Thursday 29 August 2013

Trams on Test, Ashton under Lyne


Credit goes to Vanessa Dixon for filming and editing this interesting and maybe one day historic video. It is great to see ordinary citizens documenting every day life all around us. What may seem mundane or inconsequential now will one day be type of thing that future generations will look upon as memories of a bygone age.

20 comments:

Oi Jamie, wot did u say, let them eat cake? said...

Jamie Oliver says we are too lazy and we should be prepared to work an 80 hour week for minimum wage pay. That is a bit rich from a man with a personal fortune of £150,000,000 and a man who has the audacity to tell poor people to make broth with stale bread.

Eugenics said...

He was going to fix the education system by feeding the chav scum's offspring more vegetables wasn't he.
Perhaps he'd be better taking some lessons in KEEPING HIS F***ING MOUTH SHUT.

Trundle trundle into the space age said...

An inflexible, expensive, obstructive, low capacity transport system that was scrapped 70 years ago because it was fundamentally inferior is now being touted as the future, but virtually only in Manchester (a city with a rocketing population). It's being built because of pressure from the crackpot 'Green' lobby and political machinations within the three party system to create jobs in the north.
Fortunately there's some good news as the Thomas the Tank Engine fan club has bumped into reality as increasing numbers of senior figures in the transport, business and political spheres are starting to come out against the EU inspired lunacy of the £100 billion HS2, which will, if built enable a miniscule proportion of the population to travel from London to Manchester an 'incredible' 15 minutes faster (WOW), whilst simultaneously decimating vast swathes of our most beautiful and unspoiled countryside, which of course is ALREADY under the dire and exponentially growing threat from the immigrant led poulation explosion.
HS2 makes the trams look rational.

George Stephenson said...

We need a massive expansion of the tram network and HS2. Once HS2 is up and running additional capacity on the WCML will be utilized to serve towns without a direct link to London and Glasgow.

Anonymous said...

Great to see this modern and fantastic transport system almost operational to Ashton. There will always be those that will criticize.

Anonymous said...

I used the metro to travel from Droylsden to Bury market during the week. It was a very enjoyable and stress free journey.

Anonymous said...

All these reports occurred within hours of the MP s decision not to progress their Syria project.
Michael Gove has described himself as "a proud Zionist",[65] and supports the United Jewish Israel Appeal's fundraising activities.[6
“Israel should be assumed to continue to have an aggressive intelligence collection operations against the United States,” Pillar said. While much information is collected through traditional political contacts, “I would personally have no doubt that that is supplemented by whatever means they can use to find out as much as they can about what we're doing, thinking, deciding on anything of interest to Israel, which would include just about any Middle Eastern topic.”
Spying, he said, could give Israel “warning indicators” before any public decisions, and enable the country to put its “political machine in action” and get the United States to reconsider.
Michael Gove was so furious with Tory MPs for voting down intervention he had to be restrained by colleagues, it was claimed last night.The Education Secretary, a staunch backer of military action in Syria, shouted 'you're a disgrace' at those MPs who opposed the Government in the tense vote last night.
Libya is the most extreme example of political mayhem around the world disrupting output and causing a chronic shortfall in oil supply. Production has slumped in Iraq, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen and Syria itself, each for different reasons.
Iran is Israel’s enemy. Iran is therefore, naturally, America’s enemy. So fire the missiles at Iran’s only Arab ally Syria

Seem as though Israel will be shell shocked that their
war objectives are under threat,and their lobbying did not obtain the support they wanted.

Anonymous said...

MEN headlines.
Manchester has been voted the best UK city to live in yet again in a worldwide survey.
The city outranked London being named the 51st best place in the world to live with Melbourne, Australia taking the overall title for the third year in a row.
The Global Liveability Survey was complied by the Economist Intelligence Unit and took into account factors including stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.
75% of voters agree its No1

Throughout my years I must have been living unknowingly somewhere else

Syrian government attacks school children with napalm - bullshit alert said...

CMD: "You look a little frustrated William,

WW: Yes Dave, it is ok if I call you Dave Mr PM?

CMD: Yes, Wee Willy, so why the frustration?

WW: Well Mr PM, I mean Dave, the masses didn't buy the chemical attack story and I was really looking forward to another war.

CMD: Well Willy, what other horrific images of war could we use to hoodwink them into supporting a war?

WW: Mr PM, as a wee boy I remember seeing a horrible image of a young girl burnt by napalm during the Vietnam war, what if we industriously began circulating stories that Assad government is using napalm to attack school children?

CMD: You know what Wee Willy, that might just work, get onto the press office now and see what they can conjure up for us/

WW: Yippee, we might get our war after all if this works and if the Russians and Chinese get involved we might be able to celebrate the centenary of the WW1 with another world war.

Trundle trundle into the space age said...

@ George Stephenson, a theoretical50% increase in rail usage (a logistical, geographical and financial impossibiltiy) would only result in a 5% reduction in road usage due to the massively disproportionate and entirely necessary amount of the load the latter carries.
As the population explodes in what is already virtually the most overcrowded country in the world, cheap, mass transport is what will be required not outdated, expensive, obstructive inflexible 'systems' that can only ever do a miniscule proportion of the work, and can only exist at all because the road network does virtually all the work.
If it was cheap, underground or elevated (i.e not causing the wholesale obstruction to other road users it currently does) and capable of carrying a large proportion of the moving public I would be totally in favour.
There WILL always be those that criticise if criticism is justified and caple of being established, in this case using reasoned argument as opposed to unreasoned statement making with no counter argument.
If the tram was a transport panacea it would be being unrolled on a massive scale in every city in Britain, instead of a tiny amount of track in a handful of cities apart from Manchester, the latter only through the machinations of agenda groups and political expediency.

Fundamentally flawed said...

Cameron, more out of touch with public opinion on every significant issue than any Prime Minister in history.
Immigration, foreign intervention, foreign aid, his bizarre fixation with homosexual marriage (including a vile, sickening speech referring to 'gay schoolboys in love').
The man's judgement is arrogant, appalling and utterly wrongheaded in every meaningful and significant way.
The Conservatives should wake up and realise that he led them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in an unlosable election in 2010, in the middle of an appalling recession against the most unpopular government ever, led by Gordon Brown, the worst leader of the worst bunch of incompetents ever to hold office. The result was the coalition government with its array of LibDem cranks, degenerates and incompetents who cannot believe they're in power.
Senior Tories should get rid now, before it's too late.

Something wrong here said...

He may be completely bitchified. It's difficult to think of another explanation for his perverse combination of ignoring obvious and correct vote winning issues like tackling immigration (he manifestly shuns even mentioning or associating himself with the subject), and his out of left field, and totally out of touch with public opinion, 'moral' crusades on queers getting married and warmongering speeches on military intervention.
One wonders if events in his personal life have fundamentally warped his judgement.

rails 1 rubber 0 said...

The tram hater sees everything as one dimensional and only from his perspective. What trams and trains offer that other forms of public transport don't is speed and comfort and if you have to pay a little extra for those luxuries so be it.

Reimer said...

Gove was a cheerleader for Iraq, crossing party lines to praise Blair in the papers ("Freedom and Opportunity" he characterised the intervention, as if it were a mooted deregulation of MOT test-centres). He's clearly still shilling hysterically for Israel. If he signed up with the IDF and put his own arse on the line I could have a little respect for his putting his money where his mouth is.

Trundle trundle into the space age said...

@ Rails 1 rubber 0, I proposed a reasoned argument, it's your unreasoned statement with no counter argument that is one dimensional.
I don't have a perspective I have a view based on the facts, which leads to an argument, which leads to a conclusion. If you have a counter view let's here it.
I never said trams and trains didn't offer speed and comfort and there is clearly a case for some inter city trains, the London Undeground etc. Trams and the HS2 however are agenda driven politicised lunacy, patently unnecessary and not part of sensible, rational transport planning in terms of expense, capacity, obstructiveness, massive environmental destruction and inflexibility as outlined in my reasoned argument.

He'll do well said...

Gove has described himself as 'a proud Zionist.'

Bring back the horse said...

Trams make many places more accessible in a reasonable amount of time specially when combined with the train.

HS2 on the other hand will mean people flocks of people who work in London will move north and commute because its cheaper. The result will be a surge in demand for housing and i fear some areas locals will be priced out of town.

Anonymous said...

Which places does the tram, with its extremely limited number of stops and railbound nature, make more accessible?

HS2 will do next to nothing for the people of the north. At one tenth of the price and environmental cost it would still be very bad value.

Bring back the horse said...

The metrolink makes more places accessible because it connects well with other forms of public transport and in many cases cuts down journey times. We already have buses that stop every few hundred yards taking forever to get to where your going. If the metrolink did the same it would pointless.

Trundle trundle into the space age said...

Which places? It only goes along bus routes on main roads but has extremely few stops therefore it's less accessible. Or it uses former train lines. The infrastructure costs compared to buses are astronomical.
It's low capacity, expensive, obsructive and inflexible, all the reasons it was done away with 70 years ago. It suits a very small proportion of the better off moving public who don't like buses, but has no application as a cheap form of flexible, mass capacity, unobtrusive transport in a country and area with an exploding population.