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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Re infrastructure, my worst memories involve commuting between Oxford and London (a major rail route in the grand scheme of things) and it breaking down a few times a month, especially in winter, due to “signalling failures”.

It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working. And yes, this was 21st century, not steam trains.

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> It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working

More than that: buried cables without adequate insulation and nobody knew where they were buried.

Railtrack (the unlamented privatised company that originally took on the railway infrastructure) threw out the engineering diagrams. So when the time came to dig up the Great Western Main Line out of London for electrification, signalling failures were a routine occurrence because someone had put an excavator through a signalling cable... again.

Until lockdown I commuted to Manchester on the Rochdale line in Leyland-branded Pacers[0]. Trains with an intended lifespan of "no more than twenty years", that are now 35-40 years old. The tickets cost £100 per month and in the years I did it, only managed to find a seat on a handful of occasions. I had to wait at the station because the train was too full more frequently than finding a seat - often they'd show up with only two carriages.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail)

£100 a month? It’s £200 return for a day for Bristol to London - and that’s if the train gets you there, and doesn’t dump you somewhere outside of Chippenham because it’s the wrong kind of sunny today and the rails have buckled, or it’s cold and the rails have frozen, or it’s raining and the train is poorly with diesel cholera. All of these are acts of god, of course, so aren’t compensatable events.

There’s also “leaves on the track”, my personal favourite. Sometimes I struggle to believe trains were invented in the UK!

This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries.

My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflated and the carriage can't have passengers on board.

Most systems with wet leaf problems use sand dispensers for added traction.

And there’s the rub. Is that network rail’s problem, or the operator’s? Network rails’s rails... operator’s train wheels, leaves in the middle. The leaves are undefined, and are therefore probably nobody’s problem but the passengers’.

Yep just wanted to echo this I live in Bristol and have been stung by outrageous tickets prices too many times

It's buses or coaches only now, I'm not surprised everyone drives here

The last time I had to travel from London to Bristol and back, I rented a car from Heathrow airport and it cost me a quarter of the price the train would. It takes the same amount of time, but the car is more comfortable and worse for the environment. The system is so broken in the UK.

£100 per month for six miles each way when bought as a season ticket.

A Bristol to London season ticket is £1300 per month for ~120 miles each way. Bargain!

Something like 160 pounds at peak time from Nottingham to London. Service is good but it's just inconceivable that private individuals would be paying that, all the travelers are on expenses or are self employed contractors/consultants. When I started working and up till about 2005 the same journey was about 40 pounds - a massive increase!

Problem is that there is massive pent up demand. Cheaper tickets mean more people travelling longer distances to work when there isn't capacity. The last thing we need is even more regular commuting to London from outside greater London.

This demand is caused by high house prices and lack of opportunities outside of the SE. Trains are a sticky plaster that gives lots of subsidy to middle class commuters whilst local bus services are cut. Distance is also environmentally problematic regardless of mode of transport.

Ah yes, the Pacers - they were literally based on remodelled bus designs. Did yours smell strongly of mildew?

To be fair they were clean and well-maintained. They also had the benefit of being flushed through with fresh air - a result of the doors not forming a seal around the edges.

We had ones which smelled like the seats had been left in a damp garage for a couple of years.

£100 a month not bad. My season ticket used to cost £4400, for a 25 minute ride to London waterloo, and tube to Hammersmith. Still cheaper than £28 for the day!

Same here, but newer trains no-one was really asking for, and tickets about three x what you were paying (about £290/month and no seats from my stop in, 25 minutes.) The line -- Thameslink -- got so bad the government took over paying the compenstation rebates for distrupted customer journeys while letting the operators continue to trouser all the fares in addition to something a 4 billion pound operating payment regardless of how badly they performed.

This is pure, Tory mansion-building stuff and apparently exactly what everyone who bothers to vote in this country wants. Yay.

It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over.

Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!

Indeed. At the time of privatisation, I commuted to Oxford from a small village that was 20 min train ride away. Privatisation encouraged me to make the switch to the 45 minute cycle ride, which I suppose was good for me. I do remember seeing the automated departures table being 80% filled with notices of cancelled services or trains that were over an hour late.

Alas this seems to be best served by bus nowadays. The buses are comfortable and cheap, and connect several places in Oxford to Victoria coach station.

There are nice, fast trains from Paddington to the West, including Oxford.

My experience of road travel in the south was that delays were too frequent for journeys crossing the M25 for me to depend on it. That's from before good consumer traffic analysis apps; maybe those improve things enough.

Cheap, certainly. Also slow, and comfortable's in the eye of the beholder (I can't read in a road vehicle, so not for me). The Paddington services are much better these days, and there's also the excellent (new) Marylebone service. I live just outside Oxford and wouldn't dream of getting the bus.

Actually the Oxford to London bus services have been shutting down because of falling passenger numbers and traffic congestion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-50992888

A lot of those passengers went over to Stagecoach's competing Oxford Tube service, which served a couple of different stops within London, but (in my experience) offered a much more frequent service.

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