Jago Hazzard takes us to Camden Town station and its curse: the most complicated junction on the London Underground.
Blame the witch Mother Damnable or Mother Redcap. The station was almost named after a pub that bore her name.
You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.
Geoff Marshall says in his YouTube blurb:
So we quite often talk about Least Used Stations ... but what about the Least SERVED - the stations the get the fewest services with just a small number of trains per week?
Since it's been 10 years since I rode Stockport/Stalybridge with Karl, we headed out to Lincolnshire to ride the line to Skegness to tick off three Least Served stations, and find out what the least served stations in the country are.
I'm so old that I can remember when Stockport to Stalybridge had a proper service and was a useful route. And when I rode the line to Skegness, it was on a Jolly Fisherman excursion train behind a pair of Class 20s.
From BBC News:
The Bewdley Express is an eight-week trial taking travellers from Bewdley to Kidderminster on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, where they can change to a Birmingham service.
The trial, run by the Severn Valley Railway and West Midlands Railway, is intended to test demand for a regular rail connection between Bewdley and the wider West Midlands network.
I travelled on the Wells & Walsingham some 20 years ago and remember it as taking itself commendably seriously.
Walsingham had its heyday before the Reformation, which means that a great many ancient buildings are to be found there. Because it remains a place of pilgrimage for both Roman Catholics and Anglicans, there's also an awful lot of religious tat on sale in the village.
The original Walsingham station is now an Orthodox church.
I can't remember a single bus turning up late during my 10 days of outings in Shropshire, which is an impressive record.
And let's hear it for concessionary travel for pensioners. Family legend has it that I learnt to read from the West Hertfordshire bus timetable, and I can't help thinking how wonderful getting a card that gave you free travel on any bus would have seemed when I was six. Well, now I have one.
My train to Newport was seriously late because of a track fault north of Shrewsbury, and faced further delay between Ludlow and Leominster. But I had all day, and the recent derailments have emphasised that high temperatures are a risk to safety, so I wasn't going to complain.
I do have two moans about public transport from the holiday. The first is that I had to go through two ticket barriers at Birmingham New Street to change between the train from Leicester and the train to Shrewsbury. Who thought it was a good idea to redesign the station so that is necessary?
A bit of googling this morning has taught me that the way to avoid this is to use the escalators or lifts at the B end of New Street's long platforms, when you don't encounter any barriers within the station. I did it inadvertently on the journey home.
And the second is that when I got on my West Midlands Railway train to Shrewsbury I had to listen to an announcement warning me that three other railway companies sell tickets for this route and that if I had bought one it might not be valid on this train.
I don't think anyone designed this ticketing system: it has just grown like fungus on an October morning.
So, overall, I had a good experience with public transport and an outstanding one with the buses.
One reason for going there was St Woolos' Cathedral. Ever since I learnt that it isn't the Victorian rebuild I had imagined and has a history dating back to the sixth century, I have wanted to see it.
The photo above shows its twelfth-century Romanesque portal and the arches from the same period in the nave. The building is no larger than many parish churches, but it still impresses.
And the one below shows John Piper's window and decoration behind the altar. The other windows at the east end of the cathedral are largely of clear glass, which I have come to like more and more. It suggests a God, not of gothic obscurantism, but of light and reason.
Xueyu Geng asks if Britain’s railways can cope with ever‑more extreme heat: "Railway assets have very long lives: a track, bridge or embankment built or substantially renewed today could still be in service in 50 or 100 years. That creates a fundamental mismatch between the current design life and a climate that keeps changing within that lifetime."
"Just occasionally, when your teenage heroes turn out like this, doesn't it just make your heart want to sing along with them?" Pete Paphides salutes Paul Heaton.
Tanya Aldred looks at the problems our extreme summer has caused cricket groundstaff.
Most people I meet have an opinion on HS2. Different opinions. It has been expensive. It goes to Euston. It was a plot by Labour or the Tories. It goes too fast. Or not fast enough. It was a sop to the North or a scheme to divert economic activity to London.
What are the most useful points? Was it anything but a muddle? Some acquaintances have advised me to use these new GPT-LLM-RAG machines to produce a summary (AI). However, I know too much about how they work, so will politely decline. Instead I might read a human-written review of a human-written book that has been deemed somewhat informed.
So off to the Literary Review for some opinion. Transport expert David Leeder reviews Off the Rails: The Inside Story of HS2 by Sally Gimson. I was looking for something with lots of numbers, geography, requirements, political objectives, strategy, analysis, risk-management, expertise and national benefit. Who am I kidding? It was Oxbridge debating with itself and Natural England being paid off one change at a time.
Leeder tells us that at least 40 per cent of the population (of what ?) lives in a quadrangle formed by London, Bristol, Liverpool and Leeds. The distance between London and Birmingham is only around 160km while London and Manchester are around 260km apart. It is proposed to operate HS2 at 320 kph. Forty-nine minutes. Barely time to scan the Guardian, and tell the buffet assistant twice that there is no milk in Americano. There never was.
We can skip the bits about Blair and Adonis (who?) and the aspersions about Roy Jenkins and claret. You might as well take Avanti West Coast from Euston and find a good forward-facing seat in Coach C. They have USB and the Project Reach cellular upgrade should be working in 2028, even at Piccadilly and Euston. It would take most of 49 minutes to get Teams working and find that the AI sent you the wrong meeting minutes document. Was that £38bn or £80bn? At least the No.1 circular bus at Manchester Piccadilly is both free and powered by electricity.
Much of the rest of the review takes on a tour of the group-think of the rotating cast of London-based decision-makers. Leeder describes them as "Britain’s political class, which comprises a narrow pool of upper-middle-class types who share many of the same vague assumptions."
This seems plausible as the stated requirements used vague language and rotated with administrations. The very basic cost-benefit analysis that would link national growth with having a high-speed railway at all seems missing. The two most dynamic nations do not encourage us: the US does not bother with high-speed rail, the PRC has long distances between major cities and poor legacy transport networks. We do not compare with either.
Perhaps the most concise criticism is that the low productivity of most of the UK outside London and the Home Counties may well be due to factors having nothing to do with transport. A high pound, managed decline, class struggle, City bias, disdain for STEM, and the privilege of the Oxford Union will be suggested by a quick-lazy search engine.
HS2 functions as a 'shiny' and could be useful as a distraction from unpalatable political action. It is rather expensive for that though.
Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.
Jago Hazzard charts the evolution of London's Green Park station from its 1906 opening as Dover Street to its modern role as a major interchange.
You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.
John Rogers takes us on a walk through a quarter of Camden that surprises even him.
His blurb on YouTube says:
From the Euston Station redevelopment, the site of the Euston Arch and the Bree Louise pub we go looking for a reservoir of the New River. In this area, North Gower Street, we have Speedy's Cafe and the filing location used in the TV show Sherlock for 221b Baker Street.
From here we go to Cumberland Market, once London's last hay and straw market and look for the location of the Canal basin that served the market right until the 1930s.
This fascinating Hidden London History walk then follows the route of the Cumberland Arm of the Regent's Canal to the point where it joined the main course of the canal.
John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.
This a terrific lecture by Ian Christie, whose writings did much to bring the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger back to prominence.
His Gothic London begins with early Dickens adaptations, made because there was a ready public for them. And Dickens, after all, was a cinematic novelist before cinema was invented.
Then we go though Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the London fog to reach the early Hitchcock. The exoticism of Limehouse, with its opium dens and Chinese population, also figures.
Next we take in the Blitz and this blog's favourite topic of bombsites, before returning to Dickens in the shape of David Lean's peerless Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Carol Reed's 1970 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, says Christie, was the first colour adaptation of a Dickens novel.
And we end with some modern Gothic takes of London, including Death Line and From Hell.
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?
With the Leicester Mercury reporting a new push to restore passenger services to the railway line from Leicester to Burton upon Trent, it's time to visit it again with Our History Underfoot.
In May we saw the line between Burton and Coalville, which hasn't carried any goods traffic for two years and is already showing signs of decay.
This time we go east from Coalville about half the way to Leicester. Matt sees, or at least hears, more quarry traffic than he expected and comes across relics of the district's early railway history.
A third video will complete his journey to Leicester.
BBC News reports:
A number of Intercity services, which run to and from London St Pancras, will be cancelled from Monday, while other services will have fewer carriages.
Will Rogers, managing director of EMR, said the performance of the Class 810 fleet had "fallen below the levels we and our customers expect" and that the timetable change was "necessary".
The Intercity services run between London and destinations including Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby and Sheffield.
EMR did not say how long the timetable changes would be in place for, but said in a statement they would remain in place while "EMR works with the manufacturer, Hitachi Rail, to resolve disruption for customers as soon as possible".
And the Guardian adds more detail:
EMR is cancelling about 20 fast trains a day between London, Sheffield and Nottingham, while others will also be short-formed and are likely to be crowded. Its new class 810 fleet, previously labelled Auroras when their launch was heralded less than a year ago, have suffered from what EMR has called “performance and reliability issues”.
The operator also criticised Hitachi’s maintenance of the existing fleet that the Auroras were due to replace, the class 222 trains, which it said had “significantly impacted upon EMR’s ability to run a consistent intercity service”.
Interestingly, BBC News ran a story only yesterday under the headline:
East Midlands Railway cancellations – is it really just the hot weather?
"a bit more transparency" around a recovery plan and the issues the operator was facing would be helpful for passengers.
We are not without influence.
The 810 trains are bi-modal – they're able to take power from overhead wires but also have their own diesel engines. They were ordered on Chris Grayling's watch after the Conservative government cancelled its plans to electrify the whole of the St Pancras main line. The wires run out at Wigston, a few miles south of Leicester.
But it's not all bad news. We're getting new taller ticket barriers at Market Harborough station to stop people without tickets boarding the trains that aren't running.
But I did strike lucky when I crossed a bridge just south of Loughborough Central station.
In 1980 the were serious proposals, and not for the first time, to close both Marylebone and St Pancras stations in London.
Jago Hazzard takes us through the plans and why they came to nothing. Before I go any further, let my suggest you like this video, follow him on YouTube and have a look at his Patreon page.
One thing he does not explain is how trains from the Midland Main Line would have reached Euston. There was no existing connection they could have used nor any obvious new one that could have been built.
I don't know what the London Amenity & Transport Association had in mind in 1980, but a post on RailUKforums tells us what British Rail had in mind when there were serious plans to close St Pancras in the 1960s:
The broad outline plan was that the Bedford Suburban services would be diverted from St. Pancras into Moorgate, much as it happened later with Thameslink. Main Line services were proposed to be diverted from Market Harborough over the now closed line to Northampton, and into Euston, with the lines involved electrified. It was also proposed at one point that the line between Market Harborough and Bedford would close, with Wellingborough and Kettering losing their rail services.
For about four years the St. Pancras to Nottingham Newspaper traffic, and the remaining St. Pancras to Glasgow overnight service were diverted to run out of Euston over the Northampton to Market Harborough route, before reverting to St. Pancras around 1970 after the station at St. Pancras had been reprieved.
Several floors of the old station Hotel at St. Pancras, which had been in use as offices, were relocated elsewhere during the period when closure seemed certain. Even after it was reprieved there was a lot of vacant office space left empty, and walking about up there could be very spooky at times.
It's worth reading the whole thread there. Other contributors say Bedford to Market Harborough would have remained open or that only the line between Kettering (Glendon North Junction be be precise) and Market Harborough would have closed.
I like the idea, possible if the latter closure had taken place, of a regular semi-fast service from St Pancras to Leicester via Corby and Melton Mowbray.
Assailed by hay fever, flying insects and stinging nettles, Gareth Icke is our guide for a walk in the hills above the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire/
With that setting, disused lead mines, white spoil heaps and unlikely-sounding local folklore, this video ticks a lot of Liberal England boxes.
For more like it, subscribe to The Walk on YouTube.
"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.
Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"
Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."
"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.
Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."
Wynford Vaughan Thomas and friend travel the length of the border between England and Wales in 1963.
But the tone of the commentary could come from a topographical book of 30 years before. Anything that smacks of modernity or progress is suspect and the old ways are to be supported, however silly. There's an obsession with market day, while farmers can do no wrong.
Also in line with such books, there is disapproval for visitors' buses, but the writer's own car gets a free pass.
Still it's lovely country and Montgomery is still a little-known treasure. And Knucklas Viaduct still carries trains despite what the film says about Dr Beeching.
What really interested me in the films are the remains of Victorian agricultural improvement on Long Mountain, because I once discovered them for myself.
I had stayed for the night at Colebatch, the first village south of Bishop's Castle. I set off the next morning to walk to Montgomery. At first I went cross country via Bishop's Moat and Mellington Hall to meet the Offa's Dyke Path.
In those days I sometimes carried a radio when I went walking, and I can remember sitting in the sun listening to The World at One. It was at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union and there was an item discussing how an independent Ukraine would fare.
I remember laughing because such a notion would have been unthinkable a few days before, and perhaps because I had called at a pub for a lunchtime drink. Looking at the map, I think it must have been the now-closed Blue Bell near Pentreheyling.
Anyway, I passed the turn for Montgomery and kept going because it was only mid afternoon and I felt fine. That's why I found myself on Long Mountain, and wondering what these strange Victorian remains were, before I managed to snag a bed for the night in Welshpool.
Now you could find out online, but this was 1991. Yet, by another of those strange coincidences, there was an item about them in, I think, The Times a couple of days after I got home.
But Wynford Vaughan Thomas is getting impatient, so you'd better watch the video. But after you've done so, you might enjoy my review of All the Wide Border by Mike Parker.
