Where Worlds Collide

Some context. At the end of the 1990s, Britain’s previously state-owned railway network was splintered into a thousand parts, with many different companies owning the trains, operating them, owning, and maintaining the tracks. And it’s all gone pear-shaped.

French-owned Connex, one of the least-loved train operating companies, has been stripped of it’s franchise. They’d already lost one franchise, South-Central, and now their South-East operation, including many of London’s busiest commuter lines, has gone the same way. Cynics will suggest that Connex were no worse than a lot of other operators, but they had the misfortune to serve an area heavily populated by powerful and influential people, who are better at complaining and live much closer to the political centres of power than the users of someone like Arriva Trains Northern.

Another stunning example of the triumph of privofragmentisation, in which we end up paying more and more (in both taxes and fares) for a service that’s getting worse and worse.

Will Hutton lays into the whole broken system of fragmentation and short-term franchises.

The truth is that if we want a great rail system, we have to have great organisations running it, organisations that are passionate about delivering a great service to their customers and passionate about being railwaymen and women. In the entire debate about the rights and wrongs of rail privatisation, this obvious point is all too rarely made.

The Conservative government under John Major created the current monstrosity because it genuinely believed that just the magic wand of being private and pursuing the profit motive would build dynamic rail organisations. New Labour has been paralysed in devising an alternative system because it genuflects to the same totemic set of beliefs.

If either government - and senior officials - had any understanding of business, they would know that successful businesses are, above all, successful organisations made dynamic by an over-riding sense of purpose at their core. The question that should be asked is whether the current structure of the rail system fosters the growth of great rail companies with such a passionate commitment and sense of purpose. The answer is an emphatic ‘No’.

You cannot build a great rail company if you know that your licence to operate is temporary and if one of the key aspects of your success - the infrastructure of railways, stations and signalling - is outside your control. You are condemned to be a franchisee with a franchisee culture.

From the opposite end of the political spectrum, on Patrick Crozier has this to say:

All this is yet one more block section on the branch line to railway Gotterdamerung. At some point, someone is going to say “enough is enough”. And then what? Railway closures, higher fares, an end to upgrades or maybe a quiet acceptance of a worse service at a greater cost? Or will the real culprit ie fragmentation ie the wheel/rail split be identified? And if it is will anyone have the gumption to stand up to the EU and demand its removal?

Meanwhile, Notwork Rail goes from worse to worse. BBC News has this classic quote:

“The administrators are accountants, they didn’t know very much about running the railway.”

If only the tabloid press had found out about John Major and Edwina Currie in the mid-90s.

But… It’s now six years since that hopeless adminstration was flushed down the toilet of history by the Great British Public. Tony Blair’s New Labour have had six years to sort out the mess, and so far have failed to bite the bullet and reform a fundementally broken structure. Not that we should really have expected anything different

Update: Brian Micklethwait has some ideas.

Game Wish 52: Your Robin Laws Type

Robin Laws identifies several types of gamer in his book of GM tips: The Power Gamer, the Butt-Kicker, the Tactician, the Specialist (plays one type only), the Method Actor, the Storyteller (plot and pacing fan), and the Casual Gamer. Which of these types do you think you are, and why? Most people aren’t pure types, so multiple choices are OK.

Like a lot of people, I’m a mix of more than one of them. I think I’m more of a Storyteller than anything else. Plot and pacing matter a lot to me, especially as I currently GM as much as I play. I’ve never been much of a munchkin^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hPower-Gamer, which I attribute to not discovering RPGing until my twenties, and I not really into deep immersion enough to be a Method Actor, at least face-to-face. Of course, there’s no room for method acting when GMing! I’m certainly not a Specialist, since the character’s I’ve most enjoyed have been a real mix of types.

I’ve got a bit of Butt-Kicker and Tactician in me; good fight scenes can be entertaining provided they don’t get bogged down in too much fiddly detail (For instance, I much prefer GURPS basic to Advanced Combat), and it helps to have some sort of plan even if I get bored spending the whole session planning.

On-line it’s a different story, and I become a bit more of a Method Actor, and the Tactician in me vanishes completely. I remember one combat scene in my first on-line game, where the traditional RPG combat of dice, minatures, maps and hit-points vanished, to be replaced by a sense of sheer terror as my cyberpunk technican was confronted by heavily-armed ninjas who’s ambushed us in the hotel, and I was convinced my character was going to die. In both that game and another I wrote long surreal posts detailing what my character was dreaming about, something I’d never do face-to-face.

Collected a parcel from John Brightwell today, containing two N-gauge BLS Re465s, 465.001 in plain blue, and 465.004 in “Wallis Tourism” advertising livery, along with some FS and SNCB coaches and a couple of intermodal flats.

It’s time I got a bigger layout….

Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops recalls getting on the wrong train at Swindon and ending up in Kemble rather than Reading. Easily done, especially since HSTs look the same at both ends, so you can’t tell which way a stationary one is supposed to be going.

I’ve ended up on the wrong train a couple of times. Ironically, one time was when I was going to Swindon, and boarded a late-running South Wales train instead of the Bristol-bound train I should have caught. I only realised this when the train didn’t start slowing down on the approach to Swindon, and then sailed through the station without stopping.

I eventually had a 90 minute wait at Bristol Temple Meads waiting for a train back to Swindon. I suppose there are worse places to be than Temple Meads on a summer Saturday in 1974!

According to this well known publication, a central asian power has been relieved of a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Warning. If you read this, they may have to kill you.

BBC NEWS | England | Kent | Oxfam bans Max Bygraves

A charity shop in Kent is asking for records and CDs to sell - as long as they are not by Max Bygraves or Val Doonican.

The Oxfam shop in Canterbury has a sign outside saying it does not want any more records by the two veteran crooners - because it has so many already.

The manager says it is not meant as an insult, and says the large number of albums by the singers show how successful they have been.

Max Bygraves told the BBC there were so many of his records in charity shops because lots of people who bought them originally had died.

In forty years time, will the same shops be refusing copies of “Dark Side of the Moon” and “Led Zeppelin IV”?

Concert review, Blue Öyster Cult, Manchester Life Cafe, 11 Jun 2003

Last year, after playing little more that a few one-off shows over more than a decade, BÖC played an extensive UK tour of smaller clubs. The reception was so good that they returned, after just a year, to play another ten-date tour. Last time I saw them at the Astoria Theatre in London, this time I saw them up north, in the Life Cafe in Manchester.

The present-day lineup still includes three of the original members, guitarist and frontman Eric Bloom, who’s sadly lost his Jeff Lynne style-perm, lead guitarist and vocalist Buck Dharma, who now looks like a middle-aged accountant rather than a yuppie accountant, and keyboardist and guitarist Allen Lanier, who I’m half-convinced is now some kind of vampire. The replacements for the original rhythm section of Albert and Joe Bouchard are Danny Miranda on bass, and one time Rainbow and Black Sabbath drummer Bobby Rondinelli.

There’s something about seeing an established band in an intimate small venue with an audience made up mostly of hardcode fans. I met several people that had been to every gig on the tour, even to Aberdeen, and the band clearly fed off the enthusiasm of the audience.

They decided to vary the setlist a lot on this tour, resting several of the usual standards and dusting off some less well-known numbers that they haven’t played for years. I was told that they’d played 37 different songs on the tour so far, and attempted to play one or two others that got abandoned when Buck Dharma realised Eric Bloom had forgotten the chords! Some of the surprises were “Tattoo Vampire”, “Unknown Tongue” and the funky “Shooting Shark”. We even got two songs from the often-reviled 1979 album “Mirrors”, although I found the atmospheric epic “The Vigil”, a song about a whacko flying saucer cult, one of the highlights of the show.

All in all, a great show from a band that prove they can still cut it live, 32 years after their first album. Just about the only fault in the whole show was that they didn’t play what I think is their best song, “Astronomy”.

Setlist

Dr Music
OD’d on Life Itself
Pocket
Flaming Telepaths
Unknown Tongue
Tattoo Vampire
Shooting Shark
Divine Wind
The Vigil
Lips in the Hills
And Then Came the Last Days of May
Godzilla
(Don’t Fear) The Reaper

Burning for You
Cities on Flame
The Golden Age of Leather

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 51: New Genres

What are three genres that you’ve had limited exposure to as a gamer that you’d like to try or play more of?

First, an Alternate Earths/Parallel Universes game. I love the parallel worlds defined in GURPS Alternate Earths, and a campaign using those worlds as the setting is one of the games I want to run ‘someday’. I’m not totally sold of the Homeline/Centrum conflict as the theme of the game, and I’ve thought about using something along the lines of Luther Arkwright’s Disruptors as the bad guys. A convention-style one-shot at a future Gypsycon or Hatcon cannot be ruled out.

Second, a realistic hard-SF Game, either Traveller or GURPS:Transhuman Space. I did play in a Traveller PBMB on the CompuServe RPGAMES forum called HST which ran rather slowly for a couple of years before fizzling out, and played in a Transhuman Space demo game at last year’s GenCon UK, but it’s still a genre I haven’t played nearly enough of. Transhuman space comes over to me as a setting very rich in adventuring possibilities, especially in the lawless deep beyond; the outer fringes of the 22nd-century Solar System.

I also haven’t played nearly enough Call of Cthulhu. CoC is still the Gold Standard for horror games, even if some people can’t grasp the concept of a game when the point of the game isn’t to gain XPs and go up levels, but merely to defeat the monster, and that character survival is a bonus.

Finally (I know we were only supposed to list three), In Nomine, SJG’s Angels and Demons game, the ultimate Good vs. Evil struggle. The original French game (which I haven’t played) was essentially a satire on French Catholicism, while SJGs translation is a rather different beast. It’s able to be played in many different styles, not all of which are in any way irreverent or sacrilegious. While the whole concept is going to upset those fundamentalist twits who were burning D&D a decade or so ago, it can be played as a deeply religious game with a strong sense of morality. Sadly it’s probably going to be eclipsed by White Wolf’s Demon:The Fallen, which I suspect is full of typical White Wolf angst and pretentiousness.

Ever resprayed a model locomotive, and used dodgy masking tape that pulls the paint off? By the look of this, the same thing happens to full-sized trains as well….

A posting in the SWRG mailing list led me to this article in last week’s Sunday Mirror

ALASTAIR Darling has ordered a “summer summit” to pave the way for the biggest reductions in rail services since the infamous Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

The Transport Secretary is poised to close dozens of branch lines to fund a new rail “super-highway” connecting major cities.

The plan is to be discussed this week, prior to a crisis conference in July when Mr Darling will ask experts to prepare a radical overhaul of the system.

I’m sure I’m not the only person that believes that the financial crisis facing Britain’s railways isn’t because of loss-making rural branches, but the total inability to control the costs of large-scale projects on busy main lines, a consequence of John Major’s hopelessly botched ‘privofragmentisation’, and New Labour’s perpertual failure to recognise just how broken the structure is.

The Sunday Mirror lists the lines ‘under threat’

SCOTLAND

Inverness to Kyle

Inverness to Wick

Helensburgh to Fort William

Helensburgh to Mallaig

Aberdeen to Inverness

WALES

Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth

Shrewsbury to Pwllheli

Heart of Wales line between Swansea and Shrewsbury

Whitland to Pembroke

NORTH OF ENGLAND

Carlise to Carnforth via Whitehaven

Middlesbrough to Whitby

Settle to Carlisle

EAST ANGLIA

Norwich to Cromer

Norwich to Great Yarmouth

Norwich to Lowestoft

Ipswich to Lowestoft

SOUTH OF ENGLAND

Ryde to Shanklin (Isle of Wight)

DEVON AND CORNWALL

Exeter to Branstaple

Exeter to Exmouth

Newton Abbot to Torquay

Liskeard to Looe

Par to Newquay

Truro to Falmouth

St Erth to St Ives

Note that I don’t believe for one minute that the list comes from any official document; my guess it’s the product of Mirror hacks looking at a map. I notice there’s no mention of any branches in the Home Counties.

While I don’t believe every last branch line deserves to exist in perpetuity, and some, like Par-Newquay or the Central Wales line really do need to justify their existance, it should not be for some London-based bureaucrat to decide their fate. That should be up to the people of Cornwall or Wales.