Random Writings

Have a listen to this track, Spitfire, by the retrotastic Public Service Broadcasting. Chances are that if you’re white, male and British (and possibly even if you’re not) that the stirring rhythm and clipped narration conjures up the romantic image of the Spitfire aircraft “wheeling and banking” in the bright blue skies over Beachy Head. We see the young pilot in his flying helmet and RAF moustache – “Hunter Leader, bandits approaching!” -and gripping his flight controls before unleashing a hail of bullets.

I wrote that after listening to the track without having seen the video (brilliantly recut from the 1942 film The First of the Few) and was surprised as to exactly how closely my mental images match what appears.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. World War II has already become our “founding myth”, our “war of independence”, part of our national identity. It seems as if it’s become ever more popular in recent years – the “austerity” calls of the post-2007 politicians harking back to it all the more loudly. Why? Mitch Benn put his finger on it for me in his show “the 37th Beatle” – he says that his generation, born in the Seventies, have had to put up with all their older relatives saying how great the Sixties were, and having an overwhelming sense of missing out. It suddenly struck me that this almost certainly applies to the Baby Boomer generation in the UK – probably uniquely – because of the UK’s particular wartime experience. These children, born in the 40s and 50s, would have been brought up being told how their parents’ generation had saved the world from fascism, and how they ought to be respectful and grateful for that. They also will have watched the endless romanticisations of WWII produced once the rawness of the truth was leached away by nostalgia – The Dam Busters (1955), The Great Escape (1963), 633 Squadron (1964) and so on – and so their WWII is the technicolor Hollywood version, where the good guys are handsome and the bad guys wore black hats. Of course, this generation will have had to have kept quiet about the war whilst their parents were alive, but now that generation has mostly gone off into the sunset, the Boomers are free to bring out their romantic views of The War (it’s always The War to them) without fear of rebuke. They can tell you details of tank battles, name strategic bridges and reel of the names of battleships destroyed. They weren’t even born at the time in many cases! I was born in 1980, but I don’t go on about the Falklands War (or the Miner’s Strike) because I’m too young to remember it. But every stately home and preserved steam railway has a WWII weekend now – people dress up and pretend – which still strikes me as pretty tasteless. Can you imagine attending a Bosnia, Iraq or Falklands themed event as a jolly family outing in twenty or thirty years from now?
What’s worse is that this romantic war-fauxstalgia affects politics, too. It plants the idea of Plucky Britain Stands Alone in the hearts of its people – which is dangerous rubbish of the worst kind. Yes, we got into the war before the Americans did. But don’t forget that a goodly fraction of the moustachioed pilots in the Battle of Britain were Polish, and that infantrymen came from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Australia and New Zealand. But of course, in the films, they’re all airbrushed out – and so our Stands Alone myth fuels cheap populist isolationism – a refusal to engage with the rest of Europe and a reluctance to realise that so much of what was taken for granted in Britain at the time was based on the system of Empire Trade that ensured the high value manufactured goods were Made in Britain using raw materials shipped in from the colonised countries.

It worries me that this war romanticism will take us out of a close engagement with our European neighbours, out of the EU and out of relevance to the 21st century. Spitfires will not save us this time.

(and in reply to the headline, Nigel Farage is surprisingly young – born in 1964, the year “633 Squadron” came out…)

Two recent articles in the news have poked me into writing a bit more about Transmanche Metro, the long-talked-about scheme to allow people in the Pas de Calais region of north-east France to commute to Kent and London via the Channel Tunnel. The PdC has quite an unemployment problem, and today’s Guardian points out that a number of people already commute daily via the Eurotunnel car shuttle service. The Opale Link consortium has argued for a “local train” to Ashford, Ebbsfleet and London from Calais, and with the support of Kent County Council has tried to lobby Eurostar into providing a better service. Eurostar, of course, is not remotely interested (it only serves Ashford four times a day each way anyway) as its main business is shifting people between the cities of London, Paris and Brussels.

Eurostar no longer technically has a monopoly on passenger services through the Channel Tunnel, and so it’s theoretically possible for someone else to operate a passenger service. They’d have to buy train paths from Eurotunnel (not too difficult, there’s apparently still spare capacity) and also acquire running rights on either HS1 (preferably) or the classic lines. Southeastern, the incumbent Kent operator, is an obvious candidate, not least because they’re already operating a high speed service to Ashford via HS1. Whoever it is would also have to acquire a train suitable for use in the Channel Tunnel, which has its own safety regulations (e.g. – the trains have to be at least 300m long so that wherever they stop one coach will be near a cross-passage to the service tunnel) and this is likely to be one of the biggest headaches unless they can get hold of a few of the ex-Eurostar sets that were intended for UK Regional Eurostar services that are now being operated by SNCF. Southeastern’s existing Hitachi-built high speed trains are not suitable due to being too short and not having the necessary fireproofing.

The other big headache will be dealing with the onerous “Fortress UK” policies on immigration and security. Eurostar are already having a fair few issues with this, and have just announced that their new Marseille-London service will stop for nearly two hours in Lille in order to complete border formalities! This is totally ridiculous, but the odds of getting it changed are slim. So, I suggest a partial workaround. The Transmanche Metro would use ex-Regional Eurostar trainsets, as noted above, and would terminate at Calais-Frethun station, which is already a border control post. Local trains would be timed to connect sensibly and allow time for border formalities. London-bound services would call at Ashford, Ebbsfleet and Stratford International stations, and would be considered as UK domestic train services and not subject to any additional border control (since all this would have been done in Calais). The return journey would involve a complete de-train at Ashford for Calais-bound passengers to have their passports checked and baggage x-rayed. If the x-raying could be waived, the border control could then be done on the train whilst standing at Ashford station, potentially with the doors locked so as to prevent anyone boarding after the inspectors have checked each coach.

I’d like to see it happen, but I doubt it ever will, more’s the pity.

I discovered last week that Govia have updated their website with a lot more detail about their plans for the Thameslink Southern Great Northern franchise. They take over the franchise on 13th September – so we have nine weeks left of First Capital Connect before the changeover. Govia are known for not stamping their name all over the companies they own, and so they’ve chosen to use relatively simple brand names for the new franchise. These are:

• Thameslink
• Great Northern
• Gatwick Express
• Southern

Here in Cambridge, we can expect our trains to be branded “Great Northern” from September, but not a lot else will change immediately. Govia have very sensibly chosen not to try and make any major changes in the first year of the franchise, and a lot of the enabling work for future changes will still be in progress. They are planning to shake the fares up a bit, introducing cheaper advance-purchase fares, so there’s a possibility that they might appear in the first year.

One year on – September 2015 – they intend to have franchise-wide smart ticketing. This means an ITSO-type smartcard which can be loaded with pre-purchased tickets rather than having to use paper tickets. For people like me who buy daily or weekly tickets depending on what they’re doing that week, this’ll be a big step forward – buy your ticket from your computer or phone before leaving the house, then just go straight to the ticket gates, no need to queue for a machine. ITSO will not (initially) work like the Oyster PAYG system, though they hint that they would like to try and make that happen!

For my London friends, you will be pleased to know that they plan to extend the Oyster PAYG system well beyond Greater London, so that you can use Oyster to pay for your train journey to Gatwick or Luton Airports and to stations as far north as Welwyn Garden City.

In the spring of 2016 we will start to see a bigger change, as services will switch to being operated by different types of train. The fast Cambridge trains and the King’s Lynn trains will be operated by Class 377 sets that will be transferred from Southern. These are relatively new trains (built in batches from 2003-present) whereas the existing Class 365s date from the mid-1990s. The 377s are very similar to the 379s being operated by Abellio Greater Anglia on services to Liverpool Street – they have air conditioning and may well have power sockets and wifi. Those of us who use the slower trains are actually getting brand new trains during 2016 – the Siemens-built Class 700s will be introduced, replacing the existing 1980s-built stock. However, these are relatively spartan inside as they’re designed to handle massive numbers of passengers when passing through central London, so we’ll see how comfortable they are!

Once May 2017 comes around, the King’s Lynn services will become half-hourly. Finally, in May 2018, Cambridge will get through services on the Thameslink route – so the stopping trains will serve St Pancras rather than King’s Cross – and trains will run through to Gatwick and Brighton. The full service won’t be implemented until December 2018, giving time for the new systems to bed in. Govia promise “a range of stopping patterns” on the four trains an hour to serve Cambridge – so there’s a good chance of getting additional trains serving the smaller stations on the Cambridge-Hitchin line. Royston will almost certainly benefit from having another fastish train to London and Cambridge.

We went to Aachen in Germany for a long weekend, and returned on Tuesday night. This involved taking the last Eurostar train back from Brussels, which leaves at 1952 each weeknight, calling at Lille Europe, Calais-Frethun, Ebbsfleet and London St Pancras. Having used this route before in 2012 I was expecting to have to deal with quite a lot of border-control paranoia associated with the “Lille Loophole” – which involved passengers buying tickets on Eurostar from Brussels to Lille, allowing them to board the Eurostar without having passed UK border control, and then remaining on the train at Lille and continuing to the UK. The UKBA imposed quite unnecessarily draconian restrictions on all other Eurostar passengers arriving in London on trains that had called at Lille (see Jon Worth’s blogpost) by checking everyone’s passports on arrival, causing a 20-30 minute delay!

I’m pleased to report that despite having taken one of the trains (9161) that Jon identifies as a “loophole” train, we were not subject to additional border control in London. There was a UKBA agent at the arrivals desk, but she appeared to be pulling aside a few randoms for extra checks, and we were able to get out of St Pancras within minutes (in fact, we managed to make our 15-minute connection with a Cambridge train from neighbouring King’s Cross). I think that Eurostar, the UKBA and the Belgian authorities have finally managed to find a way around the problem.

Firstly, as of November 2013 (6 months after Jon’s post), Eurostar have reconfigured their arrangements at Brussels-Midi. Lille and Calais-Frethun passengers no longer use the same check-in as UK-bound passengers, and the famous “Lille Corridor” that bypassed the UK border control has now been locked shut. Instead, they are directed to a new “Eurostar intra-Schengen” terminal, which is upstairs, adjacent to the Eurostar arrivals hall. The SNCB news page announcing the change gives several useful clues about what’s going on:

It was recently announced that GoVia have been awarded the new Thameslink Southern Great Northern (TSGN) rail franchise, with the new management taking over in September 2014. GoVia is a consortium of the British firm GoAhead (mostly an operator of buses) and the French firm Keolis, which is part of the state-owned rail operator SNCF. They will take over the services currently run by First Capital Connect, some operated by Southeastern, and then integrate all the services operated by Southern from 2015 onwards. GoVia have promised that they will resurrect the “Thameslink” brand for this extensive network.

Looking at this mostly from a Cambridge perspective, a number of interesting service improvements are promised for our route:

• firstly, the ongoing refresh of the Class 365 trains will continue over the summer, so the new operator should have a newly-refurbished fleet of trains on the fast services to Cambridge and King’s Lynn
• the current hourly service to King’s Lynn will become half-hourly from May 2o17 (once the junction improvements in Ely have been completed)
• the Cambridge-Kings Cross expresses will be retimed to get the journey time down below 50 minutes again (this is probably as a result of needing less margin now that the Hitchin flyover is open)
• new trains (the Siemens Class 700) will be introduced

Once the Thameslink Programme is complete in 2018, there’ll be quite a big change to the timetable. The DfT and the Thameslink Programme have both published maps that show services we can expect in four years time – now, there’s always a risk that they might be changed again in that time, but it’s worth having a look now anyway.

Promises, promises

So, the DfT map promises (mouse over “Cambridge”) that Cambridge will have “six trains an hour to and from central London off-peak” from 2018. Cambridge currently has four trains an hour to London off-peak: two non-stop (one of which has come from King’s Lynn), one semi-fast (calling at Royston, Letchworth etc) and one slow one that serves all the stations between Cambridge and Hitchin and then major stations into London. So, what’s going to happen to the existing services, and what new services will we get?

Helpfully, there’s a clue in the map published by the Thameslink Programme, which shows how trains will be routed through the “Thameslink Core” (between St Pancras and Blackfriars) linking up destinations north and south of London. Each line on the map represents two trains per hour each way (so a half-hourly service, approximately), and two lines are shown as serving Cambridge – making four Thameslink services every hour! The grey line on the map shows a Cambridge to Brighton service, which will also serve Gatwick Airport. The red line shows another Cambridge service serving, err, Tattenham Corner? Really? I used to commute from Croydon to Kingswood on the Tattenham Corner branch – it’s a popular commuter route but by no means a major destination in its own right. Tattenham Corner station itself is really only there to serve Epsom racecourse anyway! However, the reason for doing the Thameslink upgrade is to get more line capacity by reducing the congestion caused at major stations by terminating trains in central London – and the Tattenham Corner off-peak trains currently terminate at London Bridge.

Fast trains to Gatwick and Brighton

Now, my hunch is that the Cambridge-Brighton service will take over the existing stops and timings of the Cambridge semi-fast service, except that it’ll run half-hourly instead of hourly. It currently takes an hour for this service to reach Kings Cross, and likewise an hour for the limited-stop service from London Bridge to Brighton. Given 20 minutes to transit through London and 20 minutes to turn the train round at each end, that makes a nice neat 3 hour cycle – so the half hourly service can be fulfilled using six trains.

Slow trains to Tattenham Corner

I suspect that the Cambridge-Tattenham Corner service will take over the existing Cambridge “slow” train, which takes 90 minutes to reach London. London Bridge to Tattenham Corner services currently take 50 minutes, so with the 20 minute transit time through London that makes 2 hours 40 minutes. Assuming a ten minute turnaround at each end also gives a 3 hour cycle – six trains again would give a half hourly service. If this happens, this’ll be a big step forward for the smaller stations on the Cambridge branch – they’ll get twice as good a service as they get at present.

So, here’s your answer: six trains an hour – two that start from King’s Cross,  run non-stop to Cambridge and continue to King’s Lynn; two that start from Brighton and call at major stations only to Cambridge; and two from Tattenham Corner serving all the local stations.

New trains too

Now, the Thameslink services are all going to be operated by the new Class 700 trains, which will come as an eight-car and a twelve-car version. These trains have big walk-through connections between coaches, so they won’t be coupled and uncoupled the way that our existing trains are. Since the small stations on the Cambridge and Tattenham Corner branches have 8-car platforms, it would seem likely that our stopping services will see the existing Class 317 and Class 321 trains (dating from the late 80s) phased out and replaced with the new Class 700s. I suspect that the old trains might find their way to newly electrified lines in the north-west of England or on Great Western suburban services in the short term. Siemens are supposed to be delivering the new trains from 2016 onwards, so it’s likely that we’ll start to see them operating our existing services before the Thameslink services begin.

The King’s Lynn trains are also due to be replaced with Hitachi-built Class 801 trains eventually – these should start to appear in 2018 as well.

One unresolved question

As yet, we don’t know exactly which services will call at the new Cambridge Science Park station. Cambridgeshire Council’s consultation suggests that all the services currently using the Cambridge-Ely line will call at the new station (i.e. the King’s Lynn trains, the Birmingham-Stansted train, and the Ely-Liverpool St trains), plus one “semi-fast” service currently terminating at Cambridge station will be moved up to terminate at the bay platform in the new station. On that basis it seems likely that some or all of the Thameslink trains will serve the new station – given that it has only one bay platform I might be tempted to suggest that two out of the four Thameslink trains will call there – most likely the faster Brighton services as they have a bit more turnaround margin and will give the promised “semi-fast” service. Let’s wait and see!

If you’re dealing with a bank, building society or other such financial services provider, you’ll inevitably have to hand over some documents to prove your identity and address. The Money Laundering regulations require such institutions to carry out checks on the identity of people opening new accounts – and with good reason. However, the regulations don’t specify exactly how this should be done. Typically, you’re asked to produce some sort of document that links your photograph to your full name – such as a passport – and some sort of proof of your home address, such as a printed utility bill or bank statement. However, the documents accepted by each bank vary considerably! Of course, we increasingly bank online now, and so this means that a new account opened online inevitably results in a letter from the said bank saying “we need to see these documents, but don’t send the originals in the post”. They usually provide you the option to provide a “certified copy” in lieu of the original. However, no-one can agree on exactly who can certify a document, and how they should do it. I have in front of me, by way of example, two letters from two different institutions asking for certified copies.

Post Office Savings (aka Bank of Ireland UK) will accept a tax coding notice from HMRC as proof of ID (which is useful, and unusual), but if you send a photocopy of a passport or driving licence it must be certified by a “legal professional, accountant, bank official or post office clerk”. They must “sign and print their name, specify the date, affix an official stamp or write their business address and contact details and write or stamp the words Certified Original Sighted or words to that effect”.

Tesco Bank (aka RBS), by way of comparison, won’t accept HMRC correspondence as proof of ID or even as proof of address – but they will accept certified copies by “a bank, a post office clerk, a senior civil servant, a police officer, a member of the judiciary, a lawyer, solicitor or notary public, an accountant, an Authorised Financial Intermediary, a Doctor (as long as you’re one of their patients), a Teacher (with whom you have a pre-existing relationship), a local councillor, MP, AM, MEP or MSP, an official of an embassy, consulate or high commission issuing a passport of origin.” That’s a much longer list of people (though with some odd caveats), but their certification is more onerous – they must:

• add the words “original seen and copy provides a good likeness of the individual”
• record their full name, date, signature and official stamp (if they have one)
• Record their business address (or personal address if they don’t have a business address)
• Record their professional qualifications and professional body membership number
• Record their contact details (I presume this means a phone number or email address)

This is clearly quite barking mad, as it means every time I open a new bank account I have to get a new photocopy certified with the right form of words and with a person deemed acceptable by the bank in question. The Post Office will certify documents (they charge £7 to do up to three different documents) but they have a standard form of words and I’ve often struggled to persuade the clerk that they need to use the form of words specified by the bank. Quite often, you get a little leaflet from the British Bankers’ Association explaining the need for ID documents – given that the BBA can get a standard leaflet together, why can’t they get their members to agree on a standard list of “suitable people” and a standard form of words for a certified photocopy? I might think that this was the sort of restrictive practice designed to discourage people from changing their bank account too often…

Of course, the rise and rise of online banking, online council tax payments and so on means that the old paper “proofs” are starting to go away. I know that there is a digital proof-of-ID scheme being developed by the government, but I fear that’ll go the way of all government IT projects. We could start by making the paper process less irksome!

I have to go to Coventry in a few weeks to go to a trade fair. I looked up the rail fares and discovered that they can be astonishingly cheap – typically around £12 each way, provided that you book in advance. However, some of these fares take you via London and therefore provide for a cost-effective way to travel to London at peak times if you can book in advance. Simply search for fares from Cambridge to Coventry and specify “via London King’s Cross”, and you’ll often find you can travel on the 0715 or 0815 to Kings Cross for £12, and likewise return on the 1745 or 1843 for £12, which would normally attract a full fare of £38.60 return, saving you £12.60. You do have to travel on those specific trains though! If you have a nationally-valid railcard (i.e. not a Network Card) you can get a third off the already-discounted price, too. The trick also works in First Class, where you can pay £34 each way on that same routeing.

If the Coventry fares have sold out, you can also try booking to Rugby, which is technically a different ticket but is charged at the same price.

Last week’s Rail Magazine has a big feature on rail electrification projects in England, concentrating mostly on the “Electric Spine” project to provide an electric route between the Midlands and south Yorkshire and Southampton Docks. The article explains that there is programme funding for electrification work over at least a decade, and that it’s likely that various additional “infill” electrification projects will happen alongside the main “spine” that was announced in 2012. Network Rail have been asked to look at “connectivity to ports and airports” in general, and specifically to consider an electric route between Felixtowe and the West Midlands. This is exciting from a Cambridge perspective because it offers the prospect of much-improved connectivity across the Fens – there’s potential for electric services between Ely and Ipswich, as well as an all-electric service from Ely to Peterborough via March. The latter will make the Cambridge route into an electrified loop off the East Coast Main Line, which opens up potential for direct electric services between Cambridge and North East England.

The article also mentions the Oxford-Bletchley-Bedford East West Rail project, saying that the priority is to open the Oxford-Bletchley section in the spring of 2019 – suggesting that the EWR project is either already running late or will open in 2017 as planned with a more limited diesel-powered service. The Bedford-Bletchley electrification is apparently proving quite challenging and may well be put back beyond 2019. Likewise, the Oxford-Coventry electrification is likely to take place well after 2019 as it’s deemed less of a priority.

Whilst the delays to EWR are a little demoralising, I’m encouraged that Network Rail are being encouraged to look at electrification a lot more widely, and that opens up a lot of new opportunities for rail services.

This is mostly for my own future reference, but I reckoned that it might be useful to other people in Cambridge. How much does it cost to go to London by train? Well, that depends – I was quite taken aback with the sheer Byzantine complexity of all the different prices and rules! Anyway, here are the ones I use most commonly:

Weekday flexible off-peak day returns:

• To Kings Cross (50 minute journey time),  £23.70 return. With Network Railcard discount: £15.65
• To Liverpool Street (1hr 20 journey time), £16 return. With Network Railcard discount: £13.00 (minimum fare applies)
• To Kings Cross with an all-zones travelcard, £30.90 return. With Network Railcard discount: £20.40
• To Liverpool St with an all-zones travelcard, £23.50 return. With Network Railcard discount £15.50

Weekend flexible super-off-peak day returns:

• Either route, £16 return. With railcard discount: £10.55
• Either route with travelcard, £22 return. With railcard discount: £14.50

Advance Fares (cheapest single journey to London)

You must book online via Greater Anglia for these. They cost £6 or £8 (depending on availability) each way, to Liverpool St only and are restricted to specific trains.

Anytime (Peak) fares:

• Kings Cross return, £38.60
• Liverpool Street return, £35.20
• Either route with all-zones Travelcard, £48.60

A more detailed explanation follows…

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I’m doing some Linux-based server development at the moment, but my work machine runs Windows 7. I reckoned the best way to do this was to run a Linux VM, and a friend put me on to Vagrant, which is a crossplatform tool for managing VMs. Put simply, Vagrant allows you to build a VM according to a script, so that your whole build environment can be created repeatably on demand. This is really useful when a colleague joins your project, since you don’t have to spend a whole day remembering all the things you installed to make your build environment, and debugging issues with it not working on their machine.

Vagrant comes from the world of *nix, so it’s command-line driven and (as ever) such software doesn’t always play nicely with Linux. Here’s what I did to get it working on Windows 7.

• Download and install Vagrant from www.vagrantup.com

• Download and install VirtualBox from www.virtualbox.org

• Don’t bother getting any guest OSs for VirtualBox at this stage.

Vagrant needs an SSH client to work properly, and Windows doesn’t include one by default. It suggests using Cygwin, MinGW or git to provide one. I chose to use MinGW, which is a minimal set of tools to make Windows behave a lot more like a GNU system.

MinGW has a package-based installer – you download the installer, tell it which packages you want, and then it downloads and installs them for you.

So:

• get the latest MinGW installer from https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/latest/download and then hit “Install” when it runs.
• Keep the default installation directory (C:\MinGW) because like nearly all *nix tools, MinGW hates filepaths with spaces in. Make sure “install graphical user interface” remains ticked.
• The installer should then open the package manager GUI (“MinGW Installation Manager”.
• Go to Installation->Update Catalogue to ensure you have the latest package list.
• Close the update dialogue box when it has finished.
• Under “basic setup”, click on the checkbox next to msys-base and choose “Mark for installation”. Do the same for mingw32-base and mingw-gcc-g++.
• Now go to “All packages” and scroll down to “msys-openssh”. Find the “bin” class and again mark for installation.
• Finally, go to Installation->Apply Changes, and the system will download and install everything you need.

Finally finally, you need to alter that PATH environment variable so that Vagrant can find the ssh client:

• Go to Control Panel->System And Security->System->Advanced System Settings and on the Advanced tab click “Environment Variables”.
• Under “System Variables” scroll down to “Path” and click “Edit”.
• The Variable Value box will be too small to contain the values, so carefully press your End key and add ;C:\MinGW\MSYS\1.0\bin to the end of the path. Note the semicolon that separates each individual path.
• Having done that, close all the dialogue boxes and get a command prompt window. Follow the Vagrant introductory tutorial, it should all work now!