the way.

All three of Northampton's station served as the terminus of trains from Bedford in their time. I recently posted an aerial photo of the long-vanished Northampton St Johns.

Cambridge to Oxford by train in 1967

There are great hopes that the railway line between Cambridge and Bedford will be reopened as part of the East West Rail project.

This film shows the line in 1967. We follow a train from Cambridge to the old Bedford St Johns station. Missing out the stretch to Bletchley, which remains open to passengers, we then see a few shots of the train reaching Oxford. That stretch of the line remains open to freight.

This line was not recommended for closure by Beeching and had recently received investment in the form of a flyover across the King's Cross main line at Sandy.

After that the video shows the death throes of the Great Central - a working between the forgotten stations of Rugby Central and Nottingham Arkwright Street.

I posted some photographs of the remains of Leicester Central in 2015.

Progress with Oxford to Cambridge reopening

Embed from Getty Images

The restoration of direct trains between Oxford and Cambridge moved closer today with the launch of the East West Railway Company.

This, says Rail News, will oversee the reconstruction of the link, which exists in some form from Oxford as far as Bedford.

The report goes on:

When the line opens, it will have interchange stations with four main railway lines radiating out of London, but it will run under or over each, minimising any risk of delay. The aim is to build a route that allows future upgrades to be incorporated with as little disruption as possible.

This suggests there will be some major new engineering works at Bedford and Sandy at least.

I hope I live to see the day when you can catch a train from Market Harborough to Bedford and change for Oxford or Cambridge.

Last time I went to Cambridge I complained about how indirect the rail journey now is from here, and Oxford is no better (change at Leicester, Nuneaton and Coventry).

The railways want you to travel to London and nowhere else

Melton Mowbray station - a long way from Cambridge

On Saturday I had an enjoyable day in Cambridge with some old Liberator friends.

But if anyone doubts that the railway network in England is dominated by the needs of London, they should try making a journey from West to East like this.

Market Harborough and Cambridge are 48 miles apart. To get there from there you first have to travel north to Leicester and then take a train to Cambridge.

Because that train takes a circuitous route via Peterborough and the connection at Leicester is not very good, the journey takes two hours and 40 minutes. That is an average speed of 18 mph.

After an hour you are at Melton Mowbray station and further from Cambridge than when you started.

In fact it would be as quick to reach Cambridge via St Pancras and King's Cross, though you would travel more than twice the distance.

There used to be better cross-country alternatives, but none survived Doctor Beeching.

There was a line from Rugby to Peterborough via Market Harborough, but that was closed because it did not go through any other places of any size.

There was a branch from Kettering that reached Cambridge via Thrapston, Huntingdon and St Ives. You can see trains on the final stretch between St Ives and Cambridge elsewhere on this blog. Today the trackbed is occupied by a guided busway.

And there was a line from Bedford to Cambridge, which may one day be reopened as part of the East West Rail project.

My conclusion: if you have to travel across country in England, take a good book with you.

The Bedford to Hitchin line today

Before the Midland Railway built its London terminus at St Pancras its trains reached the capital by taking the Hitchin branch from Bedford and then running into King's Cross.

The Bedford to Hitchin line closed to passengers in 1961 and the last goods train ran in 1964.

This video explores what remains of the line today.

Expensive new trains on the Midland main line will be slower than the current diesels

You may recall that it was announced last month that plans to electrify the line from St Pancras to Sheffield have been scrapped.

The line is currently electrified to Bedford. That will be extended to Kettering and Corby, but no further.

Services to Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield will be provided by new bi-mode trains that will take power from the overhead lines as far as Kettering and use diesel engines north of there.

Then the other day there was this story from Chris Doidge, BBC Radio Derby's political reporter:

BBC Radio Derby's learned that the government's decision to scrap the electrification of trains between Derby and London will mean slower journeys. 

Three weeks ago, the government said its new bi-mode trains - that run on electric and diesel - would mean "quicker journey times", but now it's admitted that's not quite the whole story. 

Journey times will reduce - because lines are being straightened and junctions improved. 

The trains will actually be slower than the electric ones the government has scrapped.

Today I met an old friend who knows far more about railways than I do. He explained why this may be the case.

The overhead electrification from St Pancras to Bedford was erected to serve commuter trains not faster long-distance services.

As a result, the maximum speed for trains using it is 100mph. So, unless a lot of money is spent to upgrade this electrification, that will be the maximum speed of the bi-mode trains using electric power on this section of the line,

Yet the diesels currently providing the service can travel at up to 125mph.

I suppose the bi-mode trains could use diesel power throughout, but then there is not much point paying extra for them.

Mind you, as Chris Doidge went on to say:

The group which represents rail operators says the bi-mode trains are heavier, less powerful and more expensive to buy, more expensive to maintain and more expensive to operate than their electric cousins.

And that is not the bottom of this mess.

As I said in my post when electrification to Sheffield was cancelled, a great deal of work has already been carried out along the line to raise bridges to make room for overhead wires.

The Leicester Mercury has also reported this and quoted my old friend Simon Galton, leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicestershire County Council:

"We have already had the road closure and the disruption and for what – for the Government to scrap the scheme almost everyone else says is vital to the region. 

"The money that has already wasted adds insult to injury. 

"It would not surprise me if £50 million at least had been spent."

This whole affair has highlighted how hopelessly inefficient and centralised our current way of running the railways is. The Department for Transport is intimately involved in every decision.

In fact, the railways had far more autonomy when they were nationalised under British Rail.

Electrification from Bedford to St Pancras and Moorgate

A British Transport Films effort from the 1970s.

Notice how grubby everything looks and the cavalier way with railway heritage.

Bid to reopen the Northampton to Bedford line

From the Northampton Chronicle & Echo today:

Rail campaigners fighting for a link between Northampton and Bedford have launched an online petition. 

The English Regional Transport Association wants to ensure that the land and track that would be used for the link are protected and is calling for the route to be re-opened. 

The group says the route would link Northampton and Cambridge, which it says has been identified as a priority in local growth plans.

This sounds a good idea but, given the amount of redevelopment currently taking place in the relevant part of Northampton, I fear the campaign may have come too late.

Anyway, you can visit the English Regional Transport Association blog and sign their petition if you wish.

If this line ever is reopened, trains will run again across the Bridge Street level crossing in Northampton. It is shown in the photo above, though I believe the rails were removed from it last summer.

St Pancras to Sheffield in 1971

More than 3 hours 20 minutes  of Midland Main Line nostalgia with a commentary explaining what you are seeing and some comparison footage of the line today.

Thrill to Market Harborough (1:39:00) still with its canopies, Leicester (1:58:30) still with its overall roof and the numerous semaphore signals and signal boxes along the route.

Cambridge to Bedford by train in 1967

There are hopes that the railway line between Cambridge and Bedford will eventually be reopened as part of the EastWestRail project.

This film was taken in December 1967, a few days before the line closed.

You may also enjoy a slideshow of the line in those days that I posted a year ago.