Trains

Thursday

William Cook & Stephen Bayley

Restoration drama

Yes   William Cook Rejoice! Rejoice! Fifty-four years after its destruction, Euston Arch has returned to Euston. Well, after a fashion. Four blocks from this lost portico, salvaged from a murky river bed in east London, have been deposited outside the station by Euston Arch Trust, a heroic pressure group that is campaigning to rebuild this much-lamented landmark. It’s only a tiny fragment of the original, but I can’t begin to tell you how much this small pile of rubble cheered me up. Wouldn’t it be terrific fun to reconstruct this splendid monument? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to bring old buildings such as Euston Arch back to life? Even by

Thursday

Robert Van Egghen

God bless Peter Hendy. We all know London’s commuter services are awful

Anyone who has spent some time travelling on Southeastern’s packed-to-bursting commuter lines – elbows in the back and heads tucked under armpits – will no doubt today be cheering on the Transport for London commissioner Sir Peter Hendy: London’s commuter services are, as he says, ‘shit, awful’ and like ‘the wild west’. Hendy singled out Southeastern as being the worst offender — and he’s right. I travel on it almost every day. Since the closure of much of London Bridge due to refurbishments, the trains at my home station of Orpington have become ever more crowded. People are forced to cram on to an ever dwindling number of services. The

Thursday

Ian Thomson

‘I will call the police!’: My close encounter with ‘revenue protection’

‘Make yourself a happy bunny this Easter with cheap tickets and egg-cellent deals!’ chirped the Abellio train company advert. I use Abellio’s Greater Anglia service regularly from London and was looking forward to a nice fluffy ride to Norwich. I was late for the 9 a.m. train but the Liverpool Street station Abellio assistant smilingly informed me I wouldn’t need to pay extra for the later train. I bought a cup of coffee and presented my ticket to the barrier staff at platform 11. A dignified-looking man of African origin with ritually scarred cheeks seemed to be unusually officious. Tapping my ticket with the sharp end of a pencil he

Thursday

The Spectator

The perils of planespotting

A dangerous hobby Three men from Greater Manchester were arrested and held in the UAE after being seen writing down the numbers of aircraft. — Plane-spotting can be risky. In 2001 14 Britons were arrested in Greece after allegedly taking photos at an air base in Kalamata. Eight were sentenced to three years; imprisonment for spying and the other six were given suspended sentences. (All were overturned on appeal.) — In 2010 two British men were arrested at Delhi airport after being seen taking photos of planes from a hotel room. — Trainspotters have had problems too. In 2008 a 15-year-old boy was held under terror legislation after taking photographs

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I lie about my age and still use my Senior Railcard?

Q. I was not brought up in England and don’t appear in Who’s Who. This means that there is no printed record of my date of birth. I’m not vain, but have good reason to believe the work I do would dry up if my age became known. (I look about 50.) The point of my writing is that I now have a Senior Railcard but hardly dare use it in case the collector comes while I am sitting with neighbours or potential clients. Twice I have pre-empted having to show the card while sitting next to such people by walking through the train on the pretext of asking the

The Spectator

Five more MPs making Malcolm Rifkind’s day rate

Golden league Some MPs who earn Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s rate of £5,000 a day: — Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury): £3,333 for four hours work as deputy chairman of Woburn Energy. — Greg Barker (Bexhill and Battle): £20,000 for 30 hours providing advice to Ras Al Khaimah Development LLC. — Henry Bellingham (NW Norfolk): £7,500 for 12 hours’ work as non-executive director, Developing Markets Association. — Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham): £15–£20,000 for ‘about 20 hours a year’ as adviser to National Fostering Agency. — John Redwood (Wokingham): £27,941 for 40 hours’ work as chairman of Investment Committee of CS Pan Asset Capital Management Ltd. Source: Commons Register of Members’

James Walton

Critical on Sky1 reviewed: a new medical drama where everyone radiates an unusual degree of competence and concern

Sky1’s new hospital drama Critical (Tuesday) can’t be accused of making a timid start. Within seconds, an urgent request had come over the loudspeaker system for ‘the trauma corps’ to head to the emergency department, causing the main members of the cast to sprint down various corridors at impressive speed. Meanwhile, a patient was briskly wheeled to the same department from a helicopter on the roof, pausing only to cough up blood all over the lift. Moments after that, the trauma corps were already exchanging the kind of rapid-fire medical speak — ‘Dullness to percussion on the left side!’— that most viewers mightn’t entirely comprehend but that clearly translates as

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Have the people who design trains and airports noticed that laptops exist?

It’s taken years to work this out, but there is a subtle art to designing an airport lounge. 1) Install power sockets and add useful tables and comfortable chairs… 2) make sure these three items are never located in the same place. You can sit comfortably, use a laptop or even charge it — but do not attempt more than one of these at the same time. In this way, almost all the gains made in information technology are being eroded by the uselessness of furniture designers and the mean-spiritedness of the people who design public spaces. When I first installed a computer at home, I had something called ISDN

Melissa Kite

How HS2 has blighted my parents’ lives

Waiting to appear before a Commons select committee, my father turned to me. ‘This was not on my bucket list,’ he said. My father should be enjoying his retirement. Instead, he and my mother are still working full time in their seventies because they cannot sell their home due to the blight of HS2. And here they were now, about to present themselves to Parliament to petition the High Speed Rail Bill. Theirs is one of more than 1,900 petitions brought by people whose lives have been so adversely affected by the planned rail link that they will need to be heard in person by MPs before the Bill can

Thursday

The Spectator

Rochester’s special qualities, and the price of Ebola.com

What’s special about Rochester What is special about Rochester and Strood? — Rochester has the second oldest cathedral and school in Britain, after Canterbury. — Medway, the unitary authority area in which the constituency is situated, has one of the highest rates of private home-ownership in Britain, with 92 per cent of homes in private hands. — Rochester has one of the few remaining airports in Britain with only grass runways – though it has filed a planning application to build a paved runway. — Morrisons in Strood was Gordon Brown’s first engagement after announcing the date of the 2010 general election. — Strood was once the largest producer of

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

George Osborne’s cynical grab for northern votes (and why I’m for it)

When John Prescott used to wax garrulous about a ‘superhighway’ from Hull to Liverpool, everyone assumed it was a wheeze to spray southern taxpayers’ money across the region he saw as his power base. When George Osborne decided to ‘start a conversation’ this week about a super-city along the same route, an English equivalent of Germany’s Ruhr valley connected by yet another decades-away high-speed rail project, everyone assumed it was about recapturing votes in northern conurbations where Tory MPs and councillors are an endangered species. But on past form you’d still expect me — ardent northerner and rail buff that I am — to embrace this back-of-a-Downing-Street-envelope concept, however cynical

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Why Aids is still a threat, elephants are altruistic, and crime has gone online

Aids is still deadly Sir: Dr Pemberton (‘Life after Aids’, 19 April) subscribes to the now prevalent view that we have turned the corner on Aids. Well only up to a point, Lord Copper. There are now about 100,000 HIV carriers in the UK, and in London, where Dr Pemberton works, as in the rest of the UK, reports of new diagnoses of HIV infection are continuing at much the same rate as before. These diagnoses are too often of individuals who have been infected for years, and are liable to have passed HIV on to others. It is also estimated that as many as one fifth of all HIV-infected individuals

Thursday

Mary Killen

The question that Dear Mary refuses to answer

Q. One of my best friends, who knows I don’t have a great social life at university, has a brother in a band which is touring and will have five nights of gigs at my university town. He is offering me a free ticket for any night that week and to hang with the band backstage. But I cannot bear this artist’s music or voice, and couldn’t sit through a concert, let alone socialise with him. My friend knows very well I won’t have anything else on. Is there a tactful way to extricate myself? — Name and address withheld A. Yes, but it would do you no favours were

Melissa Kite

My friend Denise doesn’t know where London ends – just when it ends

The look on her face said it all. I can always tell my friend Denise is upset about something when she is sporting an especially wide grin. Denise is from Jamaica and is a devout Jehovah’s Witness. She takes most catastrophes by being alarmingly cheerful about them because they just go to prove that the end is nigh. Whenever I am with her and something goes wrong, she invariably laughs and exclaims: ‘No good, Mey-lissah!’ She then treats me to a lecture about how wicked the world is and how the day of judgment is coming any day now. I’m inclined to agree with her most of the time. And

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Riding back from Scotland with Ron Burgundy in the privy

When the ticket collector asked to see my ticket, I took the opportunity to ask what time my connection left Birmingham New Street. ‘Are you travelling onwards with the Vag?’ he said. ‘Excuse me?’ I said. ‘The Vag! Virgin!’ he said, irritated by my ignorance. I laughed at him. His expression remained official. He touched the screen on his portable machine and presented me with a card printed with the information. Then I went to the lavatory, one of those spacious ones with a curved door that slides back with a hiss at the touch of a button. As I lifted the seat, a voice said, ‘This is Ron Burgundy

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland: How to improve journey times without HS2

I am still waiting for someone to refute my argument that it would be possible to reduce the journey time between London and Manchester or Birmingham for many rail passengers by between 20 and 40 minutes — and to improve effective capacity — at about 0.001 per cent of the cost of HS2. This would be done simply using software, not hardware. Last Thursday I travelled to Manchester to give a talk in the afternoon. The journeys up and back were flawless. But they did take 40 minutes longer than necessary — in both directions. Why? A month before, once I knew that I had to travel to Manchester, I did what every

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Nobody takes a flight from London to Manchester. So why would we take HS2?

From Edinburgh airport there are more than 45 flights a day to London. And, I imagine, the same number back. You can fly from Edinburgh to London Heathrow, -London Gatwick, London Luton, -London Stansted and London City — even to the optimistically named -London Southend. Glasgow offers a similar choice. I have often used these flights. I live about 25 minutes’ drive from Gatwick, so when I go to Edinburgh my -favourite plan is to take a morning train up and then fly or take the sleeper back. Since Manchester is bigger than Edinburgh, I had naively assumed that I would be able to do something similar for an upcoming

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: The rules of wearing a dressing gown

Q. What to do when you are an unwilling eavesdropper in a train carriage in which people you know assume they are alone and start talking very indiscreetly about someone else you know and you have left it too late to alert them to your presence? — Name and address withheld A. Ideally you will have access to earphones and some sort of electronic device and can walk through the carriage dopily, as though looking for a newspaper. Wrench out the headphones theatrically on seeing the talkers. In the absence of headphones, duck your head down, walk backwards to the nearest connecting doors and, when they wheeze open, walk through

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

Will George Osborne be able to push through HS2?

As if many true blue parts of England didn’t dislike the Chancellor enough, today’s Financial Times adds to his misdemeanours renewed support for High Speed 2. Their splash (£) reports that despite fresh concerns from Treasury officials over the sums, George Osborne is still pushing ahead with the new line. According to the pink ‘un, Osborne sees the project as ‘an emblem of the coalition’s commitment to spread growth more evenly across the country’. I’m sure many of his fellow Tories will be disappointed that he isn’t backtracking instead. Osborne’s rallying cry doesn’t drown out the scary new figure that the FT has for the cost of HS2. The original

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

The government’s latest High Speed 2 argument: we need more capacity

40 u-turns and counting, the coalition has a habit of dropping difficult policies. One notable exception is High Speed 2, which is still being keenly promoted. Today, members of a new HS2 growth task force have been announced. The advocates are an  impressive selection of council leaders, academics, businessman and trade unions. Their job will be to counter the view that HS2 does not make financial sense. As Janan Ganesh pointed out in the Financial Times yesterday (£), the government’s enthusiasm for HS2 is in marked contrast to its dithering over airport capacity. But, the public doesn’t share this enthusiasm. The last YouGov poll suggests that 46 per cent are