Network Rail produced another set of impressive sounding figures last month. Its interim (half-year) report shows that train performance has increased to under 7 per cent of trains being late and it has managed to reduce its operating costs by £140m, around 7.5 per cent.
Its had a good press, too recently with much praise for [...]
Archive of December, 2009
Just been to a briefing with a very tired looking Richard Brown, the head of Eurostar, and Chris Garnett (the former boss of GNER, not Network Rail as reported in the Guardian) who is conducting, along with a French colleague, the enquiry into what happened. He is hoping to publish the report by the end [...]
After having spent the last three days in and out of the studios for the past three days criticising the performance of Eurostar and Eurotunnel in the face of the breakdown and then cancellation of the Eurostar trains, I now wonder if I have been too critical. After all, it was an unprecedented event with [...]
A love affair with trains is like marriage to a serial philanderer. Just when things are going well, they let you down - again.
Eurostar is usually a fantastic service. London to Paris or Brussels in around two hours, a window with a view and that superior feeling of overtaking cars that seem to be going [...]
Dec
20
Eurostar breakdown conundrum
It was not the wrong sort of snow, but simply too much of it that appears to have caused the breakdown of five Eurostar and two other trains in the Channel Tunnel. Last night, Eurostar engineers were still trying to discover the precise cause of the incident but the investigation focussed on electrical failures as [...]
Just as a little addition to my previous blog entry, the arbiter pretty much confirmed what I had expected, which is that he found pretty much in favour of Transport for London in his determination on the second period of the PPP. That was all very much as expected, but the response from Tube Lines [...]