Just over a decade ago, Mulhouse, a town of 110,000 people near the German and Swiss borders, was a symbol of the death of the European high street. One of the poorest towns of its size in France, this former hub of the textile industry had long ago been clobbered by factory closures and industrial decline.
...
Today, Mulhouse is known for the staggering transformation of its thriving centre, bucking the national trend for high street closures.
The article goes into all the normal Guardian favourites like independent shops and god help me, f**king trams. These people think that gentrification is all about putting the independent shops there and that makes everyone richer and they spend money. In reality this is a by-product. You get the fancy, overpriced shops when you get the richer people.
What's really happened in the past decade is that a new shiny high speed LGV line was built linking Mulhouse to Dijon, cutting the time from something like 2:30 to more like 1:00, and onwards, Mulhouse to Lyon is down from 4:30 to 3:00. There's also a plan to have a branch going around Dijon to join up with a TGV to Paris, and to extend the line down to Lyon.
Via MBK, fimsy excuse of the week from The Times. The only actual hard facts in the article to back up that claim are:
However, in a direct challenge to Britain’s powerful rail unions, The Times understands that ministers will only consider the move to CPI if unions lower their wage demands. RPI is currently used to calculate pay rises and last year staffing costs on the railway reached more than £2.8 billion.
That £2.8 billion figure is meaningless unless you compare it with total revenues of their employers, which appear to be about £10 - £11 billion according to this.
That doesn't seem disproportionate to me. All things being equal, whether rail worker salaries go up by CPI or RPI should not have any major effect on ticket prices, which are set by demand (supply being largely fixed), regulations (price caps) and subsidies.
Whether rail companies are fundamentally over-staffed, or even under-staffed is a separate topic.
A Kent railway line has been closed after a train derailed when it hit cows that had strayed onto the track.
Southeastern said two carriages came off the rails when the Ashford-to-Canterbury service struck the livestock between the villages of Wye and Chilham on Sunday night. Around 70 passengers had to be evacuated by the emergency services and led to safety after the incident, at about 9.30pm.
Buses will replace trains between Ashford International and Ramsgate, via Canterbury West, all day on Monday - with the possibility that disruption might continue longer...
Southeastern said no staff or passengers were harmed, adding that the only casualties were "the poor cows".
Ah... but did the "poor cows" really "stray onto the track" or was it a suicide mission?
Transport For London staff have been banned from using electronic cigarettes at work because they are too realistic. And customers may also be forbidden to “smoke” them in future, bosses at TfL say.
In an email to staff, the organisation writes: “E-cigarettes and nicotine inhalers are extremely difficult to differentiate from real cigarettes, therefore if someone uses an e-cigarette or nicotine inhaler in the workplace it might look like they are smoking a real cigarette."
It's a bit rich Bob Crow complaining about the cost of rail tickets for passengers (Metro, Mon). Where does he think the money comes from to pay for the disproportionately high wages and conditions his members keep going on strike for?
Stephen Ware, Nottinghamshire.
Speak of the Devil…
Labour MP John Denham (Metro, Mon) has forgotten the basic premise of a national railway - that the revenue from more busy routes is used to support less-profitable routes to maintain a national railway network.
The logic of Denham's thinking is massive Beeching-style cuts where railway revenues fall below a certain level.
In any event, the figures he quotes are misleading as no private railway company could operate without public subsidy to the rail industry.
That is precisely why the railways should be nationalised, saving passengers more than £1 billion a year according to independent reports, which will lead to fairer fares and better services.
Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary.
I'm with Bob on this one.
Yes, his members are probably overpaid slightly, so what? The extra pay they get is a lot less in total than the subsidies being creamed off by the corporates, and surely it is better for each of thousands of staff to get a couple of grand extra (liable to income tax and NIC) than for a few multinationals to scoop the lot and shuffle it offshore tax free?
More than 1,000 of Britain’s most important wildlife habitats and dozens of ancient woodlands will be directly affected by the proposals to lay down 8,000 miles of track between England's towns and cities.
Official documents also disclose that tens of thousands of acres of valuable farm land - already scarred beyond recognition with canals and cart tracks - will be lost and more than 1,000 buildings are to be demolished.
Conservationists and other campaigners reacted angrily to the figures, which were buried in a mass of Railway Acts passed without fanfare by Parliament.
They are the fullest assessment of the environmental impact of the newfangled 'steam locomotives'. Until now only the impact of the first railway using these contraptions, from Pen-y-darren ironworks to Abercynon, had been fully detailed.
The railways are backed by both Houses of Parliament, with Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, and other senior Cabinet ministers arguing that railways suitable for steam locomotives will transform Britain’s “economic geography”.
Hundreds of the creatures were found squashed in a slippery mess on the track.
David Hynes, spokesman at the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia, said: "Millipedes are one of the factors we are going to take into account."
Six passengers were treated for neck problems after a train pulling into a station at Clarkson, 25 miles north of Perth, ran into a stationary one, the train company said.
Another one from Bob E (who has more or less been writing my blog posts for me this week while I was on holiday), spotted in The Guardian (funny how the G hardly complained about this sort of thing when their favourite party was in government*, but hey):
"... and let's possibly return to it later, much later, when you have made enough money from being given it back."
Isn't it just amazing how these sort of tales appear just as the HoC has risen for its summer break and, guided by a quote in the article I think henceforth the Grand Alliance can only be referred to as "the Great Ambivalence".
FirstGroup may be handed an extension to its Great Western rail franchise, underwritten by a multimillion-pound taxpayer subsidy – despite having served notice on the contract to avoid a payout of more than £800m to the government...
In the meantime, trains will be operated by FirstGroup, even though it decided to relinquish the last three years of its original contract to avoid paying premiums to the government. It is likely to receive subsidies during the extension period.
* Equally tattyfilarious is that the Labour MP who chairs the Public Accounts Committee (who is actually starting to look like a caricature of herself) is now laying into the current government for all the costs and deficits now being run up on the basis of contracts and policies put in place by her own party when it was in government, e.g. NHS PFI stuff, Olympics-G4S; Work Programme-A4E; low carbon electricity crapola; HS2.
Somehow this was all much more credible when the former chairman of the PAC, Conservative MP Edward Leigh, was saying it about the 1997 - 2010 Labour government. Their policies and programmes were in many respects different to those of the Conservative government which preceded them, so he was entitled to complain, but the current Lib-Con government is merely a continuation of what Labour were doing so for a former Labour minister to start whining now is rank hypocrisy.
Escaped cows were struck by a passenger train with around 200 people on board to Manchester yesterday. The runaway herd found their way onto the tracks of the 2.45pm Crosscountry Trains service between Bournemouth and Manchester and were hit near Tackley, north of Oxford.
The trains are now running again after several delays last night. No passengers were injured but several were in tears at the sight of the 12 injured animals...
Drew Benvie, UK managing director of the Hotwire Group of PR companies, tweeted from on board the carriage: "Our virgin train just outside Oxford has hit a herd of animals at hi speed and we think a vehicle. People in tears. Train is on the tracks."
JT and RA set the hare running in the comments to an earlier post about Fiat Currencies In The Movies, so just to summarise...
1. The underlying theme of Western films set pre-1850 or thereabouts is usually white settlers versus Red Indians (aka Native Americans), and the underlying theme of those set post-1850 is usually about established white settlers/small holders fighting off Large Evil Businesses, such as railroad companies, mining companies or property developers (sometimes they are about white settlers fighting off outlaws, but as like as not, said outlaws are in the pay of the LEB's).
2. See e.g. Once Upon A Time In The West, Heaven's Gate or Pale Rider. They used exactly the same basic plot in Nowhere To Run, which is a Western in a modern setting, and property developers are the stereotypical baddies in modern children's films such as The Borrowers or Hannah Montana: The Movie (" there is a firm battle developing with the residents of Crowley Corners and a team of developers who are planning to destroy the meadows and build a shopping mall on the site"). The final bit of Miss Potter follows the template as well.
3. There were a couple of documentaries on television recently which fit into the overall scheme:
a) The one about Abraham Lincoln says that before the Civil War, he was not so much anti-slavery or pro-emancipation (that was later forced upon him by events) but anti-slave, i.e. anti-Negro. He assumed that because all the land had now been appropriated, there was a limited pool of money left over available for wages of labourers and that it was better for the poor white Europeans to earn these wages than for the rich landowners to import even cheaper labour from Africa (again, whether he was subconsciously anti-landowner or just racist or a bit of both was unclear).
b) The one about Wyatt Earp said that all the fighting and tension in Tombstone was between the middle class urban people/farmers and the cowboys, who were the lowest of the low, as they had turned up too late to be given any land for free and led a semi-nomadic existence carrying out acts of brutality on behalf of the big landowners who employed them. Earp himself was just a lawman of no particular political views, but we see the same as with Lincoln, it's not clear whether the real struggle was against the landless minions of the large landowners or against the landowners themselves (one of the people whom Earp shot dead was such a large landowner).
4. So, in movies as in real life, whether the baddies are Native Americans, slaves, cowboys or large landowners (railroad and mining companies are of their very nature large landowners), all these battles are about land ownership and not just land but rents; there was no danger that the disorganised cowboys would obtain title to land by terrorising the townsfolk of Tombstone, but by so terrorising, they certainly depressed the rental value of the land. This is the Faux Libertarian contradiction: no, we don't want the government restrict our actions; but yes, we do want the government to restrict the actions of others because, er, we were here first.
5. The key scene in Once Upon... is where Cheyenne asks what is so bloody important about the dry acre of land to which the heroine's murdered husband had staked a claim and which the evil railroad company is trying to prise off her by fair means or foul. Charles Bronson's character explains patiently that because of the topography, the acre is in the likely path of the coming railroad, and because of a nearby river or spring, it happens to be exactly in the right place for building a train station.
OK, replies Cheyenne, what's so important about a train station?
Bronson then explains the concept of agglomeration. Once the station is built, that is the best place to build an inn (the murdered husband already had an inn sign carved) or to have the post office. It's also the best place to build shops, because the goods can be picked up straight from the station, so other settlers will want to live near the station; those who live further away will visit the shops, post office and stay overnight at the inn; the existence of the station (built at the railroad company's expense and ultimately funded by its passengers) is enough to trigger a whole new little town, and once the town is built, the land will be worth millions. 6. In other words, the murdered man merely wanted to steal a march on the railroad company and collect all these rents for himself by staking his claim where he did. He had ordered enough timber for the first few buildings, so effectively, he was trying to blackmail the railroad company and they get their own back by killing him, which triggers a further cycle of violence.
In the film, the railroad company is portrayed as the baddies, because they employ the more violent minions, but in economic terms, they are as bad as each other. More to the point, the LEBs who are called upon to play the baddies in film after film are clearly rent seekers, they want to make easy money by owning certain locations or mining rights, but aren't the heroes in these films fighting for the same thing, i.e. rents?
7. To what extent all these Western films represent what actually happened, I do not know, but there must be some truth in them. Now, as a thought experiment: what would have happened if the Founding Fathers had followed Tom Paine's sage advice (in turn based on what Queen Elisabeth had actually done for real in England two centuries earlier) and stopped these rents falling into competing private hands (which is what triggered all the unpleasantness) by having the government collect them, spending a little on things which enhance rental values (i.e. law enforcement, irrigation, railroads, whatever) and dishing out the rest as a Citizen's Dividend? -------------- UPDATE (for my own future reference), there's also a scene in "The World's Fastest Indian" where Anthony Hopkins' neighbours complain that he never mows his lawn and this depresses property values. The only film which shows the downsides of new infrastructure, i.e. the negative impact on land values elsewhere, is "Cars". The cars live in a sleepy little town on the old Route 66, which has been dying off since the new interstate was built.
Somebody once told me that when London Underground announce that Tube trains are delayed because of a "passenger taken ill", this is code for "somebody has thrown him or herself under a train".
I have no idea whether this is true or not, but this was inspiration for a song that I co-wrote eleven years ago:
A very high turnout for last week's poll, thanks for everybody who took part, results as follows:
Do you think the public sector strike on 30th November was justified? No - 83% Yes - 17%
As I suspected, the strike has back fired horribly as a PR measure. No doubt the government has done its own polling and come to the same conclusion, so if anything, the government's negotiating hand is now strengthened. ------------------------------------- It appears that The Righteous have are bored with pillorying Jeremy Clarkson for saying that public sector workers who went on strike should be shot, and have finally got round to criticising him for something else which he said on The One Show last week, which was to describe people who commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of/under a train as "selfish".
I'd completely agree, only I'd describe them as "wickedly inconsiderate" rather than "selfish". Those who suffer most are the train drivers themselves, followed by the poor sods who have to clear up the mangled limbs and blood afterwards, not to mention all the commuters whose trains are delayed.
Of course, there is such a thing as a Righteous Train Driver, who doesn't really know what to think :-)
So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Are people who throw themselves under trains selfish?"
The cow escaped yesterday as it was being unloaded ahead of today's weekly fatstock cattle auction at Newark Livestock Market. A local farmer said: "Something must have spooked it."
A Network Rail spokesman said a member of the public reported the cow at Newark Castle Station level crossing at 4.20pm. Trains on the line were ordered to run at low speeds, causing delays, but no services were cancelled. After standing by the level crossing for some time and then wandering down the line, the cow began walking in the direction of Kelham.
The Nottinghamshire Police helicopter was used to monitor the cow's progress. It was in collision with a Mini more than a mile away at the entrance to Kelham Hall on the busy A617 at 6pm and died. As the Advertiser went to press the extent of the driver's injuries were unclear. The cow's carcase was recovered by Crowden's of Newark.
For maximum carnage, try and get hit by a train, you stupid cow!
I love the extra detail of which local slaughterhouse recovered the carcase, I wonder whether they'll be selling rather oddly shaped cuts for the next few days.
A man has been taken to hospital after being crushed by a model train in the back garden of his home. West Midlands ambulance service was called to a property in Wilmcote near Stratford at around midday on Sunday after the man, who is in his seventies, became trapped under the large-scale model.
An ambulance service spokesman said: "The man in his seventies was apparently sitting on the locomotive when it left the rails and came off a garden wall. The patient was trapped for almost 30 minutes as ambulance crews and firefighters worked to release him. "
Spotted by MikeW, who adds: "Toy trains join cattle in war on mankind. Back gardens the new front-line. Radio controlled boats to vote on direct action next week."
Spotted by RH at the BBC, adding "Now it's sabotage!":
Rail services through Northamptonshire and Warwickshire were suspended after an engineering train derailed as it hit a cow.
Buses are replacing London Midland trains between Northampton and Rugby after the engineering train hit the animal early on Friday at Long Buckby. Services are not likely to return to normal until Friday afternoon.
The train remained upright after the crash. The incident has not affected Virgin services. A Network Rail spokeswoman said: "An engineering train struck an animal in the early hours causing two sets of wheels to come off the tracks. Engineers are working to get the train back on the rails so the line can be reopened."
Train travellers, who sometimes feel their journeys are by cattle class, have been given a new excuse for delays - cows on the line. The bovine problem led to 15 train cancellations on a West Midlands' section of the West Coast line between Nuneaton and Rugby last month, Network Rail (NR) said.
A cemetery containing the graves of playwright Harold Pinter, retail magnate WH Smith and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel could be disturbed under plans for a new high-speed rail line, it was claimed today.
The “preferred route” for the High Speed Two rail link between London and Birmingham goes under Kensal Green Cemetery which contains 130 listed monuments and a Grade I listed chapel from the reign of William IV.
And, possibly the most vomit inducing NIMBY comment of all time...
Campaigners today said it would be “madness” to cut under the cemetery. Lee Snashfold, director of the General Cemetery Company, said Brunel “would be turning in his grave”.
However, HS2 said the tunnel would not affect the graves. A spokesman added: “The preferred route for consultation goes under Kensal Green Cemetery, between 80 and 115 feet below. Because of the depth of the tunnel the graves will not be disturbed.”
