Led rides to/from RideLondon FreeCycle - help needed.

We are looking for marshals, back stops, and ride leaders for led rides to/from the central London circuit of RideLondon FreeCycle on Saturday 9 August. Please consider helping out in this way.

In particular we need someone to lead a ride back to Barking Station from Tower Hill at 3pm. This needs to be someone who has experience of leading, marshalling, or back stopping rides and who is a strong cyclist. Also s/he needs to know the route (which she can choose) well.

The back stop needs to be a strong rider as s/he may need to "catch up" with the leader, though usually the job involves staying behind the slowest rider.

Marshals need to be assertive riders who are adept at keeping the group together by facilitating crossing of roads and encouraging less confident riders to keep together with the group.

Useful / interesting railway websites

Depends what you mean by useful, I suppose, but here goes. Some sites have been mentioned here before, but here they are together:

www.realtimetrains.co.uk

http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/maps/areas/swml/1 - is a link to the first of a series of 6 diagrammatic real time train information. There are no links to it on the main page and the levels of folders aren't accessible, but there are links to pages 2-6 on this page itself.

www.brtimes.com

www.brfares.com - see also http://data.atoc.org/member-area (previous blog post explains).

www.opentraintimes.com previously metioned here has closed down, according to Barry Doe, but was working when I tested during writing this.

trains.im (Open National Rail times, maps and stats).

Thanks to Barry Doe and Rail magazine - p48 of issue 746 - for the information.

How to download the free National Rail fares database

Barry Doe explains in Rail Magazine, issue 749 (28 May - 10 June 2014) page 42. Go to http://data.atoc.org/member-area and create yourself an account. The download to go for is the Avantix fares database.

Please don't ask me for support doing this - I'm just passing on the info.

Incomplete journeys on Oyster - swiping out and in mid journey.

Last month I travelled from Holborn to Barking changing at Bank and Limehouse (where one has to swipe out of the system and back in again to change between DLR and c2c). A couple of days ago I logged in to my Oyster account, and an incomplete journey was flagged up -  a very useful feature.

I looked in my diary, and saw that I had been to Holborn that day, so I supplied Holborn as the missing swipe. However, when I went to the journey history, it transpired that the missing swipe was the one at Limehouse c2c, so now I have a journey from Holborn to Limehouse and amother journey from Holborn to Barking.

Now it seems to me that Oyster should be able to work out the journey I actually took from the times, or make an assumption that as I live in Barking, and had travelled from Barking to Holborn, that my return journey was Holborn to Barking. Maybe this is a refinement that is on the cards.

In the meantime, this could be fixed by the way the Oyster website works. I can't reproduce the presentation of the problem  so I don't know what options I had, but I think that the user should be taken to the journey history to assess the missing swipes there.

LCC Space for cycling campaign 2014 - Parsloes Park at Ivy Walk

Many of the points I raised at our meeting regarding this campaign on 6/2/14 are on my list of access issues that I have been maintaining sporadically over many years. In some cases I have a photo to illustrate the issue. I saw this entrance to Parsloes Park last Autumn and I'm posting the photo here largely for the record.

Bastable Avenue

The controversy about the banned turn onto Bastable Avenue (see http://stibasa.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/special-pleading-at-thames-view.html) has been raised again (see https://www.streetlife.com/conversation/3fyzbtj7n9be6/).

I went and took photos on 4/9/12 to see for myself what all the fuss was about, but since then some of the signs shown here have been removed

The writer on streetlife says that " there is only one sign on the wrong side of the road [sc: and it is on the wrong side of the road] which [sc: and it] is obscured at one point by a traffic light and also by high sided vehicles. You would not look on the left hand side of the road to turn right".

As the photo below shows there were 3 sets signs on the near side (where signs always are). The middle set had the CCTV warning sign. The second photo shows the furthest away of those three from a bit closer.

Bikes now allowed on Docklands Light Railway (off-peak)

http://road.cc/content/news/108510-bikes-be-carried-docklands-light-railway-trains

Following a (successful, obviously!) trial last summer, bikes will now be allowed on DLR trains off peak. One of the best things about this is that it opens up two river crossings to cyclists.