The photo story of my August trip to Northern Serbia – can now be downloaded here. 

Feat: Planet Earth’s maddest trumpet festival

Feat: An adoring tribute in pictures to my new favourite hotel. We had lift off! One day all hotels would be like this

Feat: Belgrade – it ain’t pretty but I love it 

Feat: Subotica – it is pretty and I love it. My new favourite Art Nouveau town that nobody knows

Went to see the Richard Long exhibition at the Tate Britain.

At first there seems something banal, too cool and reductive about it – but then like settling into the rhythm of a long walk…

Relativity and measurement

Straight lines and meanders

Stone and water

Movement and stillness

Outside and Inside

The transient and the long lasting

The physical and the temporal

Circles and squares

Limited and liberating

Chance and intent

Walking, eating, sleeping

And always the walk

Of his walks I dreamt most about walking until the first cloud appears in the sky, walking from Stonehenge to Glastonbury on June 21st, and walking every track and road within a certain radius of the Cerne Abbas Giant

solvitur ambulando

I’ve posted some fairly upbeat posts about tackling climate change recently – but there was a less than optimistic message about the latest climate change science from Dr Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change to this year’s big low carbon vehicle event and conference held at London’s City Hall.

Here’s what came out of it…

Health warning: this was based on my notes – plus the issues are highly technical, and many of them are moving so fast that it’s difficult to for anyone to provide a settled overview.

The context is scary…very scary

Dr Kevin Anderson, Research Director for the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research presented on the latest climate change science.

It’s looking very unlikely we will manage to reign in GHG emissions to prevent dangerous climate change of 2 degrees. The science says we will have to make monumental efforts to rapidly reduce GHG if we are to avoid far worse than that including the serious risk of runaway climate change scenarios based on a series of possible tipping points and feedback loops (including the land mass becoming a carbon source rather than a carbon sink)

GHG emissions are still rising. The time for action on a scale we have never achieved so far is now.

We need to stop thinking about long term targets and start acting now – as given that carbon hangs around for 100 years it is cumulative amounts that matter – not what we may do in the year 2049.

You want more challenges? By 2050 the population of the world is forecast to be 9 billion (up from 6.7 billion today) and the number of light duty vehicles is expected to triple.

Is the Government providing enough leadership

According to the poll of LCVP members – not enough.

According to the car and oil industry – yes. Government is setting a clear direction and the car industry is only heading in one direction now – which is lower carbon.

But…there’s a view from the car and oil industry that regulation and target setting needs to go global. There are too many different targets and standards for car emissions in different parts of the world.

General feeling was perhaps that yes the Gov was showing leadership – but not enough given the scale of the challenge. This is not a problem that can be solved by consumers exercising moral fibre and informed choices alone.

Car industry – dinosaurs or innovative thinkers?

Well…the overall view from the industry appeared to be that they will keep pushing the boundaries on these new fangled technologies and options but incremental improvements to petrol and diesel power would inevitably be the main focus for the short to medium term. And the EU targets for car emissions (that they helped water down) were very tough and challenging.

However, the sudden demise of the reactionary US car industry and its partial take over by Obama is a sign of paradigm shift.

Toyota rep also suggested that the future was e-transport and that the current model of car ownership could fragment into car clubs, leasing, rental and smartcard access to different travel options.

So where are we going on low, and ultra low carbon vehicles

Unfortunately it’s too early to know what the winning technologies and fuels are…and there’s no ‘silver bullet’. At the conference were exponents of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and Shell made a strong case for advanced high tech bio-fuels. However, plug-in cars have emerged as the option that everybody wants to talk about.

Bring on the plug-in cars?

The technologies are coming on leaps and bounds (outside were electric, fuel cell and hybrid cars and vans that had just completed a London to Brighton demonstrator run). An electric four seater Mitsubishi car will be available for purchase in November – there was also an e-Mini which is currently being trialled by BMW. Many of these vehicles now have a range of 80 to 100 miles and look and increasingly perform like regular cars.

They may not be competitively priced though – either for the vehicle or fuel. Ford rep reckoned it would be another decade before they were.

And they need the infrastructure (ie the charge points). Denmark and Israel are racing away on this but Boris Johnson told the conference that he wants London in the mix and will be aiming to have the infrastructure in place for 100,000 electric cars in 2015. Though will there be the affordable vehicles to take advantage of that infrastructure (see above)?

Then there’s the batteries. Hard to tell from the claim and counter claim at the conference (plus it’s a technical area in which I’m not at expert) but there are further issues relating to weight and charging. You will never be able to charge them up rapidly – so garages where you can change the used-up battery for a charged-up one (rather than have the car out of action for hours while the used-up battery is re-charged) might also be needed.

One of the car industry reps says that battery cars are where mobile phones and laptops were a decade ago – in other words before they became light, reliable and convenient.

And of course if the electricity that feeds the plug-in cars was generated in a dirty, carbon-intensive way then the carbon gains from plug-in cars are significantly reduced.

The attraction of plug-in cars to politicians appeared to me to be that it doesn’t involve tough, complex and often unpopular policies like LEZs or road user charging – you can tell people they get to keep their cars and the culture that goes with it – but now it’s green. Plus plug in cars are just that little bit over the horizon – so no immediate political downsides or tricky practical issues to be dealt with now.

All of which helps explain why electric cars are so hot right now for Politicians in the US and round the World. This includes our own Lord Adonis who majored on plug-ins in his speech to the conference (though unless I’m missing something there’s no clarity on how precisely we get from DfT support for the concept to a worked through plan for achieving it on the ground)

I may well be wrong on this but is there a danger that by going for an over the horizon technology is a displacement activity for getting on with mass conventional hybrid introduction??? Or will we end up with plug-in hybrids as the intermediate stage (the third generation Prius will be a plug in Hybrid)???

And finally on electric cars – there was a film out a few years back called ‘Who killed the electric car?’ A docco about how the electric car was sabotaged by the industry. Now the makers of that film are making a new film about the return of the electric car.

What about buses?

Buses hardly got a mention at the conference – which underlines what we’ve heard elsewhere which is that the Gov and industry focus will be car and light vans. Because of their volume and because they are easy to decarbonise (because they are lighter)

Not good news for the environmental credentials of the bus (already the largest source of NOX emissions in many town centres and when its carbon advantages are not as significant as perhaps many might think).

However, there was some interesting stuff on how some cities are forging ahead on bio-gas powered vehicles from municipal waste. Lille and Graz for example have been powering their entire bus fleet with gas from municipal waste for years. I’m not sure why other than for regulatory reasons – why we couldn’t have a similar pilot here.

Indeed one speaker argued that municipal authorities are the right unit of Government for piloting significant low carbon vehicle fleets – as the nation-state can be too large but a city that knows where it’s going can give the market and innovators the confidence to invest.

Enjoyed a tribute the Leeds locomotive building industry (RIP) that was D2578’s Homecoming Weekend at the Middleton Railway.

In my related internet explorations I came across the Leeds Historical Exploration Society’s site – which is a site of record of their various expeditions. Among their explorations is one of the last surviving of evidence of Leed’s tram system. At one stage there were plans to put it underground – instead the who thing was scrapped at the end of the Fifties – dedicated reserved tracks alongside main roads, the lot.

But there’s more than transport stuff on there – and there’s more on hidden Leeds on this related flikr site.

But in the meantime here is an artists impression of the modernised city centre underground tram system that Leeds could have had …

Went to an interesting debate hosted by the Green Alliance last night, which featured leads from the three main parties on climate change.

Key themes:

- the biggest issue on climate change is can a global deal be done (given this requires the developed world to support the developing world)?

- there is a consensus between the three main parties on climate change (all three supported the Climate Change Act) and there will need to continue to be an anti-democratic conspiracy between the three main parties as tackling climate change will require a radical, dramatic and sometimes unpopular thirty year strategy which is systematically followed through

- this is a debate that’s moving fast (thank god). Less than a year ago carbon trading was the sole answer. Now its carbon trading plus direct intervention – for example the recent moves on carbon capture for coal-fired power stations.  Some of this more interventionist policy is also a good example of politicians over-riding the civil service which in many Departments suffers from ‘producer capture’. It’s a good sign -  but it’s a shame its taken so long for a Labour Government to start to do this.

- the Climate Change Act is revolutionary because it is not based on economics or cost benefit analysis – its based on regulation, and it has the support of all three parties

- should climate change continute to be labelled and marginalised as an ‘environmental’ issue by the media anymore?

- one of the next phases of the climate change debate will be that climate change is coming and this is what it means for the UK. This will bring people up short.

- NGOs and the green movement are important in this debate because they play an important part in forming and informing public opinion. The politicians on the panel appealed to the green movement to move from a negative, doomy stance (which promotes a feeling of helplessness among the public) to an Obama-style, we can rise to this challenge approach. Hilary Benn used a Martin Luther King analogy. King’s speech was ‘We have a dream’ not ‘We have a nightmare’

There was some good insights from a Mori pollster on the pannel on public opinion.

- The public are fatalistic about climate change – it’s now seen like death and taxes. Undesirable but what can you do?

-  One of the very few things that pollsters can find consensus on among the public is that one of the best things about England is its heritage – and that includes the landscape. Is there a way in which this can be utilised in the climate change debate?

- The public want and expect the Government to take on climate change and be innovative about it. But they want it to be done fairly. Fairness is key. As an aside it struck me that a perceived sense of the lack of fairness of Manchester’s road user charging proposals could be one factor in why the vote was so heavily against. 

All in all a very thoughtful and high quality debate – and encouraging. As in my previous post on the mass introduction of CNG vehicles in Delhi I think fatalism about climate change is a cop out. It’s now a practical challenge so let’s gone with it – win or lose. 

Also it wasn’t the kind of debate that you normally get to hear as it’s unlikely the mainstream media would ever be likely to cover it unmediated by reductive cliches. But then right now the mainstream media is obsessed with politician’s expenses rather than climate change - the public’s reaction to which underlines how reassuring important to Brits is the notion of  ‘fairness’.

The photo story of a trip through the backwaters of the Indian state of Madyha Pradesh this Christmas and New Year can be found here.

Twenty years ago I was given a book by a widowed lady from my dad’s church – from her husband’s library. I’ve only just got round to reading it – but somehow she was right to choose it for me and it was right to keep it all that time to read it.

It’s rare to read the story of an ordinary person’s life from the nineteenth century – told in their own words. Like seeing a documentary when all you’d ever seen of a place before was via films and dramas. His energetic, inquisitive, largely non-judgmental nature compensates for his mannered, auto-didactic writing style.

The person in question being James Dawson Burn. The book being the ‘Autography of a Beggar Boy -  in which will be found related the numerous trials, hard struggles, and vicissitudes of a strangely chequered life; with glimpses of social and political history over a period of fifty years’.

Popular in its time – but since then its drifted into obscurity. His story criss-crosses the UK and Ireland, a succession of jobs and professions with the tranformation of Britain into the urban industrial age as the backdrop.

He starts the tale on the road with his drunken ex-soldier step father who begs, steals and drinks his way round the Scottish lowlands, becoming acquanted with its every jail. From there the trajactory of his life is generally upward but never settles, is never truely securely based. Hatter, Oddfellow and reform activist,  pub landlord, directory salesman, seaman, begger, tradesman, labourer.

What’s striking is the insecurity and precariousness of even the respectable life of the time. When industrialisation could fatally destabalise a craft and a trade which had taken years of apprenticeship to learn and find a place within. Or when new forms of capitalist speculation and endeavour failed or collapsed. Take to the road – with or without your family. Go on the tramp.  In the early years of the book the travelling tradesmen with goods to sell, or the begger with a good story to sell were the only way that news from the wider world reached the farmsteads and small towns. Cities like Glasgow were ‘embellished with piazzas and pillars, half gothic and half Norman…the miles of splendid quays which have been efected of late, were then sleeping quietly in their quarries.’

The railways change all that as the book progresses and the cities take on a form we can recognise today.

‘…the railway acted the part of the great magician in its wonderful transformations. The high level bridge which spans the Tyne, in the novel character of a pair of bridges, is one of the greatest undertakings of the age. The old brig which unites Newcastle and Gateshead, looks like an ancient pigmy beneath its modern rival.’

Thank you Mr and Mrs Marvill.

Before the de-industrialisation of the North, and the unit-isation of the railways, the youth cult of bashing was in full swing. Bashing being the art of accumulating haulage behind railway locomotives – either by type, or by distance, or by both.

At that time the railways were still stocked with rolling stock from the ‘modernisation’ era that preceeded and paralled the Beeching era. The diesel locos that had replaced steam were still powering many of the types of workings that those steam engines had – including loose coupled freights and summer Saturday specials to seaside resorts.

The Miners strike was still to come. Rail privatisation was difficult to imagine. Thatcherism hadn’t become a fully fledged ‘ism’ – didn’t stop the riots though. There was still long shadows hanging over the railways – strikes, lack of investment, a total lack of enthusiasm for rail from the Conservatives (coupled with long standing antagonism from the civil service). When the railways ground to a halt on strike days it felt like the last days were upon us.

Bashers were not train spotters. They had no time for ‘kettles’ (steam engines). They were in thrall to the oldest, noisiest and most battered locomotives. Mostly consigned to freight and working out of depots in the deepest recesses of industrial England – Thornaby, Gateshead, Tinsley, Healey Mills. On Summer Saturdays, they would emerge on holiday trains to Blackpool, Skegness, Aberystwyth and Llandudno.

Long trains of compartment stock would draw in behind their monstrous traction – the racket swirling round the station. The front carriages invaded by the bashers – toting their addidas and head bags. Then away, to much flailing and bellowing out of the windows in tribute, triumph, adrenalin and identification

They didn’t turn out to be the last days in the way it looked like at the time. Since then rail’s time has come with passenger numbers soaring. Everything the stolid defenders of rail were arguing at the time – that rail was the right way to go – has come to pass. But at the same time the rail network has descended into some kind of plasticky, modular blandness.

Bashers were worshiping machine and speed like some mutated anglo Saxon strain of futurism. Looking to let loose, to find camaraderie. To mainline nostalgia. To order and catalogue a world that was always slipping away. To subvert the purpose and conventions of rail travel, whilst respecting every aspect of the mode more than any ‘normal’

To mark the last great flourish of locomotive manufacturing in the country that invented it. Wave after wave of orders from Vulcan Foundry, Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns, Brush foundry. As Britain’s late start on replacing steam turned into a stampede. Britain’s locomotive manufacturing industry kept going for a few years more turning out heavy duty industrial design for rail modernisation. Designs heroic in their solidity.

Thrash – ‘the noise made by classic diesel locomotives’
Clag – ‘A term describing the often spectacular (especially blackened, as in Class 37 or whitesmoked, as in Class 55) exhaust emissions of many older British diesel locomotives, especially Classes 52 and 55′
Dreadful: ‘Exclamation denoting enthusiastic approval’

From the summer of 1982 the volume of rateable workings was still high but beginning its long but exponential decline.

A West Yorkshire day rover would give access to the fun and games to a relative bashing lightweight and impoverished sixth former. And sometimes further afield.

Saturday 26th June 1982

40 058 Leeds to Manchester Victoria (class 31 hauled portion attached by 08 at Huddersfield) for haulage
40 069 through freight at Man Vic
40 012 ‘Aureol’ through parcels at Man Vic
47 135 + 47 210 double headed Trans-Pennine running over an hour later
47 002 Manchester Victoria to Huddersfield for haulage in the rain
46 010 Huddersfield to Bradford Interchange (Weymouth to Bradford) for haulage
25 224 Shipley to Leeds

Saturday 11th September 1982

Haulage

47 305 Bradford – Huddersfield
47 286 Huddersfield – Dewsbury
47 526 Dewsbury – Leeds
40 183 Leeds – Huddersfield
40 056 Huddersfield – Leeds
45 009 Leeds – Huddersfield
40 197 Huddersfield to Leeds
31 295 Keighley to Leeds
40 004 Leeds to Huddersfield
47 095 Huddersfield to Leeds

Rosebay Willow herb seeds drift and eddy
A signal stop
The carriage creaks in the heat

An hour and a half at Wakefield Kirkgate 24th November 1982

37 131 HM loose fitted coal
56 106 TI MGR
47 373 HM empty MGR
40 172 SP Tankers
56 030 HM empty MGR
40 162 KD
31 168 IM
37 023 MR mixed unfitted
47 291 cartec
56 093 HM full MGR
56 106 TI MGR
37 040 HM
37 123 HM brakevan

A stolen afternoon from School
Succession of freight trains
Liberation