Friday, 16 November 2007

Rolling Stock


We now have the first of our new Japanese arrivals for testing, as a schoolboy a popular joke was, the train standing at platforms 1 to 20 has come in sideways, whereas now I am trying to get my ideas about them straight.

The new bullet trains which look to be going to knock about 20 minutes of the journey time from Thanet to London nearly all of the time saving being on the stretch between Ashford and London.

I asked around a few engineering friends why there would be hardly any time saved between Ramsgate and London and have formed the impression that a further 20 minutes could be saved by two new investments on the line.

The first being updating the signalling system between Ashford and Thanet, apparently it is very antiquated and means that trains have to wait for very long lengths of line to be clear of a train before the next one can enter.

The second being straightening out the approaches to those stations where the line curves round platforms instead of running straight between them.

It also looks as though there is an intention to run the new trains on slow local services, which would appear to be a bit of a waste of money.

I may have got this all wrong so am interested in any comments from those who know better.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.