Category: Travel

To Chelmsford for a meeting this afternoon, and lunch in the Acanteen cafe on New London Road (address). A nice stripped-wood cafe, with a good range of sandwiches and drinks. Didn’t try the coffee, but the ambience was very good. A scrambled egg on toast was OK, but a bit bland and accompanied by rather tough sausages. My host’s chicken soup looked better.

A great resource: ViaMichelin helped me find the location of the best ice-cream in the world (corner of Rue des Deux Ponts and Rue St. Louis-en-l’Ile, Paris).

It also told me that it would take 16h01 to drive from my home to the village in Poland that my family are named after (1,447km away).

On a Virgin train from Oxford to Brighton, and once again I find myself wondering why Virgin Trains is pretending so hard that it’s an airline.

Continue reading “Virgin planes, er, trains”

On a short pub crawl with some friends the other night, I came across a lovely quiet pub down a side street near Victoria station (about 5 minutes’ walk from the station). Good beer and comfortable seats. Food at lunchtime. The Grouse and Claret.

Dodgy stats merchants TransportWatch (previously discussed here) have been pulled up by the Advertising Standards Authority. In an adjudication on the adverts they placed in the Economist, the New Statesman and Private Eye the other week, the ASA says:

The Authority noted the claims in the advertisement were based on information collated from various studies of existing railway conversions and the advertisers’ projection of the potential benefits of converting railway lines into roads for express passenger coaches and goods vehicles in the UK, and especially London. It noted the advertisers’ comparisons between the safety, the financial cost and the environmental impact of road and rail made assumptions such as that all existing track and environs were capable of conversion to roads on which coaches could match or surpass trains for speed, whereas the complainants believed this would not be possible in all cases because of the variations of verges on some roads and because the coaches the advertisers advocated would have to travel at speeds that would not be attainable given the national speed limit. The Authority also noted the advertisers had included subsidies to national rail in their calculations for the cost of rail transport, but had not included the unavoidable cost of converting railways to roads in their claims for the financial benefits of road transport.

Or, to put it another way – “Dude, STFU”.

A Wikipedia article on the Nicky Line, the former Harpenden to Hemel branch line, closed (surprisingly early) in the late 40s. Interesting how a potentially useful link line was run down because of stubborness by the competing companies.

Paul Steane has an eye-wateringly comprehensive website, at the Enthusiast’s Guide to Travelling the Railways of Europe.

MetaFilter links to a great site full of 360° panoramas of Rome. Personal favourite – the view of the Pantheon. I sat in exactly that spot over thirteen years ago, just before I started university.

Photo from http://www.mjausson.com

I went out to Worcester today, to give a talk, and the train passed the site of the old Adlestrop station, made famous by Edward Thomas’s beautiful poem. The poem’s always been a favourite of mine, Jane and I had a poster of it up in the first flat we had together, but I’d never been to the place itself.

You can see why Thomas was moved to poetry – the view from the railway line between Oxford and Evesham, running along the Evenlode Valley, is absolutely spectacular. So much so, in fact, that when faulty line-side equipment kept us waiting at a signal for 35 minutes, I was almost pleased.

Culinary discovery of the weekend was Pokeno Pies in Gardner Street, Brighton. Lovely modern, airy shop with excellent beef and mustard pies (also haddock and fennel, which Jane had, and chicken and leek for my mother in law).

Quick, friendly service with a huge chunk of mash and mushy peas. Lovely.