When you're over the hill...

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Doesn't it seem like a fast slide down the other side?

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Scotrail "smart" cards?

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A few years after London made its Oyster smart card unnecessary by integrating contactless bank cards for Tube and bus journeys, Scotrail has finally enabled Flexipasses on their own proprietary smart cards. My home station is a ticketless station. I feel there are a couple of aspects of the scheme for smartcards that have not been user-tested from the point of view of users of small rural commuter stations. Of which there are many on the Glasgow-Edinburgh lines and many more throughout Scotland. I'd like to always arrive with plenty of time for my train in the morning, but sometimes the train is even early. At Kirknewton, Scotrail have placed the Edinburgh-bound smartcard reader by the main car-park entrance, halfway along the platform, about 50m from the entrance nearest the road where late arriving passengers - some detained by the level crossing - scramble for the train. Maybe Scotrail's business analysts imagine that everyone always arrives for a train with 90 second...
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So wind is the answer?

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UK generation Look at any day, week or month. See the red line? That's gas turbines.  Burning gas is better than coal for soot, but carbon is carbon. Methane plus oxygen generates heat plus carbon dioxide. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-natural-gas The blue line, that's wind. There's about 14GW of total capacity in the UK at the moment. That's about half the UK's average demand.  https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ Except on Tuesday, when it was almost zero. So it is on any hour, day, week or month you look at.  Electricity demand varies a bit, but the red line is almost a mirror image of the blue. That's because electricity can't be stored in any great quantity. The pumped storage and batteries on the grid at the moment are used only for smoothing, not covering major gaps in the wind.  Every time the wind turbines stop, the gas turbines start In a BBC News report yesterday, the 9th of June 2020, a screen showed a picture of coal gen...
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Kirknewton level crossing needs a pedestrian crossing!

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A recent post by the Met Office caught my eye. 40% of UK citizens caught out by severe weather Kirknewton's "new" level crossing , installed in 2013, makes it impossible for pedestrians to cross the line when the crossing is down.  Most evening commuters arrive on the Westbound platform from Edinburgh, often to get to their cars parked in the station car park on the north side of the crossing.  If the crossing has failed - a frequent occurrence - such commuters may eventually seek an alternative route .  In bad conditions that could be 3km through the snow. After departing the village via the underpass, commuters would be navigating an unlit farm lane, probably by now buried under several feet of snow.  Kirknewton needs a permanent pedestrian crossing at the level crossing!
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