please empty your brain below
The cinema opened on 11th October 1920 with Isobel Elsom in "The Edge of Beyond", with Miss Elsom appearing in person.
Yet the powers that be were unmoved by its versatility, efficiency, and sheer cost effectiveness. Sadly, they were put off by its eccentric nature and quaintness, although it was made clear that all engineering problems had been overcome.
I'm most pleased to see how thriving it is.
But ah, Granny Buttons! When I first started blogging (in 2006), he was king of the boat bloggers; (nearly) everyone looked to him - and then in 2012 he just stopped; gave up on the format. With the result that there are now quite a few of us who have been going longer than he did.
I did a little analysis a couple of years ago of the rise and fall of a non-representative sample of boating blogs. http://chertsey130.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/statto.html
We have a piddly little train running on a single track between Stourbridge Town and Stourbridge Junction. So not much danger of collisions or major incidents requiring the assistance of the guard. Stourbridge Town has a ticket office open for most of the day. Every single journey on this vehicle, which cannot carry as many passengers as a bus, requires both a driver and a guard.
In one direction there were two guards (maybe one was off-duty) and they spent the journey chatting to each other.
Nevertheless, a scheme being tested for 8 years without much else happening is very much dead to me. PoP might have mentioned the very reason!
I don't think it can be classed as a test any more. It's a practical solution to a specific problem, and releases a bigger train for use elsewhere. (The 1960-vintage single-car units which until recently operated the Cardiff Bay branch and(until next month) still work a couple of peak hour services on the Aylesbury-Princes Risborough branch solved a similar problem).
No doubt if there were other branch lines as short, and as steep as the Stourbridge line, PPMs with regenerative braking could be used on them too. But there are not. (Lyme Regis, Brighton Kemp Town and no doubt others might have fit the bill, if they had survived Beeching)
I wonder how the flywheel copes with steep gradients? Presumably someone's thought about it, otherwise it would tend to act as a gyroscope and try to keep the carriage completely horizontal.
Similarly, I hope that no beancounters have saved a few pennies on the flywheel bearings, otherwise it really could be a case of 'The train now arriving at Platforms 1, 2, 3 & 4 has come in sideways'...
Apart from funiculars, the only rail system I know with a regenerative system as effective as that is the battery operated train that takes you down the cave at Rouffignac in the Dordogne.
The Emerson Park line is fairly level, so is not as well suited to a flywheel system.
As you mention, the Town Branch is steeply downhill from Stourbridge Junction. Back in the days of the Bubble Car, the Stourbridge Dodger ran away at least 3 times - see for example this Google image search.
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