Virgin Trains Luggage collection/delivery service - Bag Magic

See www.virgintrains.com/bagmagic.

Virgin Trains has started a bag collection/delivery service called Bag Magic. For £9.99 a bag weighing up to 30kg can be collected from your home on Mon-Fri and delivered to your final address the next day. The price is £16.99 for two bags.

At weekends the charge is £8 (1 bag) or £14 (2 bags) but the weight limit is 20kg and you will need to take the bag to a collection point and collect it from one, too, and there's a size limit of 38 x 38 x 64cm.

Let's hope other companies will also offer this system which was universal at one time back in British Rail days.

Thanks to Barry Doe / Rail Magazine issue 763 for the information.

Cheapest Gold Cards

According to fares supremo Barry Doe, in Rail Magazine issues 761 and 763, the cheapest Gold Card - £108 at current prices - will be Lichfield Trent Valley to/from City. The former cheapest Gold Card was Ryde St Johns Road to/from Ryde Esplanade on the Isle of Wight. This now costs £164, but, if bought at a South West Trains station, it (and I assume any South West Trains Gold Card) entitles the holder to 6 free South West trains tickets in the year. This may save you more than the £56 difference in price from the Lichfield one.

The discounts obtainable with a Gold Card, which change from 2015, are explained here:http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/ticket_types/46573.aspx

Train ticket splitting websites - save £ on train fares

Thanks to A to B magazine for pointing out https://www.splitticketing.com/ and https://raileasy.trainsplit.com/. (These are connected sites: the second can be reached via the "Need more options?" link on the first.)

The major breakthrough is that these sites can deal with more types of tickets, and you can buy tickets directly on them. The earlier sites were good for finding a split point, but then you needed to go off to another site to try out the splits on cheaper ticket types, and buy tickets.

My earlier posts on the subject are here http://stibasa.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/tickety-split-improved-version.html and here http://stibasa.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/split-train-tickets-and-save-money.html.

You can read up on the pros and cons of ticket splitting in A to B Issue 105 or on the above mentioned sites, but the sense of ticket splitting is that you buy several tickets for a journey, costing less in total than a ticket for the whole journey, whilst travelling on exactly the same train(s). The websites work this out for you (the train has to stop where your tickets are for) and the savings can be very large.

History in the making as Cullen Bridge joins Dagenham to Elm Park

Today I went to see a new pedestrian/cycling bridge being lowered into position across the R Beam, nr Western Avenue Dagenham, joining Beam Valley Country Park with Bretons Outdoor Recreation Centre. The bridge should be ready for use in about 3-4 weeks time - marki it on your maps now - and the formal opening will be on 28 April 2015, which is the 80th birthday of veteran walking campaigner Michael Cullen, who has doggedly campaigned for a bridge in this vicinity for many years.

The bridge is a Sustrans project funded by TfL. Some photos and moving pictures I took are here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/105158567856821703505/CullenBridge20141020

Times of Hammersmith & City Line Trains from platform 3 at Barking Station

This photo shows the poster at the top of the stairs to platform 6 at Barking Station. It explains that most H&C trains depart from platform 6 and gives the exceptions that depart from platform 3 (44 of them on weekdays).
 ---

Here is a transcription which you may like to copy and file fro reference:

Mo-Fr:

0611 0628 0650 0709 0748 0806 0828 0845 0857 0917 0925 0934 0946 0957 1005

1545 1555 1605 1617 1626 1637 1645 1656 1706 1716 1725 1735 1746 1755 1805 1814 1826 1835 1846 1856 1906 1915 1925 1935 1945 2344 2354 0005

Sat: 0606 0630 2345

Sun: 0641 - 0735 plat 6
0745 onwards plat 3

---
What the poster doesn't show is the times of District Line trains from platform 3 - I have seen someone making her way to platform 3 to catch what I assume she thought was an H&C. It was the wrong type of train for the H&C line, but a lot of people don't know the difference, and anyway the District line will soon be operated by S-stock trains like the H&C, so the train's appearance will be no indication.

The "changes" were, I've been told, caused by the introduction of the new S-stock trains.  It's bad practice that this poster is undated (at least as displayed) and it would be useful if it were available on line. I have yet to check whether the other locations that showed the previous version of this poster have this one, which I assume to be the latest.

TfL say that they do intend to add platform numbers to their journey planner, but this is a long way down the line. In the mean time, if you really want to know full details, you can plough through the working timetables at http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/working-timetables.


The information provided about Sunday is not terribly helpful, as it doesn't give the times of departures from platform 3, so we still don't know whether to set off down there or not.

If/when the Barking & Gospel Oak Line service is extended onto the Tilbury loop, it will use platforms 7/8. This would free up platform 1, which could conceivably be used for Underground services terminating at Barking.

Even so, what we need is a proper train describer just like the c2c, B&GO and other Underground platforms have, giving dynamic information.

Myth of new trains on Barking & Gospel Oak Line

Apparently even London Overground staff are saying that there will be new trains on the line next year. They are mistaken *, as are the public address announcements saying the same thing. There won't be new trains on the B&GO next year, and here's why:-

1) Any new trains' engines would have to comply with the latest emissions regulations (stage 3b). The Class 172's (the current train type in use) engine and (possibly) exhaust design would need changing to make it stage 3b compliant. This would  be difficult - and probably prohibitively expensive for the small number of vehicles required for the B&GO - but not impossible.

2) (1) is not the main reason for not purchasing more diesel trains. If electrification - the obvious answer for the line - comes before any new / existing diesel trains have recovered their cost from leasing fees, Angel Trains, the company that owns them would have to lease them in a market in which much cheaper and more efficient older units will still be available. (These are unhindered by new emissions regulations - they are not retrospective; some diesel locos are being refurbished and brought back into service for the same reasons.) New diesel trains would give a poor return on investment, in other words. NB: The trains are leased to LOROL, not TfL.

3) Adding additional (unpowered) carriages to existing diesel  trains would not only be technically difficult (they are not designed for it) but would slow the trains down (reduce their power-to-weight ration) below the standard required by Network Rail.

 4) Additional trains cannot be run because there are insufficient paths (ie time slots) to run more without reducing the number of freight trains. There are currently eight paths per hour in each direction (per Wikipedia). This makes longer (higher passenger capacity) trains the only option.

5) As electrification of the remaining un-electrified stretches of line, along with associated works, has not yet started, it will certainly not be finished by next year. (Electrification work will take a long time.)

6) No new trains or carriages have been ordered, so none will be delivered next year.


* There will be additional carriages on other parts of the London Overground next year. Unfortunately this information gets passed on into the wrong contexts and repeated imprecisely, leading to the myth.

Note of caution

This article has been compiled from remembered information and some unclear/illogical/ambiguous published information to which I have attempted to apply logic and common sense. One source http://stibasa.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/gospel-oak-and-barking-line-train.html is based on an e-mail (now mislaid) from Glen Wallis of the B&GO Rail User Group,and another is the 4th of the "notes for editors" in this BGORUG press release - http://www.barking-gospeloak.org.uk/documents/20130331_press_release.pdf

Get a loan to buy an annual travelcard on Oyster and save relative to monthy travelcards

https://www.commuterclub.co.uk/

This organisation is offering loans at 5.6% to enable people to buy an annual travelcard on Oyster, whilst paying out monthly. Not only are the monthly payments less than a monthly travelcard, but also you get a Gold Card with an annual travelcard and this gives substantial savings on off peak train fares for you and travelling companions. If your employer doesn't offer an interest free season ticket loan, this may be a good option for you.

(The cheapest annual season in the country used to be (and maybe still is) Ryde St Johns Road to Ryde Esplanade on the Isle of Wight, currently costing £164. Because Gold Card savings are more than with ordinary railcards, this could be cost effective for those who travel often enough.)