#9

Bloody love trains mate.

Love the abbreviations only idiots know - LHCS, ECS, OHLE. :smiley:

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I can't stop fantasising
#10

was at the London Transport Museum the other week and they had a bit about the parliamentary trains, didn’t even know they were a thing before. also found out about trams going down my road there, and read a load more about the history of transport in my area on their website. good museum, would go again :+1:

#11

If you want to find out about tram routes and stuff, then this is a great resource:

http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=12&lat=51.5067&lon=-0.1673&layers=163&b=1

And for old stations in London, this is too:

http://carto.metro.free.fr/cartes/metro-tram-london/

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#12

Love all this kind of stuff. We went on the East Lancs Railway a couple of weeks back and the Ffestiniog last year - both fine ways to spend an afternoon.

The abandoned stations website has some great photos of disused tube stations: http://www.abandonedstations.org.uk/

#13

Cromford Station near Matlock in Derbyshire is always an interesting wait. Really attractive station and place where the Some Might Say cover was done, but also the site where about 10 years ago, a taxi driver was lured by a gun nut who just wanted to experience the feeling of killing someone. That shrine always gives me the creeps.

#14
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#15

Because we’ve got a pretty good tram system in Manchester lots of people move to areas serviced by that. You can or could before people became a bit more savvy, move to New Islington, Crumpall, Monsall and have a really quick commute into the centre of Manchester and find an affordable house.

Surprised more people don’t do that with old train routes. For instance, i know Stretford quite well, most commuters use the Metrolink, but on the other side of the town there’s Trafford Park train station which hardly anybody uses. You can be in Manchester in <10 minutes and the train the other way gets to Liverpool city centre in around 50 minutes, and you’ve got the biggest industrial estate in Europe a mile up the road, so loads of scope for work, but the area’s on its arse.

It’s weird how some areas become gentrified and others don’t. You could buy a flat there for £80k, a house for about £175k, about half what you’d pay a couple of miles up the road.

#16

Love trains. I grew up in a house not far from Eaglescliffe Station and would regularly see the Mallard pass on the tracks not 20m from the front door.

Eaglescliffe station itself is privately operated – one of only two – on behalf of Network Rail by Chester-Le-Track (the other station they operate is Chester-Le-Street).

http://www.chester-le-track.co.uk/htm/aboutus.htm

#17

One of my favourite railway journeys is from Pickering to Whitby, across the North Yorks. Moors.

It’s a heritage railway, which stops at Goathland (TV’s Aidensfield from Heartbeat and, more recently, Hogwarts).

Last time I went, I openly scorned that the locomotive was a dirty diesel as I’d hoped for steam. The volunteer guard overheard me and told me off – “It’s one of only three surviving examples”. Still would’ve preferred a steam train tbh

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#18

Outside of housing stock etc, a lot of it depends on the frequency of the service. There’s a point at which it becomes a turn-up-and-go frequency and that seems to be the threshold for whether people take the active decision to live in a particular area of a city.

#19

I have nothing to add here but I find it interesting as a.f.

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#20

Big fan of the Berlin U-Bahn and S-Bahn services.

#21

I’ve lived in Stretford for about 10 years now and we’re close to Trafford Park train station. I rarely use the station because even though it’s closer to my house, the tram runs much more frequently. It’s also a pretty grotty station and so are its immediate surroundings, but I do like Stretford itself. As you say, housing is much more affordable than the surrounding areas, we’ve got lots of really nice neighbours, I don’t see much antisocial behaviour, its close to the motorway, close to Salford Quays, is on the tramline and I think it is an area on the up (albeit slowly). The community takeover of the townhall, the sip club, events in Victoria park are all things that have happened since we’ve moved here and as first time buyers get more priced out of Chorlton and Whalley Range, I think they’ll migrate more to Stretford.

I think part of the reason for the slow pace of change is that people who live here tend to stay here for a long time. The lady in the elderly couple on the other half of our semi when we bought the house had lived there since 1949, our next door neighbour on the other side has been here since the 1960s and we bought ours from someone who was selling his childhood home after parents passing away. As such, the housing stock that comes on the market is often good, but in need of a lot of modernisation.

#22

Dunno
Empty Coaching Stock
Overhead Line Equipment

#23

This one is near me. Scheduled for closure soon.

My house is right next to a railway. The village I live in has about 15 houses…it used to have a station until the Beeching cuts in the sixties.

#26

Locomotive Hauled Coaching Stock

(as opposed to a Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU) or Electric Multiple Unit (EMU))

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#27

One of my things to do when I’m bored is watch cab view videos on YouTube. Quite interesting/relaxing really.

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#28

Do enjoy doing this for the really high speed stuff in China and Japan. Just seems really exotic

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#29

one of those parliamentary trains runs from stalybridge to stockport, which, when i was working in stockport and living in staly vegas and it took me an hour to commute there via piccadilly, pissed me off no end

#31

Might get the train back from Dublin next week. Though there are no trains in Ireland.