Going underground: The Royal Mail's great London train squeeze For the last 13 years, a tiny train tunnel running through the centre of London has remained empty and unused, maintained by just four engineers. But these engineers don’t work for Transport for London or Network Rail – they work for the Royal Mail. The small gauge tunnel, running for 10.46km (6.5 miles) from Paddington to …
Remove the public ownership restriction.
Sell it off.
Watch some companies make millions out of using it. Delivery, I suspect. Ironic if they used it for parcels and mail. But even using the tunnels for underground fibre must be possible - I bet a load of companies along the line would pay a fortune for another leased line that goes by a route independent of the buildings etc. above it.
Nah, having it as a tourist attraction is the best way to go. It'll be popular, as long as it's marketed properly. I'll certainly go.
I'm going on the Down Street tour later this week. At £75 a shot, it's expensive, but they don't have any problem shifting the tickets. I'm really looking forward to it.
Lucky you getting the Down Street - managed to miss out on the tickets for that this year so congrats. Had to make do with the consolation prize of the old Euston tunnels but was still well worth the £35. It also came with a discount voucher for the london transport museum.
At the risk of doing myself out of tickets again next year, I'd recommend all commentards in london and the south east interested in this sort of thing to bookmark the Hidden London site and watch it like a hawk for when new tours make an appearance:
http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/hidden-london
"I bet a load of companies along the line would pay a fortune for another leased line that goes by a route independent of the buildings etc. above it."
It's a market pretty much owned by London Underground Limited in London. This line doesn't go many places, whereas the tube covers rather a lot of sites.
London Pneumatic Despatch Company was a mail company. They ran a short pneumatic rail system.
There was also a small pneumatic tube system (between the London Stock Exchange and the telegraph station), but London doesn't seem to have had much of a pneumatic tube system -- not enough to make much of a fibre system.
If I had the money I'd buy it and convert it into my underground (sorry) lair.
I could make a good heap of dosh running dark fiber for people, and even more for intercepting that (hey, according to Hollywood, that's what people with underground lairs do, it's now UK accepted practice and something suitably evil has to pay for the upkeep).
There, problem sorted. All I need now is the money.
And a cat.
:)
I could make a good heap of dosh running dark fiber for people, and even more for intercepting that (hey, according to Hollywood, that's what people with underground lairs do, it's now UK accepted practice and something suitably evil has to pay for the upkeep).
Sadly not that simple. Problem is you're constrained both by the limited route, and by wayleave costs getting fibre in/out of the tunnel. Then there can be additional O&M costs or embuggerances due to limited access, maintenance windows, HSE restrictions etc that impact on cost and SLA. So for example when the tunnels were operating 22hrs a day, you'd have to fit any installation/repair work in with the 2hr maintenance window. Or try 'Stop the train! Teh Interweb's down!'.
"Delivery, I suspect. Ironic if they used it for parcels and mail."
Doubt that would happen, there simply isn't emough the money in it for them to afford to buy the system.
However given the bad air pollution in London at the mo, surely taking any vehicles off the road would be a good idea so perhaps Mr Kahn could think of subsidising some deliveries going via this system instead of in a van or lorry? And given the traffic levels it would probably be quicker. Just a thought.
The LHC has detected evidence of the existence of the hypothesised "quaint quark", postulated to be responsible for the phenomenon known as "nostalgic action at a distance", where people's memories of their childhood hellholes are magically transformed into images of wonder and light...
If a brand new train, running a fixed route on a dead end line with no other trains, needs a driver in order to carry passengers, how on earth are driverless cars even a thing?
Costs and benefits. The Mail Rail tourist route can only derive a small benefit from driverless operation, so the cost of implementing it isn't justified.
Driverless trains are not uncommon. The DLR has been one since 1987. The Victoria Line, constructed in the 1960s, has drivers, but the trains are automatic.
Except that the likes of Foxconn are replacing workers with Robots at a great rate of knots.
Go read up on Elon Musk's plans for the Tesla model 3 and how it will be built with very little human interaction.
Go read Mark Carney's speech on this today.
5% unemployed will become 15-20% unless there is a new Ned Ludd lurking in the wings.
...of the Mail Rail system were taken by a group of urban explorers in 2011. Whatever one may think of their laissez-faire attitude to trespass laws; there's no denying that UEs have documented some very interesting places in recent years.
The story and pics are here: http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2011/04/24/security-breach-london-mail-rail/
Somewhere... I have some nice pictures that I took on a tour organised via Usenet in the 1990s. I can't remember the name of the organiser, just that it was probably done via uk.misc. What impressed me were the stacks of wheel pairs on massive axles, nicely ground and finished with red paint. The miniature trains made you think that we'd stumbled on a aliensubterranean civilisation. A long owed beer for whichever kind and industrious soul organised our free visit. I'm so glad that I saw this before it became a relic.
They could stop sticking their oar where it isn't needed and insist on the royal mail reopening and using this damned railway to get their noisy, polluting and foreign vans off the over crowded streets of London.
In fact I would force them to extend the railway.
I guess some snotty RM board directors and some government ministers got together with the directors of Mercedes and Shell to get some nice kickbacks from abandoning an environmental, cost effective, cheap and existing solution in favour of a nasty, polluting, overcrowding and expensive alternative. Just like Beeching did in the 50s
The mayor of London could follow the other cities like Paris etc and ban Diesel vehicles from central london. That won't bring this rail line back into daily use though.
The MailRail hub in Willesden made sure that there would be no need for the mail system to use this link.
However as much as I hate to say it, Amazon would probably love an artery like this through the city.
"The mayor of London could follow the other cities like Paris etc and ban Diesel vehicles from central london"
Is there any analysis anywhere on the relative contributions from (diesel) cars, light vans, vehicles up to 7tonnes (sub-HGV), and HGV and above? Plus buses etc.
Instinctively based on what I see in Birmingham centre and suburbs, the contribution from diesel cars is relatively small (newer and better maintained vehicles, with DPF, etc), whereas the contribution from commercial vehicles, PSVs, etc, of varied ages and sizes (and qualities of maintenance) seems likely to be much higher.
In fact why not have another go at what Ken Livingstone's GLC quite understandably wanted a couple of decades (?) ago: ban all HGVs in the city and suburban areas unless specifically authorised (or, alternatively, zero tailpipe emissions, ho ho ho).
Here's a 1936 classic for your lunch break. From the days when postal mail was fast and efficient.
"Here's a 1936 classic for your lunch break."
2013 remix (3 minutes or so): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFJPYi3JXw4
"From the days when postal mail was fast and efficient."
What? You mean it's not 'fast and efficient' to have dozens of competing delivery companies (Herdel and Yomes and such) all trying to see who can offer the worst delivery service and the worst employment conditions **in the same places as the competition** and still make money for the owners?
You wonder who built the stock.
Others may wonder if you (or the article author) are familiar with Wikipedia (am I allowed to say the W word here these days?).
Start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
and you will find that English Electric built most of the stock, with the exception of the last batch.
English Electric also built the Deltic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltic
Little and Large, as it were. Or as ARM would have it, big.LITTLE?
"Greathead shield system" - a link would be useful (yes I can copy/paste but a direct link from the article would be good)
However, this is really going to screw up my current Mornington Crescent gameplay strategy.. could you add another 2 stops to the SE please.. or maybe 1 S & 1 E?.. ;)
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