Gareth Dennis
@GarethDennis
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Rail engineer and writer. Hosts @Railnatter . Associate @OpenInnovates . Lecturer @BCRRE / @PWInstitution . Co-founder @LevelBoarding . Chair @RailEngineers . He/him.
York, UK
Joined August 2009
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Last Seen Profiles
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WE'RE BACK (again)! There's finally another
#AnEngineerPlays
stream in
@TransportFever
as we return to Amphitros and see who won the election... And what it means next for the railways on the island. Also a big station remodelling.
TONIGHT, 9.15pm:
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I don't know who needs to hear it, but giving public sector workers a decent above-inflation pay rise is probably one of the quickest ways to turn the UK economy around.
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@ErikSolheim
This isn't incredible. It's called a bus. Buses are great, but they aren't trams and lack almost all of the benefits of trams.
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Only one of these trains has been designed for passengers rather than for engineering convenience:
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"How to keep going during the next energy crisis."
British Rail poster, 1979.
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On the left: the maximum construction extents of a railway capable of moving 40000 people an hour, with the final width being like 10m.
Oh the right: a motorway in its final* state capable of moving around 12000 people an hour.
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AI people are so thin-minded. Also they don't know about Google.
This thing has already been decommissioned as a failure. It wrecked the road it was on.
#BuildTrams
Trackless trains will make subways and trams obsolete
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Heavy private vehicles should be banned. You should require an additional, professional licence to drive anything heavier than 2t.
10 minutes later and this room would have been full of children and nursery staff. Can't quite get my head around this 🤯
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70% of Canada's population is on this 800km near-straight line.
A proper high speed railway would be straightforward to build, and could provide Toronto to Quebec timings of just over 3hrs.
Hyperloop does not, and never will, exist.
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Spot the difference,
@GrantShapps
-style!
(thanks to
@garius
for spotting this one, and made extra special by the fact that the launch completely failed)
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Hey
@ElonMusk
, look at this incredible invention...
It's a series of connected pods capable of carrying nearly 1800 people, running on a dedicated track with a throughput of one every 150 seconds, and it can carry over 40000 people per hour!
#Amazing
#YouAreAClot
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British post-war prime ministers as British Rail post-war locomotives: a thread.
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a lot of the Owen Jones discourse makes more sense when you remember that a lot of people in this country are still incredibly homophobic
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Thank God I'm British
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Pretty rare to see someone passionately making the case for HS2 - and laughing off the idea that £100bn is a large amount of money when it really is not compared to the returns.
"If I had my way, we'd be talking not about HS2 being thin-sliced, but about HS3, HS4 and HS5."
Andy Haldane, former Bank of England chief economist, speaks to
@heliaebrahimi
about his support for HS2 and expansion of similar projects.
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please always ignore Jonathan Pie, even if you think you agree with his scripted ramblings
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I love how he's tweeted this like it's revolutionary rather than the thing that all public transport-minded people have been calling for since forever.
The UK should have five or six economic powerhouses rather than just one.
And yes they should all be connected via high speed rail.
That's how you unlock agglomeration effects.
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They should simply not build this road. Every penny spent on it is wasted.
BREAKING: The Stonehenge tunnel is going ahead. The Transport Secretary has granted a Development Consent Order (DCO) to construct it. A DCO previously issued for the project was quashed by the High Court in July 2021 amid concern about the environmental impact.
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@transportgovuk
@Mark_J_Harper
@HS2ltd
YOU'VE CUT AND DELAYED THE ONE HIGH SPEED RAIL PROJECT WE HAVE, WHAT ARE YOU ON ABOUT MAN
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If the £20bn cost of Crossrail is a straight line between London Euston and Manchester Piccadilly (259.5km), then £72M only gets you 934m of they way there... Landing you in Beatty Street, Camden. That's about a ten minute walk.
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Whilst privatisation of rail in GB was an almighty botch that has led entirely to today's mess, it's the water sector where privatisation's utter uselessness has really been laid bare: this graph is dismal.
Sometimes you make a chart that surprises yourself. From
@pmdfoster
's look at the UK's infrastructure gap (link is free to open)
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This is deliberate, desperate vandalism. It's the sale of our future - and the UK's economic prosperity for another half a century.
Land acquisition for phase 2a to Crewe suspended immediately…
Government to start reselling properties it bought for hs2 phase 2
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didn't think it would be possible for this to look even more stupid in real life than it did in vissim:
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What should be the jewel in the crown of European railway services is being wrecked, chiefly as a result of Brexit but also as a result of the same general malice/malaise that's destroying the rest of the GB railway:
Eurostar route map updated with 2024 destinations. Incredible really.
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This is what proper rural cycling infrastructure can and should look like:
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Trackless trams do not exist. These are buses.
When people defend them by saying "but these cost a lot less than trams or trains" it's because they also bring the equivalent less benefit. They are an excuse for inaction.
This is a serious pledge now from
@MetroMayorSteve
and the Combined Authority
Trackless trams or gliders will be used to transport people to Anfield, Bramley-Moore Dock, the airport and other key locations
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"The argument for electrifying our railways will become clearer in time."
British Rail, 1979.
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there we go
Trains are incredibly absurdly obsolete technology.
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This one's a bit on the nose... I repeatedly had to tell anti-HS2ers on here that no HS2 meant higher rail fares, and they repeatedly responded by telling me I was speaking rubbish.
Now HS2 is gone, and:
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Annoyingly, this thread about US track gauge has gone viral. It is also entirely bollocks (other than US standard gauge being 1435mm).
Time for a quick thread...
#RailwaysExplained
A history lesson for people who think that history doesn't matter:
What's the big deal about railroad tracks?
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Well, because that's the way
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Thoughts with the driver of the HST that's just had its cab fail AGAIN having walloped a tree in Carnoustie... Not one, not two, not three but FOUR local drivers have contacted me about it, unhappy they are still running without modifications.
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@the_transit_guy
It's also: gross to look at? Its only appeal is for contrarians with limited intelligence.
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Since the announcement that Crossrail's trains would be high-floored (ending any chance of full level boarding essentially forever), I've been decrying the decision as very bad news for accessibility.
Here's Katie showing exactly why that is:
£18 billion spent on building the brand new Elizabeth Line, and because the ticket office was closed today I couldn’t get on a train.
Absolutely mind-boggling that this new line requires a manual boarding ramp and there are seemingly times where there are no staff?
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As Paul says in his replies here, it's pretty remarkable that this isn't national news given that this failure has severed the primary rail link to the port of Southampton, a key economic artery for the UK... Yet: nothing.
Here’s what Nuneham viaduct looks like from track level. Trains were running here on Monday morning, so it has clearly got a lot worse since then. This the Oxford-Didcot line, a national rail artery
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This is pseudoscientific, backwards nonsense. "Evolutionary psychology" is an enormous red flag built on patriarchy and dismal misuse of evidence.
There's nothing innate about toy preferences, it's entirely as a consequence of parental and social conditioning.
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Back in 2017, I started making a lot of public noise about how Crossrail had screwed up its design and locked-in inaccessible travel forever without major work on the central stations... Here's how that looks:
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@Classicbritcom
Anyone who doubts the moon landing (and there are a few of you on this thread) is not only a nincompoop, but also lacks the most basic reasoning skills.
400,000 people worked on the Apollo programme. Scandals slip out when there are only two or three people involved. Grow up.
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Not a single EV charging point should be fitted within the limits of pedestrian space. Not one.
If they can't go in the road, they shouldn't be fitted at all. Stop stealing space from walkers and wheelers for cars. We've had a century of that already.
I mean SURE. These’ll fix everything.
Much better than EG. putting in bike lanes 🙄🙄
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This is a canary in the coalmine for where Great British Railways is heading: NOWHERE.
A single ticketing website was and remains the easiest first thing that the UK government could do, and they've already bottled it. Absolutely pathetic.
The government has dropped plans to create a centralised Great British Railways online rail ticket retailer, the Department for Transport has confirmed
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Two ticketing trials, two very different results:
🏴 requires almost no explanation and is basically guaranteed to give you a cheaper ticket
🏴 has required extensive explanation and has resulted in an increase in fares for most passengers
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I cannot express the extent to which the running of HSTs on this line is going to end in disaster...
A toy train made of fibreglass designed for high quality signalling and track, running amongst full-sized freight trains on dreadful track and mostly without signalling: 🚩🚩🚩
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🚨 PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨
HS2 (High Speed 2) refers to the new, dedicated tracks for long distance, high speed train services. HS2 only goes as far as those tracks do.
HS2 **does not** refer to the high speed trains running on existing tracks.
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I hate the extent to which HS2's Leeds leg has been erased from history.
With HS2 Phase One & NPR going ahead, we’ve been left with a section in the middle between the WM & GM that needs addressing.
So our private sector group is looking at👇🏻
👷🏻♂️Engineering upgrades
🚆Targeted bypasses at pinch points
🚂 A new line
💷 The role of private finance
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🚨 PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨
We don't need HS2 because our existing railway is "Victorian" (it isn't), we need HS2 because our existing railway has been upgraded to the point where we can't squeeze any more out of it.
For starters, the ECML was resignalled in the 1950s with one of the most sophisticated power signalling systems in the world, and then again in the 1990s with genuinely world-leading solid state interlocking (SSI). Since then, further incremental upgrades have continued.
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**claps very very slowly**
Why HS2 axe could mean slower, more crowded trains between London and Manchester.
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a metro/subway can move as many people in a minute that this waste of concrete can in a day, top work
@elonmusk
:
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Really great that a close result in one rather silly suburban constituency is now going to drive worse national climate policy.
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A reminder of what level boarding looks like, on a legacy platform nominally matching the GB standard, courtesy of
@greateranglia
and Stadler:
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@BBCWiltshire
Catastrophically stupid. "Just one more lane" won't fix anything, every penny spent here is wasted.
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This means "we aren't building Euston station".
The full £6.5 billion saved through our rescoped approach at Euston will be spread across every other region in the country.
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Making all bus travel in England free would cost £2bn a year.
To help those at the bottom give cash, improve walking and cycling infrastructure, help to reduce fuel usage (make electric vehicles affordable), and *fund the buses* etc. Below, bus prices are way, way up, much more than fuel prices (as are trains)...
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#OnThisDay
in 1994, the Channel Tunnel was officially opened. It cost £16.4bn in today's money, and from its inception in 1958 it took 36 years to build, including one complete cancellation by Labour in 1975. Today we couldn't live without it.
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As I said barely days ago, Sunak is comfortable with letting children be killed on our streets in greater numbers. It's no more complex than that.
We’re introducing a series of measures to prevent Labour politicians from punishing people for simply living their lives 👇
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A reminder: putting solar panels in the fourfoot is a really, really daft idea. It wrecks automatic inspection of track materials, you have to move it every time you do maintenance, and it adds another complex cabled asset to the rail corridor.
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There is not a single good or useful reason to make buses "driverless". Not one. This is a total and complete waste of time and money.
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centre of gravity of mid-20th century ocean liner versus this pig marked in red:
Icon of the Seas is 5 times bigger and heavier than the Titanic 🛳️
It carries 7,600 passengers at max capacity, has 20 decks, 40 bars, 7 swimming pools, and 6 water slides
Setting sail January 2024
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That this government has cancelled HS2 essentially in its entirety despite the most expensive and complex section already being half built is unsurprising. This was an inevitability following publication of the Integrated Rail Plan back in 2021.
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Hey look - some actual good news! This is really excellent stuff, and comes from actually taking a strategic look at transport needs and HAVING A PLAN.
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THERE. IS. NO. REALLOCATION.
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The reason the UK consistently underperforms is because government (elected or otherwise) has absolutely no vision or commitment to any viable future.
FT reports entirety of HS2 Eastern leg could now be scrapped. Would mean even the figleaf compromise of ‘getting HS2 to Yorkshire’ by running HS2 trains from the East Midlands to Sheffield on existing track wouldn’t happen
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Precisely the same thinking, I'm sorry to say, has infected huge swathes of the green movement in the UK, too... Rural living *is not greener than city living*.
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Here is
@SimonCalder
excellently making the case for why HS2 has now been totally destroyed, despite its most expensive section still being planned to open:
The painful bit? Most people who oppose or undermine the project STILL don't get it.
#whyHS2
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This journey was clearly horrible, and we can expect to see more and more columnists writing about the hell on our railways thanks to HS2 being cancelled.
HOWEVER it winds me up to no end that, broadly, the columnist class has been wildly against HS2 from start to finish...
That crush at Euston station? I'm not surprised. I tried to go from Euston to Birmingham last week and it was such an appalling journey I took notes on the way. This country is fucked:
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This is an incredible exchange. Sunak is desperate to land his "swap rail investment with road investment" policy, but he isn't given a chance to here.
Also, yet again: local journalists are better at holding national politicians to account than their national colleagues.
"We're straight-talking people in the north."
@anna_jameson_
asks the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, about the future of HS2.
Listen to the full interview on BBC Sounds
@BBCPolitics
|
@BBCNWT
|
@BBCNorthPR
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Once again, HS2's cancellation is being used to justify the construction of new, pointless and destructive major roads.
@TheGreenParty
: many told you this would happen, but I take no joy in it actually happening.
It’s official,
@transportgovuk
have committed to providing £200m of funding towards our Norwich Western Link project, a new dual carriageway between the A47 and Broadland Northway to the west of Norwich.
Great news for people and businesses in the area, and Norfolk as a whole.
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Here's what the combination of a low-floored train fitted with gap fillers and platform/track set (very roughly!) to the GB standard position looks like. Curvature doesn't matter.
It isn't perfect, but it's a much better starting point than the status quo 📐
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HS2's Old Oak Common station, as currently specified, is capable of terminating around 3tph. It is being built that way as we speak.
Redesigning and rebuilding it to cope with even half of the proposed HS2 service will cost more than scrapping Euston.
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Some of the most stupid nonsense I've seen pumped into my eyes. And I've watched all the
@boringcompany
promo videos.
School children might be delivered one day to their homes through this innovative transportation system.
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@delanightmares
I look forward to jaywalking (also look up the origin of that word) as a crime being atomised into the annals of history. People should be free to walk across urban streets as they please.
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If this is to be believed, Musk personally wrecked his Starship launch. He's not a clever guy, folks.
This is what happens to your launchpad when you think it would be funny to launch to the world's largest rocket on 4/20, instead of when it's ready.
It will probably be at least a year before the FAA will approve another Starship launch.
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@ClarkCountyNV
@boringcompany
it's not an underground transportation system, it's a road tunnel with taxis in it
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Well, the
#IntegratedRailPlan
(a.k.a.
#RailBetrayal
) has landed. And immediately we can see that their plans are just a re-announcement of things that have already been planned (or indeed cancelled):
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Absolutely vital reading to understand what's going wrong on Eurostar - a vital, sustainable link to the continent (and the UK's lowest carbon railway) is being run into the ground because of government malice and malaise:
Here's the full letter from Jacques Damas setting out the challenges currently faced by eurostar.
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Well this is probably my favourite intro onto a telly programme so far...
#NewDad
#C4BenEltonTrains
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This is catastrophic, and is a tax cut for the rich. It is one of the most regressive tax policies in decades.
BREAKING: Fuel duty cut by 5p per litre, as widely trailed.
Biggest cut to all fuel duty rates ever, says Chx, and only the second reduction in the levy in 20 years.
The tax cut, worth £5bn, starts at 6pm tonight and will be in place until March next year.
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we do actually need steel to build a zero carbon society, folks
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Once again, he's lying to you. This is a regional
@UKLabour
policy being rolled out by Labour CA mayors. He's literally pretending it's his policy.
📢 I'm introducing a £2 cap on almost every single bus journey in England outside London - from Jan-Mar - backed by up to £60m, helping millions access affordable transport this winter as we continue to support people facing rising costs of living 👇
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This stuff happens every single day. 25,000 people are killed or suffer life-changing injuries on Britain's roads every year, and the increasing mass and height of vehicles turns acts of incompetence like this into tragedy with unacceptable frequency.
"It was a shock to be doing a blow dry and have a car suddenly next to you."
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