Based on a model that last ran in 1966, the Peppercorn class A1 Pacific locomotive should eventually run on mainline tracks, carrying passenger on charter trips, much like the Orient Express does today.

Full details can be found on the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust’s site.

The latter point is particularly interesting, as faster trains will undoubtedly attract more ecologically-focused passengers to switch from taking short-haul flights. This would previously have led to overcrowding, which could only have been overcome with longer trains, which in turn call for further infrastructure investment in the shape of longer platforms. That wouldn’t happen.

By running on standard tracks and working with existing platforms, the AGV can be slotted into existing fleet and track set-ups with little expense beyond the cost of the trains themselves.

It looks like the TGV’s days of being the darling of European rail travel could be finally coming to an end as the AGV achieves what even Spain’s AVE, and Germany’s ICE couldn’t do.

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This happens every year. The cardboard tickets they dole out don’t have the stamina to be taken out of a wallet six times a day (into the barriers at my local station, out again when I arrive at London, into the barriers on the tube and out then out again when I arrive at work before doing the whole thing again in reverse.

By about May it’s already worn out and needs replacing, and I’m lucky if I can get the replacement to run through what remains of the year.

So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been grovelling at the manual gates for the staff to let me through, and this morning I got a friendly, knowing smile from the guy letting me onto the tube.

‘My ticket is…,’ I started, but he laughed, swung open the door and said ‘yes, yes’.

He’d heard it all before.

Roll on proper Oyster cards for national rail.

The station in question is the restored St Pancras which, as the Times rightly points out, shames the Eurostar waiting area at the furthest end of the Channel Tunnel link. Gare du Nord itself is a beautiful building, with a wonderful interior, but from the glimpses I’ve seen of St Pancras so far, largely from the edges of boarded off platforms, it doesn’t compare.

Comments like this prove that the restoration was a gamble that paid off, as it would otherwise be hard to justify the £5.8bn cost of the link and terminus on the back of a 20-minute shorter journey alone. That’s doubly true when a trip on the Eurostar is, for many, as much a part of the whole Parisian experience as whatever they get up to once they’ve arrived.

The Times’ coverage of the Queen’s grand ribbon snipping can be found here.

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But that’s just the start of it. Dig around the Transport for London web site and you’ll come across its excellent Station Products Guide PDF (via Diamond Geezer), which specifies everything from the platform-end fences that stop you getting electrocuted, to the channels screwed onto the station ceilings to keep the cables out of the way.

It’s a mine of useless information. How else would you know that the numbers on the Underground’s digital clocks are designed for legibility at a ratio of one metre per 2mm of height, so that 10cm digits can be seen from 50m away? Or that internal station barriers are round or oval and 45mm in section so as to discourage litter and suspicious packages? Or indeed that staff sitting behind little ticket windows can pick from only six different messages for the LED boards above their heads? They’re controlled by a switch on the rear of the unit.

It’s the station managers’ equivalent of an Argos catalogue, and a real eye-opener for anyone who travels on the tube or bus each day.

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At the end of each week its busy-beaver staff will send you a text summarising all the delays on your route and make a batch of claims on your behalf, then pass the compensation back to you.

What do they get out of it? £1 for each weekly text sent. It is a business, after all.

What the payback will be like for most customers, I don’t know, but if the testimonials are to be believed it looks like it could quickly turn a tidy profit.

I’ve registered, so we’ll see how things go.

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Writer Jonathan Glancey is bowled over by it. And so he should be. I’ve been in there myself since the renovation - admittedly not onto the Eurostar platforms - and it’s an impressive piece of re-engineering for a station that was almost demolished in 1966 because planers considered it an ‘eyesore’. Fortunately it’s now Grade 1 listed, like Westminster Abbey and so largely safe from the workman’s club hammer.

Glancey writes:

It is hard to believe that all this might not have existed, as you walk into St Pancras today through brand new gothic doors and enter the station’s previously unseen undercroft, the former storage basement with its 800 Victorian iron pillars, where the Eurostar ticket-machines, check-in points and security controls are today, before riding long, silent escalators up to the trains basking beneath Barlow and Ordish’s glorious roof. This, the most adventurous and biggest roof of its kind for decades after it was built, now painted a fetching sky blue and flooded with daylight? This station, with its quarter-mile, 300kph trains, a huge cocktail bar, a branch of Foyles stocked with 20,000 titles, a smart Searcy’s restaurant and brasserie, independent coffee bars, floors covered in timber and stone rather than sticky British airport-style carpet, new gothic carvings, newly cast gothic door handles, and a nine-metre-high sculpture of lovers meeting under the station clock? How could anyone ever have thought of denying us this engineering aria, this architectural hymn?

Yes, flowery.

Much of what he says in his 2,699 words is neatly summarised elsewhere on the Guardian site in a neat gallery of 17 pictures of St Pancras through the ages, here.

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The system, where tickets are bought by mobile phone, should cut queues at ticket offices. Once purchased, travel details are displayed on the phone’s screen, to be scanned at the barrier or shown to an on-train inspector.

A spokeswoman talking to London Lite described the scheme as ‘completely secure’.

So it’s not entirely surprising to see that the announcement of Crossrail’s final go-ahead hasn’t been universally acclaimed. The service, which will link Shenfield in the east with Maidenhead in the west, and spurs running off to Heathrow and the Docklands, will be Europe’s largest civil engineering project since the digging of the Channel Tunnel. It’ll see a major new tunnel bored under London, several central underground stations upgraded as mainline rail termini, and places like Bond Street and Slough become an easy no-change commute from Essex.

24 trains will plough the east-west route every hour, with capacity for 160,000 passengers. In the words of the London Paper, ‘packed trains could be a thing of the past’ when the £16bn project, which will no doubt over-run, over-spend and end up opening 100% overdue and 100% over budget, finally opens some time after 2017.

But there are problems about which nobody seems to be talking. The Shenfield to Liverpool Street line is four tracks wide, with no room to expand. For much of its length it’s squeezed in between densely-packed urban housing, shops and office blocks, meaning the Crossrail trains, which will be metro services stopping off at pretty much every station, will have to run alongside and among the existing commuter services. How they’ll do this without either cutting current services or blocking the path of faster commuter trains has yet to be fully explained, at least in the popular media.

Then there’s the timescale. Crossrail was proposed in 1989, has taken 18 years to get fully funded and already cost £400m, yet it’ll be at least another year before the building work begins. That means much of it will be taking place at the same time as construction of the Olympic Park in Stratford, through which the route will run, inevitably leading to further delays, both in its construction, and to the services already using the lines.

Crossrail is an excellent idea that will do much for London, but the benefits for those who already use the lines on which it will run are negligible at best. Far better would be to invest in the infrastructure, build the necessary tunnels under London, and then allow the existing services to use them, rather that crowbar a new service into an already bursting commuter system.

Unfortunately, to do that, it would probably be necessary to crate a new super-operator that would run services right across the London commuter belt, taking over from the present operators. It would be a fabulously lucrative, and so eye-wateringly expensive franchise to win. But it would probably also give one single operator far more power than is good. Perhaps that’s why we’re destined to see dedicated Crossrail trains clogging up our crowded suburban lines still further.

So whether in the future you’ll be a Crossrail rider, or cross rail rider will seemingly be determined by whether or not you use a future Crossrail line already.

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Just two minutes after leaving St Pancras, the train enters the beginning of what will be 19 miles of tunnel along the route. First come the two parallel tunnels, divided by a new station at Stratford in east London.These ‘twin bore’ tunnels pass under 2,600 properties, seven miles of surface railway, 12 existing tunnels - including four London Underground stations - and 600 gas, water and sewage pipelines. For most of the way, engineers had to send ahead 10 pumps to remove millions of gallons of water in front of the tunnellers. The misleadingly named Thanet Sands were so hard the stretch wore out six £10m boring machines. Special vents will allow excess pressure to escape from the tunnels so the trains can go at 140mph.

See the full story here.Technorati Tags:eurostar