And you thought the Northern Line was overcrowded ...

Rush hour in Tokyo.

Metro map of the day

Latest rapid transit map from Singapore. The system has expanded hugely since I was last there only a few years ago. The thick lines are heavy metro, the thin lines are light rail (in the DLR sense, not street trams). UPDATE: Whoops! Apparently this is the proposed final network, not yet all in place.

Railway poster of the day

The Bournemouth Belle was a Pullman train, introduced by the Southern Railway in 1931. Unusually, it ran on Sundays only at first, but became daily in 1936. Journey time from London to Bournemouth was 2 hours 9 minutes, running non-stop from Waterloo to Southampton. By 1939 it had been speeded up by three minutes. The brand lived on under British Railways until the south-west main line was electrified in 1967, as a result of which you can now do the journey, hourly throughout the day, in 1 hour 45 minutes, albeit with more stops and not in such luxury -- certainly no restaurant car these days: the most you can hope for is a sandwich trolley. No train now runs non-stop between London and Southampton.

Train of the day

Here is the original (1970s) rolling stock on the Brussels metro, now looking slightly dowdy. When I first lived there in the 1980s, it took me a while to get used to the phenomenal speed at which these trains accelerate away from the platform, compared with the London Underground. Incidentally the service is much better now than it was then. At the time, the interval between trains was only 20 minutes in the evening -- hopeless for a city metro -- and it was being threatened with being closed down in the evenings altogether, under the then right-wing Liberal national government. Things got a lot better with Belgium's new federal structure, when in the early 1990s the new Brussels regional asssembly took over responsibility for local transport in the capital. Devolved regional government is good for transport -- look at Scotland and Wales recently, and indeed London compared with the rest of England.

Railway station of the day

Time-lapse pictures of Elstree and Borehamwood station having its platforms extended to take 12-coach trains. This is part of the Thameslink upgrade programme.

Bicycles (and trams) dominate in Utrecht

Why can't it be more like that here?

Trams of the day

Or streetcars, as they call them in America. This is silent film of them in Washington DC in the early 1950s. These have long gone, but there is now a plan for a new tram system there.

Bicycling news

The latest issue of the Campaign for Better Transport's London Group Newsletter (PDF) includes a review of the new London bike hire scheme. We are supposed to call it the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, but I don't see why we should give an evil grasping bank any credit for contributing less than one-fifth of the cost. Most people seem to be calling them Boris bikes, but I won't do that either, because B. Johnson has merely brought to fruition a scheme that was already being developed when Ken Livingstone was Mayor.

The reviewer welcomes the principle of the scheme, but is a bit sniffy about the bikes themselves, which he finds heavy and slow. As it happens, I got round to joining the scheme myself a couple of weeks ago, and have now used it a handful of times. I find the bikes just fine, and easier to use than I expected; not terribly fast, sure, but they are not meant for racing, after all.

I do already have a bicycle, but the great beauty of this scheme is that you can take a bike from one docking station and leave it at another, so that you don't have to bother about finding something suitable to which to lock your bike and then still worrying that it might be stolen none the less. The density of the docking stations is quite remarkable: on average they are said to be only about 100 metres apart. The only big problem is that so far they are only to be found in roughly Tube zone 1, so it's entirely an Inner London thing for the moment.

The scheme seems to be a huge instant success. I see loads of people using the bikes, and it's not that unusual to find a docking station with no bikes available at all, so clearly more need to be provided already.

TfL's other great cycling innovation of this year has had more mixed reviews: it is the first two Cycle Superhighways. These are commuting routes into central London from, so far, the east (Barking) and the south (Wimbledon). From what I have seen of the southern route, there are rather few stretches where the cycle path is separate from the road. Mostly the "superhighway" amounts to putting a lot of bright blue paint on existing streets. Amsterdam or Copenhagen this is not. But, as the CBT newsletter points out, it should at least help raise awareness of cyclists on the part of motorists, and it certainly makes the route more visible to the cyclist himself.

London transport spending

London Reconnections reproduces a Transport for London statement about the funding settlement.

Four points caught my eye:

(a) It implies that some sort of Piccadilly Line upgrade is still going ahead, despite the cancellation several months ago of the order for its new rolling stock. Maybe we are to get new signalling but with old trains.

(b) The East London Line extension to Clapham Junction is going ahead "and will be delivered by the end of 2012", though presumably still without the new station at Surrey Canal Road. It will be good to have more frequent trains from Denmark Hill, though I am not sure how far the new journey opportunities will compensate for the forthcoming reduction in Victoria-bound trains (and their removal altogether from Clapham High Street and Wandsworth Road).

(c) The congestion charge is increasing to £10. This is a step in the right direction, but I think it ought to be at least £15. Most car journeys in central London are unnecessary and should be penalised accordingly.

(d) Parking on the TfL road network will be charged for. And so I should think. Why on earth that's not already the case is a mystery.

Probably the worst news is the confirmation that fares, already quite high, will rise by a lot more than inflation. On buses, especially, this will hit the poorer citizens disproportionately and is therefore regressive. Ken Livingstone always did his best to keep bus fares as low as possible within whatever financial settlement was available, even when there was no alternative to putting tube fares up.

Electrification: Malaysia shows the way

While the powers-that-be in this country dither over railway electrification, at least one part of our former empire is just getting on with it. Electric services have just begun on a substantial stretch of Malaysia's main north-south line. This is the first stage of a plan to electrify the whole route from Singapore in the south to the Thai border in the north. It's a British-built metre-gauge line. Here is one of the new EMUs bought for the purpose:



Kuala Lumpur to Ipoh is about 200 km and the journey time is reduced from well over three hours to just 2 hours. The article doesn't say anything about acquiring electric locos, so presumably the existing (fun but rather slow) half a dozen through trains a day between Singapore and the far north will continue to be diesel-hauled over the newly electrified section between Seremban and Ipoh.



This is, I think, the first long-distance electrification in the entire region. Up till now the only electric trains in Malaysia have been a small suburban network around Kuala Lumpur, two metro lines within KL itself (both of which are about to be extended), and Siemens' excellent standalone airport link line.

Trains of the day

Various suburban EMUs in Melbourne, Australia.

To the British eye, what jumps out is that these trains all seem to be operated by Connex. Remember them? I wonder what Melbourne has done to deserve this.

UPDATE: I've just discovered that Connex lost the contract in 2009 to Hong Kong's MTR. Ha ha ha!

Back from holiday

We were in Aberdeen and the Grampians -- "a strange choice of holiday destination", as it was put to me beforehand.

It's true one expects Aberdeen to be always grey and wet, but we were lucky -- it was so for only one day. The rest of the time we had warm sunshine. It is actually quite a pleasing city. We hired a car and explored castles in the surrounding countryside, which is delightful. The National Trust for Scotland may be in trouble over its accounts, but the people showing us some of its castles did an impressive job.

The journey from London to Aberdeen and back was courtesy of Messrs East Coast, whose ageing but nicely refurbished HST 125 performed faultlessly. To my surprise, the train was pretty much full between London and Dundee in both directions.

On the way back, a young woman getting on at Dundee and going to York found a seat marked "reserved from Newcastle". "Which comes first, Newcastle or York?" she asked another young woman in the next seat. "I have no idea", was the reply. These were both British (in fact I think English) people, clearly intelligent and middle-class. I never cease to be amazed at some people's ignorance of elementary general knowledge. Do schools teach anything at all nowadays?

Which reminds me, I had been moderately impressed with David Cameron so far -- not all his policies, obviously, but his evident general competence -- until he said on TV in America that Britain had been the USA's junior partner in the Battle of Britain. As any fule kno, the USA wasn't even in the war for another 18 months at that point.

The summer of 1940, when Britain's very survival was hanging by a thread and when it stood alone against tyranny, was always supposed to be a, if not the, defining moment of this country's modern identity. And here we have our prime minister, for heaven's sake, educated at Eton and Oxford, who apparently understands nothing about it at all. It would almost be funny, if it weren't so desperately sad.

Whither electrification?

Just over a year ago in Railway electrification and the Tories, I wrote that a reason for hoping the general election would be postponed as long as possible was so that the then Transport Secretary, TV's Lord Adonis, would be able to let some of the rail electrification contracts quickly enough that by the time the Tories took over it would be too late to stop them.

Well, the election was indeed postponed as long as possible, but it is not yet clear that the new government is going to pick up the electrification baton. The clock has been set back to zero, it seems, and Andrew Adonis might as well not have bothered. It is the greatest of pities that such a pro-rail (and knowledgeable about rail) S of S came along so late in the day. I was very alarmed to read in Rail News recently, in Growing gloom over electrification prospects, that "the chances of electrification of the Great Western Main Line and several key routes in the north west in the foreseeable future appear to have dwindled to almost zero."

This was based on an oral answer in the House of Lords, where the government spokesman (one Lord Attlee, grandson of Clement), more or less said there was no money to pay for it.

Now the new issue of Modern Railways arrives and the plot thickens further. No mention of electrification not going ahead at all, but in a surprisingly small and non-prominent news item it has Tony Miles quoting Iain Coucher, the outrageously arrogant and greedy CEO of Network Rail, who I see is now departing early (no great loss there, I think), as saying that the Midland electrification should go ahead first, not the Great Western. This would be a cheaper option, and makes more sense in various technical and rolling-stock respects.

If this really is what's happening, I'm quite happy with it, indeed I said in the first place that my own preference would have been for the Midland to go first. For one thing, it serves a slightly greater population overall. For another, the line is already electrified as far as Bedford, whereas the GWR is electrified only as far as Airport Junction. Thirdly, one feels the poor old Midland deserves a bit of a break after all these years; it always seems to have been last in the queue for investment. I think maybe you could also argue that electrification would benefit the Great Western somewhat less since it was laid out for speed in the first place, whereas the Midland is more like the WCML in its profusion of curves and gradients, disadvantages which electric traction can mitigate in part. It's also probably potentially more significant for freight, especially if some of the idiotically short-sighted 1960s reductions from 4 tracks to 2 can be reversed.

Anyway, maybe this idea was just Coucher thinking aloud, and clearly now he is not going to be involved in it, so we await the outcome of the various "value for money" and other reviews that are now under way. It will be extremely disappointing if major railway investment is put on ice for the foreseeable future. During a recession is precisely the time when projects of this kind should be going full speed ahead, as on the Southern and on Merseyside in the 1930s. It creates jobs, and costs less than when asset values are higher, and means you are in a good position to exploit growth when the economy revives.

And what of TV's Philip Hammond, the new Transport Secretary? He certainly is not Lord Adonis, sadly. Railway Eye has already decided he is a "petrolhead". TV's Christian Wolmar is equally unimpressed. He did not get off to a good start by saying he was going to end "Labour's war on the motorist", a piece of brainless tabloid nonsense - motoring costs are actually 14% down in real terms over Labour's period in office, while rail fares have been rising sharply in real terms for ages. Hammond did go out of his way to say he was not a fan of Top Gear, so at least he is aware of the danger of appearing too car-obsessed. He didn't sound completely hopeless in a too-brief interview today on Radio 4's You and Yours, though the questions put to him were not exactly probing and his answers were not followed up. Crossrail is going ahead, but he is going to try hard to make it cost less: that was about as much as we heard from him on railways. I hope Wolmar is wrong on this. I don't think Hammond is another Ernest Marples, at least. No doubt it will be the Treasury beancounters who finally determine what happens, as usual.

Train of the day

The Singapore metro (called the MRT) is probably the most efficient public transport system I have ever used. A couple of weeks ago somebody sprayed graffiti on one of its trains, seen in this clip. This is unheard of in squeaky-clean, conformist, authoritarian Singapore, and has caused national outrage. You just do not do things like that in Singapore! Bizarrely, the culprit turns out to be a Swiss expat and he is now in deep doodoo.

Trains of the day

Rare footage of the Liverpool Overhead Railway (closed 1957). Eerie and sad.

For more on this now vanished line, including a route diagram, see this post at Scott's "Merseytart" blog.

The appropriately 1950s music used to be the signature tune of "Children's Favourites" on the Light Programme every Saturday morning.

The three main parties' transport policies

Transport Extra has produced useful quick summaries of the three main parties' transport policies as we go into the general election:

Where the Tories stand on key transport issues

Where Labour stand on key transport issues

Where the Liberal Democrats stand on key transport issues

I am not very surprised to discover that my views coincide most with those of the Liberal Democrats, as on so many issues.

Of course, what none of this tells us is whether any transport projects will survive the budget cuts that everybody says are coming.

Train of the day

It's the right kind of snow as the Hakutaka Express battles through the Japanese winter at Echigo-Yuzawa station.

Manhattan: Broadway traffic ban becomes permanent

Good news from Manhattan, where sections of busy Broadway have been experimentally car-free for nearly a year. According to this article in Business Week, the ban has been so successful that New York's Mayor Bloomberg is making it permanent. Pedestrian injuries are down by 35%. Taxi journey times are improved by 7%. The car-free zones are to become public plazas where outdoor events will be held.

Let us hope that, on his next visit to London, Mayor Bloomberg will have words with his pal Boris Johnson about this success. Quite aside from the ongoing kerfuffle over what to do about the nightmare that is Oxford Street, our own theatreland could also do with some radical thinking of this kind. Christian Wolmar has recently blogged about being stopped by an idiotic jobsworth of a policeman for walking in the road in Soho where the pavement is too narrow and there were no cars coming. Mentalities are going to have to change.

Trams of the day

Double-decker trams in Hong Kong. For more, see Hong Kong's marvellous transit system.

Train of the day

The Class 507/508 is a train I associate with Merseyrail over many years of visiting Wirral. But, oddly, SouthEastern has one or two of them as well, though probably not for much longer. Currently they are operating on the Tunbridge Wells via Croydon service, and here is a pair of 508s at East Croydon.