Strange how they (and other similar small railway operators) can manage to run old steam locomotives on time, yet Network Rail/the many subsidised rail operators haven't got a clue.
It's a terrible situation. We should privatise them and then the invisible hand of market would sort it out.
Never, ever go to Japan - after a week of using Tokyo's public transport system, where it costs the equivalent of £1.20 to go from one side of the city to the other on trains that arrive every 2-3 minutes and do so pretty quickly, when you return home you have to pay over £12 to go from Heathrow to any part of London, where you invariably see your connecting train depart just as you arrive at the station and face a wait of at least twenty minutes for a train that is guaranteed to be behind schedule by the time you leave the station and will find ways to continue delaying itself throughout your journey. If you want to go on a holiday where the public transport system won't make you weep upon your return, New York's subway manages to be just as ****ty as the London Underground, with additional anti-commuter policies and a lack of either heating or air conditioning on their trains and platforms.
QinetiQ did a lot of R&D as a part of the government, but some bright spark decided it would do better work as a private company, so it was sold off in one of the biggest privatisation scandals ever in which the directors became overnight millionaires. Otherwise British defence policy seems to be run for the sole benefit of BAe, who as we have seen today, are not quite as large an employer as they used to be.
I've been to Tokyo four times and have never once seen that happen, even in the morning rush-hour. On the other hand, I've seen that several times departing from Victoria - usually because an eight-carriage train has been cancelled and the next train to Croydon happens to be a four-carriage one.
From my experience, there's only two minor downsides to the Train and Transit systems in Japan 1. Trying to navigate the system if you don't speak Japanese - and that's my fault not theirs. 2. The archaic ledger-based fare tables for intercity routes. (Although haven't been back for last 3 years so that may have been updated by now) Otherwise, the pain of comparison with our geriatric, disorganised network is quite unbearable!
As Trump renews his spat with Rex Tillerson, this time challenging him to an IQ test, his judgement and dishonesty is again brought into sharp focus. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41419190 Senator Bob Corker @SenBobCorker 'It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.'
I've never had an issue with the former as there's bilingual maps by the ticket machines, while the destination boards on the platforms (and on some of the trains) are also bilingual. The only time it was ever an issue was the time I left the guidebook in my hotel room in a jetlagged stupor so couldn't remember how far along the line my stop was so had a mild nervous breakdown at the ticket machine as it took me a good five minutes to find it on the map.
The Conway Creature has reared its head again, and...oh boy, I think I'll just post some actual quotes from the interview. On the Las vegas shootings "I did note ... it was President Obama's ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, in 2010 that decided not to regulate (bump stocks) ... That should be part of the conversation and part of the facts that you put before your viewers." On the Las Vegas shootings (I think...) "You see Hillary Clinton, who’s out on a book tour, talking about herself, not talking about this ... You see her rushing to judgement on Twitter the other day while people are still looking through the rubble, searching through the hospitals for their missing loved ones, trying to politicize it. Your obsession with Russia has been to the exclusion of this conversation." When called out on the Trump administration doing nothing about bump stocks "No, I’d like everybody to be involved in the conversation here, because that was seven years ago, for a different president. Donald Trump was busy being a successful businessman in New York." On...**** it, no idea "(Hillary Clinton) has tweeted about guns one time this year. Bernie Sanders, zero times. Elizabeth Warren, zero times. They have tweeted about Russia over 30 times, Sanders and Warren." On Trump's half-assed response to Puerto Rico being devastated "When people take a shot at the President and try to even question, try to put a piece of tissue paper between him and his commitment to those people, and those people, you should think thrice about that. That's No. 2. No. 1, and most importantly, you are talking about the urgency to have a conversation. You and your network have felt an urgency about Russia and some phony baloney collusion."
WTF is that woman on???? To paraphrase the beloved Eric Morecambe, she used (most of) the right words just not in the right order!!
The previous "personal weapon" of the British Army was called the SLR (an adaption of the widely used FN rifle) and was semi-automatic. To convert it to fully automatic you needed ... a matchstick. However since a semi-automatic weapon fires as quickly as you can pull the trigger, you don't gain much by firing fully auto, and you lose a lot of accuracy. Even firing into an area you don't need to aim there's still isn't much advantage to using fully automatic, plus you use up ammunition much more quickly. My main point being that this discussion about "bump stocks" is a distraction from the main point which is the availability of a range of weapons that are well capable of mass destruction before adding the extra capability that this modification might add.
