Snippets and gleanings 3.0: Something for the weekend

On the right track?
So Rishi Sunak wants to invest his £36bn saving from cutting HS2 on upgrading railway infrastructure throughout the country? As many of his conference promises unravel he has been called out by RMT union leader, the sainted Mick Lynch, for presiding over the cutting of nearly 500 posts in the crucial Track Renewal Service (TRS) organisation within Network Rail supply-chain operations. These come on the back of massive government funding cuts which mean a decline in renewals for the next five years, despite the fact that the Office for Rail and Road has made clear that Network Rail should increase planned spending on renewals by £600 million. We can trust the Tories with our public services, right? Yeah, right!

Belt and road to nowhere
But we're not the only country in the world which knows how to fuck up new rail infrastructure. The first section of Kenya's Chinese-built railway from Mombasa was opened with much fanfare in 2017. Two years later work on the tracks stopped in the middle of the country and the master plan of linking it to other landlocked countries in East Africa has derailed. This means the project is not generating as much income as was hoped, while Kenya is left servicing loans totalling around $4.7bn (£3.9bn), mainly borrowed from Chinese banks. Kenya used to be run by the British. They obviously learned well from their colonial masters.

And then there's Germany
For a country which prides itself on its efficiency, its railways, once the envy of Europe for punctuality, are now a national joke - albeit a sick one. German rail commuters are in despair and Deutsche Bahn faced the humiliation of being barred from operating on Swiss railways because of its unreliability. Recently two hundred musicians of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra travelled by train to perform Mahler's second symphony in Berlin. What should have been a straightforward journey turned into a ten-hour marathon. They finally made the concert (a triumphant performance by all accounts) but the planned live radio broadcast had to be cancelled. Do say: Gott im Himmel! Don't say: Vorsprung durch Technik.

Lost but not forgotten 
The ever-informative Ian Visits: Rail News reports that TfL’s Lost Property Office, which recovers more than 200,000 items each year, is on the move. Opened in 1933, it was based next to Baker Street station until 2019. When it outgrew the space it moved to a temporary location in South Kensington. Now, four years later, it’s moving again, this time to West Ham, because the South Kensington building is about to be redeveloped. If they leave anything behind I guess they're well-placed to find it again.

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