Tuesday 3 August 2021

4 solid walls.

Liverpool is a city built on 4 solid walls, to be precise 4 solid walls of silence. The one you will hear about most of is the general one where people don't help the police doesn't matter how shit the crooks make your life, don't help the police, Brian Ashton is a strong exponent of this.

The second one is in the police, never grass up your colleagues no matter what they have done, by all means, give them nicknames like "The Rapist" and when they get caught pretend they were never really police anyway.

In LCC you also never grass up your colleagu, no matter how badly they treat the public and no matter how much they lie, you can also rely on large numbers of cops to help with this one as you are all in public service. Remember as a council staff member it is your city and you get to call the shots.

The final one is the one in the Echo when you can be called by a journo from the Echo and have all sorts of wild allegations angrily thrown at you. When you point out some of the simple factual errors like your place of birth and schooling they get more hesitant as it becomes clear they have been fed a pack of nonsense by someone. Do they apologise for doing someone's dirty work and help get to the bottom of what has caused this abuse, of course not, they just hang up, but that's all in a days work.
When you complain to the editor one Al Machray, he repeats some other rubbish angrily and surprise surprise can't find any record of your number being called and insist it didn't happen.

You can rely on the likes of the other Al's at the echo, together with the Gow's to bring things up every so often just to keep stirring.

If the people of Liverpool had any sense they'd boycott the Echo as much as they do the Sun.

If there is a roof on this room it's provided by the security guards, eager to please anyone in power who might overlook their dodgy behaviour.


Monday 2 August 2021

Simply the Worst

This route is 5:30 minutes with no WiFi or power and to make matters worse it is on the slowest possible route. Well equal slowest but you have to go via Lincoln to get to the same time

Just to given an idea of how appalling this route is I worked out all the alternatives which turn out to be something like.



or in the real world.

Note the lines in black on the map below, no longer exist but would make the journey quicker. The red bypass under Derby has no passenger services so all timings involve 5 minutes turn around in Derby, there was a bit of track to allow a turn east while passing through Derby north but that has gone.

                                                       

After messing around with the National Rail route planner and discovering it is very buggy and very limited and totally unfriendly I got these timings. These are for the fastest journeys between various points, you cannot make these journeys at this speed now because you'd have long gaps waiting for connections. 

 The UK rail system is now so messed up you cannot do a lot of the routes without multiple tickets. By a strange fluke, the slowest route I could find has exactly the same time as the current direct route and in order to do that, I had to go via Lincoln, at least no reversing at Sheffield. The current route is the slowest possible route. If the route through Bakewell ever reopens that will be physically the shortest but unlikely the fastest.

Another possible route would be Liverpool->Chester->Crewe using the Halton curve. that would add about 35 minutes to the Liverpeel Crewe section.

The British Rail Class 755 would seem ideally suited to the journey, the current trains are British_Rail_Class_158.

CrossCountry would be the ideal operator for this.