Volcanic eruption in Iceland triggers CODE RED aviation warning A fresh volcanic eruption in Iceland forced officials at the country's Met Office to temporarily issue a code red aviation warning, after lava spewed 50 metres into the air in the early hours of Sunday morning. While fewer earthquakes were recorded when the eruption started in Holuhraun shortly after 4am, more lava was being …
Cloud cover reduced following the eruption of efefeofeoifjoeifjoeifoeifoeifjoeifoeifjoeifjoeifj (or something like that...) with an attendant drop in air temperatures of about 3°C, IIRC.
Keep the aeroplanes out of the sky for as long as possible. In fact, ban any air travel between two points that can physically be reached by train, which should simultaneously improve the climate, and remove such carbuncles as Easyjet and Ryanair.
If I have to chose between First or god forbid National Express versus EasyJet I would probably choose the latter.
So while a great idea in principle, you will have to re-regulate the railways first (as in most places where they have working rail on the continent) and then do this.
After that you will have to ensure that the truckers and other vested interest parties do not give the government yeat another set of "election donations", sorry backhanders to ensure that the government does not do something useful with taxpayers money. Example - the cost of the ultra-expensive useless toy trainset known as High Speed 2 in the UK (and the slightly more useful CrossRail) exceeds by an order of magnitude the cost of going along all main routes into London and raising the height and width of all bridges and tunnels. Why do that? Two reasons. The less important one - Eu commuter rail is all 2 floor, this will allow the train carriages to stop being "special order" and the cost will drop per supply and demand. Additionally the capacity will increase by 1.7 times overnight. The more important one is that UK goods rail is limited to "special" carriages and _CANNOT_ carry standard issue containers. They all have to go by road feeding truckers associations (which in turn provide handy backhanders) and producing pollution (which in turn is a massive backhander again in the form of pertrol excise duty).
A good proportion of the lines that carry the majority of freight containers can carry the W10 (Network Rail sizing) containers
Thus, many of the gauge issues have been resolved over the past 20years.
you might like to look into the 'standard containers'. There is a large number of 'standard sizes'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loading_gauge
HS1 (Channel tunnel) link is built to UIC-C gauge. HS2 will be the same.
Oh, O.V. Bullied, CME of the Southern Railway experimented with two deck EMU's for services into Waterloo. They were not very popular and only 2 units were built.
Even the French can't get it right as the latest EMU's built for them couldn't be used because the stations on their proposed routes couldn't accommodate them.
Yes a good proportion of French, Belgian and Dutch commuter trains are duplex but not everywhere by any measure
"So while a great idea in principle, you will have to re-regulate the railways first (as in most places where they have working rail on the continent)"
Our railways are already regulated, so I presume you mean adding more regulation.
But that won't work. I work in a different industry that is currently very heavily regulated, and despite (or more likely because of that) we as an industry are under investigation by the competition authorities and the regulator who believe that the market is "not working". I can assure you that you cannot "regulate" a desired outcome through adding more and more rules, each of which has unintended consequences that require more rules to deal with.
By definition, the commercial rail operators in the UK do what they do to maximise their profits. If they are now doing things that you don't want, or not doing things that you want, then you want regulation to force them to take a course of action that will reduce their returns, and thus their willingness and ability to invest. This principle is why we are increasingly at risk of blackouts, as regulation and intervention to "improve" the energy sector has simultaneously reduced returns, raised costs to consumers, and made investment highly risky and unpredictable. The only answer to "improve" UK railways then is tax-funded subsidy, significant fare increases, or renationalisation. I remember the waste and incompetence of British Railways, I'm in no hurry to go back there, but even if that were an outcome it can only hide but not alter the fact that non-profit oriented spending diverts investment from better investment opportunities. In a state still spending around £100 billion a year more than it raises in tax, and with a £1.3 trillion pile of public debt, where will you get the money from to fritter on "improving" our railways in ways that rail users currently aren't prepared to pay for themselves? Taking the money from HS2 isn't the answer, because that's simply substituting one form of mis-allocated capital for another.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
