Public Transport Experience: October 2024

Thursday, 31 October 2024

Too Much Information : Not Nice (mini 1)

How To Buy A Ticket (1)

Go to ticket window, give "the man" your destination, pay him "money" and he would put the ticket ...

... into an mysterious "clunker" (excuse the technical term?) ...

... then hand it to you. The process took a matter of seconds.

How To Buy A Ticket (2)

Here is No 3 son's experience at S N C F Cannes. He is travelling to Nice. Being a bit of a slacker linguistically speaking, he did set the machine to speak English. Looking at the results, fbb thinks that was VERY wise.

1. Check time of train. 1910?

2. Check route. Does the 1910 stop at St Augustin - for Airport? Wait for screen to scroll to check.

3 Go to machine

4 Tell the machine what you want to do; maybe buy a ticket?

5 Tell it you are not a member of some sort of secret society.

6 Choose one of the places that the machine would prefer to be your destination

7 If you are awkward and don't want to go to any of those, type in your chosen destination. Spell it correctly or the location will not exist! The machine might read your mind.

8 No 3 son's next picture was fuzzy; but he did it anyway! Or actually he didn't. He was asked to choose his route; there only was one to choose.

The transaction could now proceed - well maybe

9 Did he really want a ticket? Or several tickets? Or four other options?

10 But how many tickets?

11 And how old was he?

12 But hold fast, did he have a pass?

13 And what price did he want to pay?

More complex decisions are needed here. The 1910 and 1917 are TER (local) trains branded ZOU. But you cannot have a First Class ride on the 1910.

Why not?

The 1935 "InOui" is an "Inter City" brand from S N C F and thus the fare for a short local journey is higher.

Why?

But after 14 screens (fbb omitted a couple of "confirmation" screens for his and our readers' sanity) we all need a break.

To be continued on Saturday .

Today?

Is the evening before All Saints' Day a k a All Hallowes E'en. In the ancient Church Calendar, the idea was that, in preparation for a day when ALL saints, all Godly people, should be remembered as an example to everyone, anything evil should be expelled by Practice, Prayer and Penitence.

So, how come we treat evil as some kind of joke? How come we extol the delights of e.g. model cars promoting the sinister and potentially damaging things in life ...

... and much worse throughout our society.

Harmless fun? Fun, it may be; but certainly NOT harmless.

How To Make A Building Smaller

Some time back fbb bought one of these. It was so long ago that he has forgotten why he bought it and what irs official purpose was.

But it didn't fit; the proportions seemed all wrong with the structure too tall for its "footprint". But you cannot cut resin buildings without specialist equipment. They shatter like glass!

So, following his modelling mentors Bill Bodge and Fred Fudge, fbb decided not to make the building lower but to make the ground higher!

fbb added a base to the wall, covering up a few mil of the windows then added new frames, also a bodge ...

... where six panes "portrait" become eight "landscape'. Then fbb added a gentle but almost imperceptible slope of the "land".

A repaint finally changes the character of the building more significantly.

More detailed work is to be done not least the replacement of the white plastic soil!

But it is now better proportioned building ...

... but maybe not quite as "twee"?

P.S. Found the box.

Called a "Station Office", it would have been better labelled as a "Goods Yard Office". Hornby currently offers it at £53.49 (OUCH but "out of stock") but retailers seem to be wiling to accept anything from £25 to £40. fbb would not have paid more than the lowest rate!

Hampshire Model are asking £23.80.

Next Newbury to Didcot blog : Fri 1 Nov

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Spookier? Ah Well : Nuclear Harwell (2)

Animals : Aircraft : Atoms

Once a sweet little village ...

... surrounded by farmland, things took a noisy turn at Harwell with the arrival of John Laing buildders in 1935.

From its opening in February 1937 until March 1944, various bomber squadrons were stationed at the airfield. On the outbreak of the Second World War, it became part of No. 38 Group RAF, initially used for leaflet missions over France using Vickers Wellington bombers, later bombing raids on Bremen, Cologne and Essen.

There were numerous Luftwaffe raids on the airfield from August 1940 until September 1941. The original grass field was replaced with concrete runways between July and November 1941.

The RAF station was closed at the end of 1945 and the site transferred to the Ministry of Supply on 1 January 1946, where it became the Atomic Energy Research Establishment.

The above is a picture of the "Cyclotron" from the early 1950s - probably a danger to anyone who worked on it - whatever it did! There was plenty of this ...

... and the disinctive tower was a notable highlight (?) of a drive past on the old A34. It has long since been demolished.

Over the years that reduced in scale and other science-based research moved in, such as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in 1957. The site is now home to the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.

It does have one of these.

Located at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory campus at Harwell in Oxfordshire, Diamond is an alchemist's dream, a place where beams of light 10,000 times brighter than the sun are deployed to probe the nature of everyday things.

Diamond is the Marmite of the physics world. Just as the sticky gunk left over from the brewing process was repurposed as a savoury spread, the light that streams from Diamond was originally the waste product of a particle accelerator.

No, fbb doesn't really understand it all, either.

No 1 son, who has walked public footpaths in the area on several occasions, reports that there are still sites surrunded by high security fences and patrolled by armed guards. Who knows what goes on there?

What does go to there in 2024 is Thames Travel / Oxford Bus service X34 & X35 ...