please empty your brain below
No service between Harrow-on-the-Hill, Croxley and Rickmansworth. Shuttle train services operate between Watford, Amersham and Chesham.
I hope you weren't smoking a pipe as a child, DG.
We all have a magical place in our early memories, don't we, even if it was only the bottom of next door's garden.
And it was so exciting that you kept going back and forth until you'd had your fill - what kind of childhood indulgence is that?
By contrast, HPST yesterday just smacked of commercialism.
The link you gave shows that the curve only saw regular daily use for the first eight years of its existence! Opened with the rest of the Watford branch in 1925, regular services ceased in 1933, except for a Sunday service which operated between 1941 and 1960.
Of course, Watford station itself is proposed for closure in a few years, if the link to the old LNWR line from Croxley Green to Watford Junction gets built.
They're more likely to experience a landslip next time it rains as there's no flora left to hold the banks together.
The idea I think is to stop the leaves growing in the first place, rather than chop the trees down when they are already in leaf! There are probably rules against doing it when birds are likely to be nesting, which is why it was done earlier this year.
Doing it at this season also gives the best chance for low-growing vegetation (which had been inhibited by the trees) to appear quickly, which will improve the appearance.
Check this beauty out:
Regular Met Line users (and I have been commuting on the Met Line for some 26 years) will recognise the "leaves on the line" issue as falling into the same category as the "wrong type of rain/snow/sleet" or "the sun is too hot" i.e. an implausible excuse for poor timetabling and late running.
The logic in the above paragraph seems to run approximately thus: it happens a lot, therefore it never happens.
I note with interest that CULG specifically mentions the Metropolitan line as being the only line which is so severely affected by leaf fall that it has to have extra slack put into its timetable in the autumn.
There's more nonsense from Rosemary Hanscomb, head of Croxley Green Residents' Association (my, she sounds like an authority on railway operations, doesn't she?) on page 6:
iii) he states that leaf fall in Autumn could create a problem with "leaves on the lines"; in fact silver birch leaves are very small and thus unlikely to create a major problem...
Let's hope all this "safety work" does not bring about a landslide instead of leaves on the line.
Others have said it better than I above, but suffice to say that trees do not prevent (indeed they cause) landslides, and they absolutely do cause delays.
I find this particular brand of armchair expert almost uniquely irritating, possibly because of the sheer amount of smugness which comes from sitting there, dismissing advice from anyone more experienced than you, in the perfect, absolute, certain knowledge that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Not to speak, of course, of the perfect storm of this and the elitism which has so often accompanied it:
vii) Residents were sent letters before the work started but they were advised that coppicing work only was to be carried out. This is not coppicing. One 83 year old resident personally canvassed 62 other residents and they were unanimous in reporting that the impact of the work was absolutely not less, but was far worse, than they feared. This same resident, Sally Herbert, was the lady who had contacted me in tears of frustration before I wrote to you. She has lived in her house, originally chosen for its outlook, for 48 years; she had specific concerns and I believe wrote to you personally. She has not been approached by Mark Hart and has only seen copies of the letters that you were been [sic] kind enough to send to me. Another long-term resident is so upset that she is seriously thinking about moving away, as she cannot wait 20 years for vegetation to re-establish itself. Another neighbour had built a hide at the bottom of his garden to watch the many birds visiting the embankments."
Truly, there is no more determined force on this earth than the residents' association of an exceedingly rich location capable of bursting into "tears of frustration" at precisely the sort of problem which many other people would dearly love to have nothing else to worry about except.
Though there hasn't been anything about the negative effect on local house prices (which has tellingly dominated most people's objections to HS2), it's surely only a matter of time.
Finally, there's an excellent article by Ian Walmsley in this month's issue of Modern Railways, about railways an unintended consequences, which contains a thorough and educational analysis of the decision to stop clearing linesides and its consequences in terms of increased train maintenance, delays, and the odd accident. I only wish I could whack nimbys like David Gauke MP around the head with it.
DG: Have you stopped uploading all your photographs to Flickr? I can't find most of the ones next to this article on there.
Having seen the deforested embankments, it's obvious that far more trees have been chopped down than is absolutely necessary. See what you think the next time you visit.
(and as for photographs, those I upload to Flickr generally aren't the same as the thumbnails I use on the blog - adds variety)
>> I confess I caught the first train straight back again, just to say I'd done it both ways... and then again, and then again.
sometimes childhood dreams are best enjoyed as adults!
The curve was also used on Boxing Day some years back (early/mid-1980s), for a service running Baker Street to Amersham via Watford (the only service operating north of Harrow-on-the-Hill on Boxing Day). That was when I first travelled it. Boxing Day services were later reduced to run direct to Rickmansworth only, no service to Watford or beyond Ricky to Amersham, so no more using the north curve.
As well as passenger trains, there have also been scheduled empty stock workings, partly to retain traincrews' route knowledge. When training on LUL in 1985, I was put onto a duty from Neasden depot which ran empty at the end of the morning peak from Watford to Rickmansworth then back to Watford sidings to stable the train.
It certainly didn't strike me as a barren wasteland (although since it's only just been done it inevitably looks a little rough), more like how railway embankments are supposed to look, and were designed to look, and would have looked if only LUL had been spending money on maintaining them rather than spending a lot more money on dealing with the consequences of leaf fall. If there was one paragraph in the bundle of letters which had half a point, it was Barry Grant's assertion that "at issue is that dereliction of duty that has meant that, as far as we are aware, London Underground has failed to attend to the trees on this portion of the embankment for many, many years." If LUL had never allowed all those 900-1000 trees to grow in the first place, it wouldn't have had to chop them down.
As for how far back the chainsaws went: think about it. The cutting is extremely deep, which means a leaf on even a modestly-sized tree sitting at the very back of it could very easily be blown off by the wind and end up floating down directly onto the track. If the trees between it and the track had already been removed, this scenario becomes vastly more likely. Indeed, if they'd only cut the trees down up to a certain distance from the track, they wouldn't have finished their job properly.
I really do recommend the Modern Railways article, by the way; even I, who consider myself moderately knowledgable about railway matters, found almost every paragraph a real eye-opener. One of the best and most educational pieces of railway journalism I've read in years.
...Speaking of which, lest there be any doubt, I think this was one of your best blog posts as well. I could so easily imagine being in the same childhood position, and who doesn't like the opportunity to go places you can't normally go? It's almost certainly not what you write the blog for, but if today's comments are anything to go by, it's what the readers think diamond geezer is all about. (Well, that and spoof tube maps...)
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