Grahame Taylor

So, what can you see from a high speed (very high speed) train in Italy in late October? It really depends on the weather doesn’t it. Think maybe of a late heat haze from vehicles on a parallel motorway and savour the smugness as you flash past. Or think of...

The tunnelling is finished. It’s time to start building a railway. Ok, here at Rail Engineer we’ve taken an interest in the Crossrail tunnelling machinery. We’ve marvelled at the wonders of steering a delicate path through all the services and foundations beneath London. We’ve looked at the logistics of shifting all the spoil...

Transport has always had its timetables. The stage and mail coaches that ran up until the mid nineteenth century used basic timetables but, as we shall see later in this article, the spin-off resource diagrams would have been as complicated as anything used in the modern day railway. The coaches...

While crafting an article for Rail Engineer, many of us rely on the old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. In fact it’s not that old apparently – maybe only dating from the early part of the last century. But regardless of where the saying came from and...

The sky is a cloudless blue. The sunlight is strong – really strong – reflecting off the baked dry earth. It makes any Brit, used to higher latitudes, squint through watering eyes, reach for the sunglasses and head for the nearest shade. This is early summer in the south of France...

On the back foot. What does it mean? Being on the defensive, unable to make progress. It’s an appropriately topical cricket expression particularly as the 2013 Ashes test series has just started and England is, of course, on the back foot in their first innings. Whether or not they will be able to make real [...]

Just look for a moment at a track layout in what we sometimes call a ‘modern railway’. The site is at Norton Bridge, some five miles from Stafford on the West Coast Main Line (WCML.) To the north is Crewe, to the south is Stafford and going off to the east is a two track [...]

Recently there have been some pretty spectacular failures of OLE in a number of high profile locations giving rise to some pretty dreadful ‘bad wire’ days. Well, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Network Rail has a plan. In fact it has a ten point plan. Grahame Taylor has a look at what’s [...]

A ‘bad hair day’ – a short phrase known to many that suggests that everything that can go wrong does go wrong. It hasn’t been in common usage for very long. It didn’t exist before about 1988 but then it rapidly inveigled itself into the US vocabulary followed soon after by global adoption. All this, [...]