Ignore this is you are not a train geek: I'm back on the Class 323s which I was on when I was living in Manchester and worked in Cheadle Hulme, They're packed every morning and the uphosterly's a horrible green. The Class 323 is the one with the really whiny gearbox. In this area they're run by London Midland.

I did make it to Manchester Pride 2010 but only for a couple of days, it's kind of hard to make a whole weekend of it when you don't live 300 yards down the road from it any more, but for the time I was there I did enjoy myself. I especially enjoyed the debut Cubstars perfomance, which stars (amongst others) my friend Brian.

I will get photos onto this site once I've fixed the plugin that sucks them up from Facebook but which has stopped working properly since the WordPress 3.0 rollout. If you're friends with me on Facebook you'll be able to see them in my photo albums.

It wasn't the best of Prides I've ever had but I did make the best of it. I'm a bit skint and stressed at the moment and I'm chalking it up to my head not being in the right space for it. Perhaps next year when I can save up for it and do it properly, who knows. I shall be trying Birmingham Pride for the first time first, next summer.

It was a little strange being back in Manchester for the first time in a number of months. I still do miss the place, and I think one day I would like to move back. But I've got a lot of hard work to do and shit to sort out before I can even consider it. We'll see. Manchester has been such a big part of my life and had I been given the choice I would not have left. My current surroundings are by no means unpleasant but they are, basically, alien to me given my limited knowledge of the area, although in fairness that knowledge is improving every day.

I've got a lot of hard work to do between now and the end of the and I've no choice but to grit my teeth and bear it. I'm still looking for a few side consultancy projects that I can do in my spare time, so if you think you can take advantage of my skillset please get in touch.

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Front view in the car park at home

I've got a new set of wheels after not having my own car for two and a half years ever since I gave my BMW 320d back. It's a 2001 BMW 735i Sport (E38), one lady owner, and it's lovely. I've always wanted an E38 and what with them getting a bit long in the tooth with the introduction of two new 7 series ranges since they stopped making the in 2001 I thought it important to scratch this particular itch before they became unfeasible to own as daily drives.

It's nine years old (last of line 2001 model) and has 139,000 miles on the clock. It's in good working order with nothing fundamentally wrong with it, however, due to its age and mileage there are a few things that it needs doing to it, including (but not limited to):

• It need an inspection service as part of its normal service cycle.
• The steering judders under heavy braking. This apparently means that the bushes need replacing.
• The LCD screen on the dashboard is pixelated (about half the pixels don't work). This is apparently due to a perished ribbon cable and so I've ordered a replacement kit off eBay.
• The boot mat is dirty and horrible and needs replacing.
• A couple of bits of body trim on the passenger side are either missing or damaged and so need to be replaced.
• The satellite navigation system needs a software and maps data update (its map data is from 2001). Again this is apparently easily and cheaply achievable using a CD kit from this guy.

It also requires a few minor personal customisations:

• Debadging.
• Replacement leather gear selector.
• Chrome rings for dashboard.
• Chrome grills replacements.
• It needs an AUX port for iPhone connection, if the stereo will support it.

At some point down the line I also intend to replace the speaker system and satellite navigation system, but they are large projects requiring a reasonable amount of money so they will have to wait for a while.

There's a wealth of E38 geeks on the Internet who have become E38 oracles over the years so I won't be short of help and information as and when I need it. It's been some years since I owned a car that I can treat as a "project" car, i.e. not a car that to do anything do would invalidate the warranty. The last car I had like this was my old blue Sierra, ever since then I've had new cars or cars that were still within their warranty period.

A few pictures (more to come once it's had a full spit and polish, it's a little dirty at the moment as the previous owner was still using it up until the day we bought it):

Side view as shown on Autotrader

Interior as shown on Autotrader

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Riding in the cab, as opposed to riding as a passenger, gives you a completely different perspective on rail travel. Obviously there's the unusual visual aspect of riding in the front, but you also get a very sincere understanding of how train driving works. John explained everything he was doing to me as he drove the trains, and you get to understand exactly why the train has to travel slowly sometimes, or why it has to stop; things that seem random, arbitrary and annoying when you're a passenger.

Indeed, John was so busy explaining the intricacies of train driving to me that he forgot to open the train doors when he pulled into a station on one occasion. A shout and a bang on the door from the staff soon jolted his memory though!

National Express HST power car

Inside the cab of the power car

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The proposals themselves are actually very reasonable. The planned improvements in public transport are widespread and comprehensive and I can see that they would be very effective. In an ideal world it would be difficult to argue against raising the money to pay for them from a congestion charge, especially since the proposed congestion charges are extremely reasonable, both in their cost and their application, when compared to the ludicrous and punitive charges levied against those who dare to have business in the centre of London on a weekday. It is, however, not an ideal world.

Unfortunately for the proponents of the proposed charging scheme and those who have planned how to spend its potential financial yield, we live in a country whose government has deliberately and consistently raped and pillaged both the car driving and public transport using public for over eleven years now. Every year the cost of both forms of transport has increased well beyond the rate of inflation and service and performance in both regards has consistently and dramatically decreased. The traveling public is constantly promised improvements in return for price increases and such improvements are rarely, if ever, delivered.

It is regretful, therefore, that no matter how good the proposals for improving public transport in Manchester are, I simply cannot advocate or support the introduction of a congestion charge to pay for them. I need to see the rewards for this scheme first, because too many times I feel I have been stiffed by being made to pay for promised improvements up front and then being let down. I'm quite willing to pay for improvements to public transport, but this time I need to see the goods before I'm going to get my wallet out. I insist on paying in arrears, this time, not in advance, because whenever I pay in advance the government just takes my money and runs, shouting vague promises and throwing hastily written IOUs over its shoulder as it trousers my cash. Enough is enough.

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When we returned to Terminal 1 on Monday I went up to the customer service desk, fully prepared for the mother of all fights with a jobsworth hiding behind the company's terms and conditions and stating categorically that British Airways couldn't possibly be held responsible for damage to personal property caused by uncaring staff and/or malfunctioning machinery and that it's left at the owner's risk, yadda yadda yadda. But it never came, and I was all geared up for it too!

Instead, a very nice gentleman took the details of the suitcase, produced a catalogue of luggage from under his desk and asked us to identify the suitcase in it, filled in a form in front of us and then without even looking at (much less actually examining) the suitcase, stated (without any sort of fanfare) that he was very sorry for the damage and that a replacement suitcase would be delivered to me in three to four days.

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. The same was true on Wednesday, when, sure enough, the replacement suitcase was delivered to my apartment. Not some cheap knockoff, the real Samsonite deal, a direct replacement.

Everyone loves to slag off British Airways but on this occasion I really can't fault them. Good for them. Bigup.

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So I went onto thetrainline.com, which is apparently the only national rail booking service (so it's not like they have any competition to be price-conscious with), and searched for trains from Heathrow terminal 1 to Manchester on the evening of Monday 12th May. I specified standard class and two adults. The minimum price quoted was £159. First class tickets were in excess of £400.

This, as you will agree, is quite ridiculous. I know that trains to Manchester, off peak, in standard class and booked far enough in advance can be booked for as little as £13.00 per person. I also know that the Heathrow Express and the tube, which the quoted price included, cost £15.50 and £3.50 per person respectively. So I did another search, this time for the last train from London Euston to Manchester, and sure enough it came up as £26.00 for both of us (£13.00 each). This means that the previously quoted price included £133 for 2 adults to travel from Heathrow T1 to London Euston, when I know that the actual price will be £38, buying walk-up tickets.

Where the hell are they getting this extra £95.00 from? For the privilege of not having to buy separate tickets for the various legs of the journey? We could buy the walk-up tickets, throw them in the bin and take a cab to Euston and still have a decent number of notes in our pocket out of that £133 that they wanted me to pay to get 20 miles from the airport to Euston. What the fuck?

Incidentally, were we able to take a carbon-belching domestic flight from Heathrow to Manchester it would have been £88 for the two of us, including all the taxes. Go figure.

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There will be no penalty that might actually mean something to those responsible. Network Rail directors will not only keep their jobs but they'll likely keep their bonuses too, safe in the knowledge that someone else will clear up their mess and bail them out of their incompetence. The entire board should be fired. That would hit them where it hurts.

I also notice that no form of compensation has been awarded to the affected passengers, who now face a £14m fine for their trouble. It's just pointless money recycling, with suitably inflated administrative fees being creamed off where it's deemed appropriate. Stupidity and shortsightedness compounded on top of stupidity and shortsightedness. I've come to expect little else from 11 years of the New Labour regime, which seems to prioritise some sort of war on common sense. The scary thing is that it's winning it, hands-down.

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The rail companies claim that they "need" this extra money in order to fund improvements in the railway system, which is the same excuse we've had for year upon year upon year with little return on the promises made. In fact, the only major railway infrastructure development that's taken place since privatisation is the electrification of the West Coast Mainline, which is currently the subject of another fiasco, which, thankfully, does not affect me. I'd be pretty fucking annoyed if it did though, especially considering the fare hikes.

However, what does rile me is when, on the day when the fare hikes came into effect, my train home was six minutes late, leaving me and my fellow passengers freezing our tits off on the platform. What provision in the Passenger Charter is made for this sort of delay? None. I'd have to freeze my tits off for an hour before Northern Rail would even think about giving a proportion of my extortionate fare back.

Then this morning, the guard on the 08:32 watched me buy my ticket from his colleague, then closed the doors of the train as I was approaching it. He just shrugged at me through the window, in the fully knowledge that I intended to board the train and that I was being held up by his incompetent ticket-vending mate. Fucking unacceptable, they're just taking the fucking piss.

Like I say, rail travel still just about suits me, but another fare increase and further examples of this sort of contempt for their customers will probably put me back in a car. That would definitely be a shame.

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Virgin's marvelous new Class 390 "Pendolino" electric multiple units which they use for many of their inter-city services, replacing the HST and Mark 3 hauled stock trains which were perfectly good and had many years of service left in them given a refurbishment programme, have several annoying design flaws which directly affect passengers.

You would be forgiven for assuming that modern rail vehicles such as these would have been designed with the modern rail traveler in mind, given that they were designed since the turn of the century. The modern rail traveler likes to be able to use his mobile phone on the train and, if possible, their laptop connected to the Internet using a wireless Internet connection. But this is not to be.

In order to cut costs and enable them to install cheaper air conditioning systems, the manufacturers of the Pendolino opted to use a special metallic sunscreen on the windows in order to reduce the heat inside the train produced by the sun. However, a side-effect of this sunscreen is that it effectively turns each coach into a Farraday cage when combined with the metal shell of the coach itself, making it impossible for mobile phones inside each coach to connect to their respective networks in any useful way. Genius.

Signal can be obtained in the vestibules at each end of each coach, because the metallic sunscreen has not been applied to the train door windows. This is great, until the train applies its brakes. Then it all goes wrong again.

The Class 390 Pendolino has "regenerative braking", a technology widely publicised by Virgin, which, when applied, actually returns electricity back to the National Grid. Each Pendolino multiple unit apparently returns enough power each year to supply Birmingham with electricity for a day or something like that, the details aren't really relevant, but it's something along the lines of the claim that if everyone gave up toast the electricity saved each day would power Birmingham for a week. Of course, if we just unplugged Birmingham, the rest of us could all have as much fucking toast as we like, but I digress.

So yes, regenerative braking sounds like it's a good idea, returning power to the National Grid and helping to reduce the rail vehicle's carbon footprint, all very grand and noble. Except, when applied, these regenerative braking systems create an enormously powerful electromagnetic field which, you guessed it, knocks out your mobile signal, whether you're in the vestibule or not. Genius.

The same problem has been flummoxing Virgin boffins charged with the design and deployment of wireless Internet connections aboard Virgin trains as successfully implemented by other train operators, namely GNER, on their East Coast Mainline services which use different types of trains (namely HST sets and Class 90 plus Mark 4 stock trains, neither of which have regenerative braking).

So I can't publish this post right now. Not only is Virgin's onboard wireless Internet service doomed, but I can't even get a mobile signal to post it via GPRS. Were I on a train that was designed in the 1970s, as is the case with the HST, I might understand. But the irony is that it would actually work on the HST, in stark contrast to this soulless electric multiple unit designed thirty years later. The terrible locomotive irony.

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Crossrail, although undoubtedly needed, is however a bit of a red herring. Most of the new route has already been built and has been in use for many decades. For the most part, the new trains will run on existing lines. The part that needs to be built, that will use up most of the £16bn, and will undoubtedly go over time and budget as all the usual suspects (consultants, New Labour cronies, etc.) jump on the gravy train is the tunnel under the centre of London. It really isn't like they're building a brand new east to west rail route through London, so the £16bn price tag and the planned timescale (over a decade from now) does seem a bit hefty. One has to wonder how far £16bn would go towards building one of the many shelved proposals to improve the urban motorway network in London, political correctness over climate change notwithstanding.

In any case it isn't right that a new public transport project, which the commuting public cries out for every day of their lives as they are packed onto their sardine tins on a railway network that hasn't seen any significant expansion since the second world war, is used as a shiny election badge. New Labour have had ten years to do something about the railway network in this country and they've fucked it up at every opportunity, except of course when it suits them.

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• If British Rail blue and grey had survived to the present day
• If Stagecoach owned 51% of Virgin Trains instead of 49% (Pendolino version)
• If the southern railway was never electrified
• If the Advanced Passenger Train was actually finished and then seconded to Eurostar duties
• If Virgin launched a double decker train like those seen in other countries
• First Great Western get desperate about their overcrowding problems and their new fleet of locomotives
• Westwood, Pimp my train!

Ironically enough, Stagecoach have won the franchise to run the former Midland Mainline and parts of the former Central Trains franchise from November, which they will operate under the brand East Midlands Trains, with branding very similar to that of their existing South West Trains franchise. Although they don't get any Pendolinos with that franchise, the Pendolino mockup is startling accurate when compared to their own mockup of how their Class 222s will look. They'll also get some HSTs, so it'll be interesting to see how similar they'll look to the HST mockup.

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