As has already been pointed out the figures quoted are since Oct last year - not from the introduction of technology over the past umpteen years.  I somehow doubt all the things you mention have been introduced just in the past 11 months.

 

I somehow doubt recruits for the latter would be drawn from the ranks of the former,  however they do seem to be being used as a useful scapegoat for a good number of the country's shortcomings at the moment.

I'm sure Rachel from Accounts will be glad of the distraction from the consequences of her policies.

 

I have been "trialling" Kagi - it certainly sorts out a lot of the junk that normal search engines drag out with annoying regularity. Of course............. is it worth paying a subscription for ?

 
That (care homes) probably has as much to do with ability to find staff willing to do the job now that visa regulations are so much tougher that the source has dried up  and there’s little home-grown take up. After all - painting red crosses on mini-roundabouts is a much more valuable contribution to society than cleaning incontinent geriatrics, isn’t it.

 
Not one of our most participated polls - and no clear results that give a statistical bias one way or the other.    As pointed out, there IS a danger of judging others countries by our own standard and that is indeed a danger.  Firstly, all parties there may be happier with it than you might think as different does nt necessarily mean bad.   And secondly, who are we to impose our views and standards?

 
Here are the results ... with percentage of total voters selecting each option:


The thing that shouts out to me is that only one in three of you would gamble on being able to get home if your service was cancelled without alternative.   Which talks to me of the huge danger to actual traffic done by announcing that a train is cancelled, only to re-instate it later.   And the danger of having an unreliable service.  I note that our voting was skewed and in my view are members are resourceful and hardy - so that double up the sentiment to say that people will not risk the train if there's anything but a minimal change of it not being available.

It seems that most gambling is a minority interest only to members. Two specific area - investments (including premium bonds) and raffles do attract the majority of us.   I will admit to holding some premium bonds, and very sadly I haven't won a major prize this month so no million pounds to [inset life plan change] so life goes on.  And for the first time I took part in the Omaze drawn for the £3 million Cornish home and once again failed to win.  Looking at the house on Streetview and GoogleMaps, I don't actually know what we would have done with it had we won it; I suspect that the change to our daily norm would have been challenging which - I observe - is something of a norm for major prize winners.

 
DuckDuckGo is my usual choice. I've also toyed with Swisscows. At the moment it takes some coaxing to get it to come up with Coffeeshop on the first page of results.

 
One of the sleeper sets is now on its way from Reading to Penzance ready for tonight's up service.

 
Many years ago, I boarded a crowded 125 train at Paddington (a strike had been called at very short notice and everyone was rushing to get home) and was using my raised hand to support myself against the frame of the doorway into the next carriage. More people pushed onto the train and, to my horror, a young lady's breast pressed against the back of my hand. I didn't dare move my hand, lest that be misconstrued.

And on crowded Tube trains I was very careful about how I held my briefcase.

In my latter days of commuting, in the early 1990s, a harassed-looking middle-aged man scampered down the aisle pursued by an irate young lady, who returned a couple of minutes later looking satisfied, only for her to u-turn and exclaim "I haven't finished with him yet".

 

RAIB write (email)

 

I'm sure thay won't be offended ... for a guest from Germany coming to the the UK, failing to guess "Peterborough" as the final destination of a local connection from the Kings Cross / St Pancras ... I can think of many other places I would guess at with a population of around 200,000 before Peterborough, even through Peterborough has its attractions.

 
https://busandtrainuser.com/2025/09/02/swindons-33-million-new-bus-station/

This week sees a raft of bus services improvements with new Bus Service Improvement Plan funded routes in many areas as well as major changes to the TrawsCymru network and other services in Powys. I hope to sample many of these changed routes over the next few weeks but first up was a visit yesterday to see the long awaited new bus station in Swindon which opened on Sunday.

...........snip..........

 
Well, I am now on my way back passing through the pleasant rolling countryside from Lubeck!

I hope the citizens of this historic Hanseatic city will not be offended that no forum member guessed that it was my destination.

I also have a DB delay/repay form to file for my outward journey,  albeit that I was just 3 minutes short of going from a 25% refund to a 50% one. And as the fare for the entire Amsterdam to Lubeck journey was only €37-99, it's materially impacted by the postal cost!

Puts Scotrail's fares (never mind Belmond's) into perspective....

 

Beautifully articulated 

Let's hope that everyone in our country can restrict their territorial micturation to "their own damn property" as someone has suggested, in order to avoid hazards to traffic and public order.

 
Care homes is a bigger problem since April when I've noticed more agency staff being used as it probably cheaper. The residents need regular contact with people they know and who know them especially in dementia homes.

 
Our main (and now back office) hosting has been with UK2 for several decades - the Coffee Shop was added as a side-site onto our the real (physical) server for Well House Consultants hosted there.   A long relationship and a good support team.  When I retired from the hotel and training we transferred to a cloud server with the same company, based on such things having come in and being a much reduced (monthly) price.  Not so much that my/our traffic had gone down, but that technology had moved forward, and that the cloud server was/is cost effective.

UK2 has moved on too.   It's now "a THG Company" ... and about this time last year they switched from their own email systems to Stackmail which was not entirely smooth.

They (and by which I think I mean THG) has move the server side of the business to "THG Ingenuity Cloud Services".  Previously, we were set up with a monthly payment made automatically with two emails - "we will be charging you" and a few days later "we have successfully renewed".  Looking back, these emails were not received late in July; an email from Ingenuity saying "your server has been transferred to us" at about that time appears to have gone into / been lost in spam, and there may have been one from the original UK2 control panel too.

Domains and email continue at UK2, and indeed a couple of annual charges have come though on some of those so the UK2 account is still live.   However, I hadn't noticed the lack of invoice(s) or payment for the cloud server, and the other evening that resulted in the hosting service "freezing" the server so that it became a read-only computer - effectively offline and only accessible to me as webmaster via a secure shell at a different IP address to the one we normally use. I became aware of the problem within minutes with both reports from members and from the receptionist server which is hosted elsewhere.

The UK2 / support ticket system no longer offered me a "help with your cloud server" option but I did put in a ticket and  member of the team there did try and find a fix, but had to "escalate to the data centre team" and told me that "I would need to allow them time".  And on that unhappy note I slept a bit, having posted a status report on the receptionist server.   And at 06:00 in the morning, I found the server was back up, and switched the receptionist to start to forward requests again.   A message in my status box told me that I hadn't paid for the service, and suggested I sign up with the new company to clear my bill and have the service continue.

---

I worry about signing up base on an email from a company / setup I have not dealt with before - however, I was assured that this was not a genuine setup / transfer, all be it not cleverly done.  And attempts to login and register with the new company failed because their verification email - as far as I can tell - was so much like spam that it never reached me.  So - in limbo with a server (temporarily?) up and running again and with a threat of being lost again when my bill remained unpaid.

Wind on to yesterday, and a phone call from "number withheld" while waiting inline at the pickup point in a local fast food takeaway ... to ask what I was doing about sorting out the account; bad line, and I am very poor of hearing - but it struck me that this MIGHT be genuine for once, and I asked the guy to call me back half an hour later - and it was at that point that the story of what had been going on became clear.  It seems that the part of our UK2 account relating to hosting could be and was transferred, but the payment details could not be and needed re-registering ...

---

Long chat with the new hosting support person - now from Manchester rather than docklands, and an invoice to pay with an invoice address in New York rather than in the UK - though in pounds and with UK VAT, and a system that's running again as I write and post but which was down for some eight hours and without warning that reached me (you could argue I should have been on the ball and noticed the lack of a request to pay).    I think we're OK for a week or two and I'll check back now that alerted to see if and how it settles.

I am inclined to stick with the new company for now rather than move in knee-jerk reaction.  I do have backups so that I can get back to where we were via a server elsewhere should I need to; that could take 24 to 48 hours.    We are promised "the same price as you have been paying" but it is not the exact equivalent to the new product being offered by Ingenuity, and I enquired about resizing - could also be useful to up certain specs.   However, the new company seems to lack quite the flexibility that would have needed - "your could purchase a bare server" but that would take us back to where we were in terms of extra cost and extra management we no longer need.   I am taking a look at the medium to long term and will throw options into the mix with the moderator / admin team over coming days.  No panic, I don't think, in the short term - but a need to plan for medium and long term.

Management summary - the Coffee Shop servers are still running.  We need to look at clouds on the horizon - as always, considering the medium and longer term in the moving IT field to ensure we remain operational and able to respond to incidents and changes.

 
In addition to TG post.
23:45 London Paddington to Penzance due 07:55
01/09/25 23:45 London Paddington to Penzance due 07:55 is now running as scheduled.
Will be formed of 9 coaches.
Additional Facilities Information
The train for Night Riviera has broken down so we have arranged for one of our Intercity Express Trains to run instead which has Standard and First Class seating. There will be no accommodation facilities.

 
A rude awakening!



21:45 Penzance to London Paddington due 05:04
01/09/25 21:45 Penzance to London Paddington due 05:04 will be terminated at Reading.
It will no longer call at London Paddington.
It has been previously delayed and is now 11 minutes late from Totnes.
This is due to a broken down train.

 
Tuesday September 2


And something went wrong with the morning 'halts' train:

2E80 07:00 Shrub Hill to Didcot Parkway was started from Oxford "due to a problem with the train (M8)" [RTT].

The stock ran in service from Oxford to Shrub Hill, but went back ECS.

 

From YouTube, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRw34BC_f5o&t=351s

Lord Dowding was the architect of the RAF's success in the Battle of Britain.

CfN. 

 
No Chris....that would only apply if you were in Cornwall and having a Cornish pastry (sic).

 


I rather think that's the weak link in your line of reasoning, broadgage. 

 
Elsewhere on these forums, I spoken in favour of small, lightweight, and speed limited cars, known in France as VSPs.
In areas without suitable public transport, perhaps criminals should be restricted to such vehicles? To some usually young and male drivers, being restricted to 27 MPH and that in a small and lightweight vehicle would be almost as bad as a complete driving ban. It would however permit travel to work or education.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35210572

 
I would support higher fares for peak travel, except for very short local journeys.

Providing peak capacity is expensive, and in my view, those who travel in the peaks should contribute to these costs. Having provided capacity, the costs of using this capacity in the off peak are limited.
Therefore off peak fares could reasonably be significantly lower.

I have previously suggested a greatly simplified fares structure, with only three different fares for any journey.
PEAK FARE-- payable for trains that are reasonably expected to be very busy.
SUPER BARGAIN-- payable for trains expected to be very little used, mainly very early morning or late night services.
OFF PEAK-- applies to trains not falling into the above.

 
A late nomination for Kagi, which I've been using happily for a couple of years now. It's like Google used to be before it decided it was cleverer than you...

 
Elsewhere, seagulls doing impressions of humans. Here's Tommy Pooper: