They want to stop members of parliament travelling first class. That puts us below local councillors and officers of local government. They all travel first class.

Do they really?  When I was a local councillor I travelled standard class every time and mostly at my own expense, although I did claim one fare to Wales I think.  I would be surprised if any of my colleagues travelled first class.  I have also travelled on business quite a lot, always in standard class rail or economy class if I was flying.  Normally I am sleeping or reading rather than working, but I have been known to work on the train, and whatever I am doing I am normally surrounded by lots of other people working away.

I do have some sympathy for Winterton though.  My reasons for travelling standard are very similar to his reasons for travelling first class – I don’t like to travel first class because you find yourself sharing the carriage with a “totally different type of people” – people like Nicholas Winterton.

The end of his little episode was quite telling too.  He said:

The people who increasingly dominate this House are people who are intelligent, but they go from school to university, university to researcher, researcher to adviser, then to candidate.  They have no experience of life outside. Have they ever paid wages at the end of the week?  Have they ever been through negotiations over a business deal?  Have they been in the law? No.

Very telling.  Note that real-life experience is not being paid wages at the end of the week but paying somebody else.  How many people do actually pay somebody else and negotiate business deals?  A very small proportion I am guessing.  It is another way of saying that you need to be from management to be in parliament – forget about being an ex-teacher or something like that.

Just out of interest, I checked Nicholas Winterton’s biography on Wikipedia to see what his experience of real life is and found:

• Prep school
• Rugby school
• National service (an officer in the 14th/20th Kings Hussars)
• Trainee sales executive at Shell-Mex and BP
• Sales & general manager of a construction machinery company
• MP

I don’t know how long the traineeship lasted, but the national service was from 1957-59 and the sales & general manager job started in 1960 so it could be anything from a few weeks to an absolute maximum of nearly two years.  Maybe things were different in those days, but it seems like a very easy path through life.

Statue of Enzo Piano at Versailles

Got back from another quick trip to France tonight.  There were a couple of meetings today, but the first was at 10:00 so I went out yesterday.

Back in the old days I could have done it all in a day – when you could still fly from Gatwick to Orly and could turn up at the airport 15 minutes before take-off and still get on a plane.Now you can’t get to Paris at all from Gatwick so, despite living next door to an airport, it is a six-hour train journey.  The time difference makes it effectively seven hours.   On the plus side, being forced to go the day before means a chance for a little sight-seeing.

My heart wasn’t really in it this time though.  I didn’t even bother to take my big camera.  That was a pity because there are currently soem really neat statues of famous architects in the grounds of the Palace at Versailles.  They look normal from a distance, but up close you can see they are actually very angular and almost abstract.

Not that I could have got good pictures anyway – it started raining as soon as I got to the Palace so I gave up and went looking for my hotel.  Of course, by the time I found it the rain had stopped.  All very frustrating.

But not quite as frustrating as coming home and missing the Brighton train by less than a minute and having to wait around for half an hour for the next FCC train. ¹

I had already had to wait around Gare du Nord for a couple of hours.  Because we are encouraged to buy the cheapest, non-transferrable, non-refundable tickets I tend to book later trains so that if I get held up for any reason, or if the meeting time gets changed I can still use the ticket.  If everything goes well I have loads of time to kill.

Gare du Nord is not the best place to kill time.  Step outside the station and you never get more than a few metres without getting pestered by somebody begging for money or cigarettes or trying to sell you something.

Not complaining though.  It is a change of scenery, and I do like France and the French railways.  Top travelling tip I learned this time: wearing steel toecapped boots plays havoc with the metal detectors at Eurostar security.  Loved the way the guard there waved his wand all over looking to see what set the alarms off and then whacked my toes with it to make sure they were really steelies.

1. Do follow that link BTW – its brilliant!

Started at Crawley station just after 6:00am.  Met my colleague at St. Pancras and took the Eurostar.  Various Metro delays meant that we only just got to head office in time for our meeting – so no chance to get even a snack for lunch.  The meeting itself over-ran by quite a bit.  In fact it over-ran the time the translation ladies were contracted for so they had to pack up and go, leaving three Brits in the middle of a meeting conducted in French…

Took the Metro back to Gare du Nord afterwards and finally had time to eat.  Persistant drizzle all day so no enthusiasm for taking photos, and not enough time to find a major FNAC or Virgin Megastore and look for French music DVDs.

The Eurostar home arrived late and I finally reached Three Bridges at about 10:00pm.   Not complaining though: got to expect the odd duff trip.  Last time I managed a couple of hours in the Palais of Versailles gardens and an hour in Montmartre cemetery so on aggregate I think I am winning, and at least it kept me away from news sources.

Colleagues who commute in from Croydon will save more than £40 a month – making it more tempting to take a train instead of driving.  Pretty good when combined with the discounts on Metrobus season tickets that the company has negotiated.

For those not living near a convenient train line there are also all sorts of incentives for car-sharing and cycling.

And still the car park fills up by 9:30…

The distance between Heathrow and Gatwick is about 25 miles as the crow flies.  On the current roads you could travel between them in an hour if you were very lucky.  On a direct road you could do it in half an hour.  On a direct rail link you could do it in as little as 6 minutes.  Theoretically.

I’m not talking about something like the Gatwick Express that just puts different rolling stock on the same tracks as existing services with a little bit of separation of platforms, but a purpose-built, absolutely straight, state-of-the-art rail link.  Possibly even using maglev technology, preferably in a straight tunnel.

You cut come corners, and cause a bit more disruption, by using a deep cut & cover tunnel instead of boring as far as possible, but it would have to be dead straight so the trains can get to a fast cruising speed quickly and stick at that speed.

Maglevs are easily capable of over 300mph,((4000mph if you put them in a vacuum but that is a bit ambitious and not necessary))  but even an average of 250mph for the whole journey would mean a 6-minute trip.  That is not a train journey: that is just a shuttle between terminals.  With that sort of link you could treat Gatwick and Heathrow as a single airport and its combined number of terminal and runways would let it function as a decent hub.  If I remember rightly, it can easily take a lot more than 6 minutes to get from one gate to another in Singapore airport.  I reckon you should aim for speeds that would enable a PR-friendly 5-minute journey, but personally I would be happy with 6.

Not only that, but it would reduce a lot of congestion on the south-west bit of the M25 and surrounding areas as those people living near Gatwick who got transferred to Heathrow could just go to their nearest airport and shuttle across – they could even do it by an expanded Fastway instead of driving.

Drawbacks?  Well it would be very expensive, but an investment for the future as long as the link was more future-proofed than Birmingham’s ill-fated maglev.  It would also cause a shift in certain air traffic over time.

If the scheduled flights that rely on a hub-based network did expand, as predicted, they would force out some of the charter flights which would take up any unused capacity at Stanstead or Luton.  Very bad for those of us living in the shadow of Gatwick who may want to take a holiday sometime, but a serious upgrade of the ‘Thameslink’  line from Gatwick to Luton would help there, as would a more direct link to Stanstead.   But that is a selfish view from a local: most people outside Sussex, Surrey and this end of Kent would find it just as easy to get to Luton or Stanstead if that happened.

If the other predictions hold true instead – that air traffic will not grow in the way the airlines and governments say – then we still have a lot more flexibility, a world-beating transport link and the other potential benefits to anybody working at Heathrow or Gatwick rather than a white elephant runway.

So whichever of the opposing groups are right with their forecasts it would be a good thing.

Needs a more rigorous feasibility study than the one I did on the back of a fag packet, but I like the idea.  Far more practical than most of my transport ideas.¹

1. The less said about the pogo zimmer frame the better I think

Notre Dame, November 2008

I’ve just got back from a little trip to Paris.  I can’t even call it a flying visit because I took the Eurostar again.  They are up and running after the fire, but not so frequent and the journe takes even longer.

It was another visit to our French offices for a union-related meeting where the top brass of the division tell a selection of workers from various European sites about what is going on, and a handy excuse to try out the new camera.

Looked at one way it was a bit of a disaster, because I am not really happy with the results, but its all a learning experience.  Half the time I was messing around with settings I don’t really understand when I would have been better off leaving it all on full auto.  The other half of the time I left it on full auto but might have done better doing something like changing the ISO settings or using a wider aperture.  The problem was that although I left home at about 7:30am yesterday I didn’t reach Paris until about 2pm, local time.  At this time of year the sun is already low in the sky, and it was pretty overcast.

Outside the Louvre, November 2008

Still… you have to learn somehow, don’t you?   I just took pictures of typical tourist sights and some random things while walking from Gare du Nord to St Michel, where I caught a train to Versailles before the rush hour.

After freshening up a bit I went out in the dark to try some night photos (also disappointing) and had a chat witha Canadian who was out doing the same thing but with a bigger camera and a much bigger lens.

I stayed at the same hotel as last time, a stone’s throw from the Palais, but didn’t go near the place – being starving I headed to the market square in search of food.  Its not a bad hotel: every room is a presidential suite.  What that means is that bath is just the right size for President Sarkozy…

Today was a bit better.  After our meeting I got a lift to the nearest train station (St Quentin en Yvelines I think) and caught the RER back to St Michel.  The light was a bit better and I walked up to Gare du Nord by a different route – passing through the garment and textile quarter.

St Eustache (?), Paris, November 2008

I eventually got home around 9pm today, feeling more than a bit knackered.  I’m not sure if that is down to a lot of walking around Paris with luggage in tow, or the many, many hours spend numbing my backside on train seats, or a combination of the two.  36+ hours out of the house for a two-and-a-half hour meeting is a bit excessive though.

After two such trips this year I really fancy going back for a few days on holiday, so I can wander round without having a loaded backpack.

What is more worrying is that trucks full of phenol are carried through the tunnel, but it still turns out to be more resilient than the average pier…  what is it with piers and fires?

Is it a ploy by business travellers to make rail travel even more expensive and slower than it is so that they can make a sound business case for travelling by car instead as a cost-saving measure?  (Answer: no. But that’s how it would end up)

1. and probably in first class with a guaranteed seat

Laura Moffatt (Crawley, Labour): an oral question to Tom Harris about railways.

Plans have been published for the £5.5 billion upgrade of the Thameslink line, which is very welcome for our constituents. How will my hon. Friend make sure that it runs to time and to cost, and that its effect on the travelling public is minimised, including the upgrade to Gatwick airport?

Francis Maude (Tory, Horsham) a written question

To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster how many copies of the Morning Star (a) the Cabinet Office and (b) 10 Downing Street purchase each day.

Nice to see Frankie tearing himself away from his many directorships for long enough to spend a couple of hundred of my pounds getting a flunky to write a question about the things that really matter rather than actually turning up to Parliament and wasting the junior transport minister’s time with a question about transport, of all things – the long-overdue¹ improvements to the old Thameslink service that will offer a greatly improved service to both Crawley and Horsham.

1. so overdue that the original project was called Thameslink 2000, giving a clue as to when it was expected