Remember that big row we had, a few days ago? When I had an epiphany on the train from Berwick to King’s X, and I realised the big problem with HS2 was the obsession with speed? As I said then, we don’t need the speed, Britain is tiny. We just need the extra capacity
“THE obsession with HS2’s speed is to blame for its failure, an official review has found.
“The project’s focus on achieving the “highest possible speeds” has led to spiralling costs that have crippled progress, according to Sir Stephen Lovegrove. The former national security adviser said the high-speed rail line had gone “disastrously wrong” because of the decision to “gold plate” the project and political pressure to “keep things moving”.”
I don’t need or expect grovelling apologies. I will, however, accept large financial gifts. DM me for my bank deets
I thought the mocking was because you were several years behind schedule relative to the PB train experts who'd been saying that HS2 was about getting the fast passenger trains off the existing lines.
ECML was still not as quick as it was pre-privatisation 90-91 last time I used it, back then there was talk of London-Edinburgh in 2 hours.
Um the fastest ever London to Edinburgh train was 3 hours 29 minutes achieved by 91012 and a shortened mark 4 rake on a non-stop press run in September 1991.
It was 5h30 after the Peterborough improvements in 1971-72.
It then drifted towards 5h40 (but remainded 5h3x) going up to 1977.
In 1977 with the line improvements for HSTs being implemented, the Flying Scotsman was reduced to ~5h27/5h28 with Deltics in their last year on the service.
The HSTs came in and reduced it to (IIRC) 4h47/4h50 in May 1978, then further 4h37/4h40 in May 1979.
4h35 in 1982, following linespeed improvements in Scotland
4h30 in 1985, following the Selby diversion
It drifted up a few mins after this before falling to an all-time best of 4h23 by 1988/9.
Under Diesel it was 6 hours 35 - the A4's weren't that fast.
Why isn’t it a Police matter ? Why didn’t the show call in the Police ?
The police have traditions about what gets policed and not policed. On top of that, they have policies.
Hence the phenomenon of going from “that never seems to get to court” to “avalanche of cases”
Over the years, Panorama has started a number of such avalanches.
“The avalanche has begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”
I don't think this is a case of police discretion. It's that the producers were strongly motivated to minimise any problems to keep the show on the road.
Was in Lapland a couple of years ago at the Sami Parliament. The chamber had translation booths for at least 3 Sami languages (dialects?) but apparently there are 10-11 different versions
If they are like the Welsh translations of the documents we had to get done at the government jobs I've worked on, they are there at enormous expense for political correctness and will never be used.
I calculated that the extra cost each year for this utter waste of public money was roughly equivalent to a refurbished MRI machine, or a couple of nurses.
Political correctness KILLS.
More than that. £20m according to AI (be quiet at the back). That’s around 500 nurses.
Remember that big row we had, a few days ago? When I had an epiphany on the train from Berwick to King’s X, and I realised the big problem with HS2 was the obsession with speed? As I said then, we don’t need the speed, Britain is tiny. We just need the extra capacity
“THE obsession with HS2’s speed is to blame for its failure, an official review has found.
“The project’s focus on achieving the “highest possible speeds” has led to spiralling costs that have crippled progress, according to Sir Stephen Lovegrove. The former national security adviser said the high-speed rail line had gone “disastrously wrong” because of the decision to “gold plate” the project and political pressure to “keep things moving”.”
I don’t need or expect grovelling apologies. I will, however, accept large financial gifts. DM me for my bank deets
Many people on PB, myself included, have said that many times in the past. HS2 was always about capacity, it just got misssold as getting people to Birmingham about three minutes quicker. What took you so long?
‘ The Office for National Statistics said the UK unemployment rate was 5% in the three months to March 2026. The unemployment rate had dropped to 4.9% in last month’s release. The youth unemployment rate also climbed to 16.2%.’
Makes you wonder a bit about those Q1 growth numbers doesn’t it? I fear that they were exaggerated by everyone filling up there cars in anticipation of petrol price rises
Two women have told the BBC they were raped during the filming of one of Channel 4's biggest shows, Married at First Sight UK, while a third has described an allegation of a non-consensual sex act.
Married at First Sight always seemed a deeply dodgy premise for a TV series. How did they ever find a Registrar willing to conduct the ceremony?
I thought the point was tha5 they are NOT actually married, but pretend to be.
Not my understanding. A friend of my nephew was a participant and I believe still married to the man she met on the programme.
2020 was the last year they did genuine weddings, and the first year they had a couple who lasted (who have recently had their second child).
Then the show changed to a more successful entertainment format, but one that created greater psychological risks for the participants - in particular they take the participants away from their normal lives and support networks.
I think that couple might be my nephews friend - I'm seeing him at the weekend and will ask.
So since 2020 Married at First Sight is just fake?
PB is about to move from California to Finland. Load times should be faster. Vanilla errors should cease. Starmer will depart Number 10. Nigel Farage will be contributing to costs.
You'll all have to learn the language. It's easy: no future tense, no he or she, no subjunctive, few prepositions. But 14 cases including the important partitive ..., pronunciation is as written, but take care over double consonants and double vowels ...
One of the few European languages that is not Indo-European.
Maltese too.
Maltese is Semitic (basically an Arabic creole) Estonian, Finnish and Sami languages are Finnic Hungarian is Ugric Turkish, Azerbaijani and Gauguz are Turkic Georgian and associated dialects are Kartvelian Basque is a language isolate All the other families- Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Baltic, Greek, Armenian, and Albanian are Indo European.
Maltese is something of a hybrid, having imported a fair bit of structure from Italian and Spanish, as well as the alphabet. The basques remain a mystery and may have been ‘here’ before the ‘Europeans’ arrived
That was Colin Renfrew's view. He believed the Indo European languages arrived with farming and that Basque survived because the Mesolithic inhabitants of the Pyrenees were not pushed out by farming.
Renfrew’s book was great… but wrong. Following more recent discoveries, the consensus is that the Neolithic people who spread farming to Europe spoke something else (and Basque might be descended from that), while the Indo-European languages came later, spreading out from the Yamnaya culture in Ukraine in the Bronze Age.
Two women have told the BBC they were raped during the filming of one of Channel 4's biggest shows, Married at First Sight UK, while a third has described an allegation of a non-consensual sex act.
Married at First Sight always seemed a deeply dodgy premise for a TV series. How did they ever find a Registrar willing to conduct the ceremony?
I thought the point was tha5 they are NOT actually married, but pretend to be.
Not my understanding. A friend of my nephew was a participant and I believe still married to the man she met on the programme.
2020 was the last year they did genuine weddings, and the first year they had a couple who lasted (who have recently had their second child).
Then the show changed to a more successful entertainment format, but one that created greater psychological risks for the participants - in particular they take the participants away from their normal lives and support networks.
I think that couple might be my nephews friend - I'm seeing him at the weekend and will ask.
So since 2020 Married at First Sight is just fake?
Yes. Albeit they've still had a couple of couples who have stayed together for the long-term.
PB is about to move from California to Finland. Load times should be faster. Vanilla errors should cease. Starmer will depart Number 10. Nigel Farage will be contributing to costs.
You'll all have to learn the language. It's easy: no future tense, no he or she, no subjunctive, few prepositions. But 14 cases including the important partitive ..., pronunciation is as written, but take care over double consonants and double vowels ...
One of the few European languages that is not Indo-European.
Maltese too.
Maltese is Semitic (basically an Arabic creole) Estonian, Finnish and Sami languages are Finnic Hungarian is Ugric Turkish, Azerbaijani and Gauguz are Turkic Georgian and associated dialects are Kartvelian Basque is a language isolate All the other families- Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Baltic, Greek, Armenian, and Albanian are Indo European.
Maltese is something of a hybrid, having imported a fair bit of structure from Italian and Spanish, as well as the alphabet. The basques remain a mystery and may have been ‘here’ before the ‘Europeans’ arrived
Preserving a language can be difficult if there are too few to justify printing school books. The Sami are buying Finnish school textbooks and over labelling with Sami translations. So they get the structure but in their language. People can be very inventive in resisting outside influences.
Comments
It was 5h30 after the Peterborough improvements in 1971-72.
It then drifted towards 5h40 (but remainded 5h3x) going up to 1977.
In 1977 with the line improvements for HSTs being implemented, the Flying Scotsman was reduced to ~5h27/5h28 with Deltics in their last year on the service.
The HSTs came in and reduced it to (IIRC) 4h47/4h50 in May 1978, then further 4h37/4h40 in May 1979.
4h35 in 1982, following linespeed improvements in Scotland
4h30 in 1985, following the Selby diversion
It drifted up a few mins after this before falling to an all-time best of 4h23 by 1988/9.
Under Diesel it was 6 hours 35 - the A4's weren't that fast.
All copied from https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/what-was-the-fastest-london-edinburgh-run-on-the-ecml.251091/
NEW THREAD
What took you so long?
So since 2020 Married at First Sight is just fake?