British Rail's Flying Saucer 155
Dynamoo writes "The Register is carrying a story about a patent for a fusion powered spacecraft filed by British Rail in the 1970s. While the concept may seem silly for a public railway, it seems that the British Rail Research Division employed a large number of aircraft engineers who presumably had some spare time between projects such as the Advanced Passenger Train."
Other patents... (Score:5, Insightful)
remember... (Score:2, Insightful)
With its' lights and hovering at night and from far enough away it's probably routinely mistaken for a UFO.
Re:British Rail (Score:3, Insightful)
So the Major government privatised them ... and the trains managed to get later, more crowded, and even more motheaten - not to mention a series of spectacular rail disasters caused by the private companies cutting costs on pointless things like track maintainence. As a result the current labour government partialy renationalised the company which owned the tracks (but left the trains themselves privitised) and imposed much stricter saftey regulations on the private rail-companies. The result? things are now only slightly worse than they were when British rail was a national joke (and as a regular trian user I'd say they were actualy improving) - but now we apreciate quite how much worse things could be ...
Re:British Rail (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:British Rail (Score:1, Insightful)
British Rail came into being because the previous separate rail entities couldn't get a decent service together, so the govt of the day stepped in. They failed, and then passed the wreckage back to the private sector, who thought they'd be able to turn the survice around. Unfortunately for them, the govt controlled B.R. had near zero investment for decades, so the private sector has to rebuilt the entire infrastructure. That is going to take billions of pounds and several years to complete, if ever.
When B.R. was created people harkened back to the pre B.R. days.
Other than the aging rolling stock and tracks, you have to factor in population growth over 40-50 years, lack of living space in the cities, almost no new lines being laid thanks to "not in my back-yard", it's no wonder the rail system is pathetic.
To be fair, all the goverments were to blaim (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets just take a small rail network like the london underground. It is hideously expensive to build and maintain. There are only two ways to operate it.
See it as a commercial company. Nice idea but doesn't work. Why? Because commercial companies A got to earn their costs, their future investments and a bit extra. But how can you do this when you run a company that has to maintain loss making lines?
What?
Well it is simple, it is very easy to make money on the mainlines during peak times. Then the trains are packed and you can easily get your money even with reasonable ticket prices. But how many people would use those mainlines at peak times if there werent any feeder lines at non-peak times?
Simply put, to get on the mainline I need to take a bus from my house that is half empty. No way that bus makes a profit BUT if it wasn't running I would have no use for the mainline.
Think of it like this, a supermarket that only sells butter and cheese and jam and peanut butter but NOT bread wouldn't be much use now would it?
A rail network, or public transport in general will always be spending the money it makes on those non-profit lines. The moment you try to cut money by getting rid of unprofitable lines you gut the service meaning fewer people can use it.
This practice of cutting unprofitable lines and thereby cutting off whole parts of the country from public transport started long ago. The more it happens the less people can rely on public transport, the less they will use it, the more unprofitable lines you will have, and so on.
Only in those countries where public transport is seen as an vital part of the infrastructure still have a working system. Spending billions on keeping it all running year in and year out however is very difficult and it is very tempting for a goverment to just cut the budget for a term and hope it will all keep to gether and next term there will be money for the back maintenance. Off course that never happens and so the system is neglected for decades until people die.
Nothing new, the dutch railnetwork is going through similar problems, our politicians asure us that the we won't have the same problems as the brits and the fact that recently we have had a whole series of accidents is just coincendence.
Who is to blaim? People that believe in tax cuts. A goverment tax cut is like your landlord saying he will charge you 100 less. Just now you got to pay the elec bill of 200 yourselve. I never seen a tax cut that wasn't offset by an increase somewhere else.
Re:Ambitious projects (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't just the people who attempt ambitios projects who change the worls. Keep in mind that Frank Whittle was laughed at when he offered his Jet engine to the British MOD, the Brits only began to allocate real resources to jet engie research when their photo intelligence analysts found prints showing working jet fighter prototypes on the tarmac on research facities in Germany. It has been debated to what extent Whittle influenced his German counterpart Hans von Ohain but the point is still that sometimes the person who spots the potential of an ambitious project/idea (in this case Heinkel, Junkers and BMW), picks it up and develops it further is just as important as the original inventor. Many ambitios ideas lay unused for decades or even centuries before their potential was reckognized.
Re:British Rail (Score:3, Insightful)
Fight security... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:To be fair, all the goverments were to blaim (Score:3, Insightful)
Which in part is due to irrational hopefulness. You hope you aren't going to get stuck in traffic when you go downtown. That hope is repeatedly dashed.
However, when the government buys into this irrational hopefulness by shifting investment to support cars, what happens is that the market responds accordingly. You get sprawl, which cannot be served economically by public transportation, and demands people to use cars to travel ridiculous distances, and they're still stuck in traffic.
Once you've reached this point, you're screwed. You can wish things had happened differently, but there's no way to fix them overnight.