450 class DEMU disposal NIR

I don't wish to write you a letter as you have utterly frustrated all reasonable attempts to engage in a two-way sensible conversation with numerous people from all aspects of this hobby. The SBR is completely a non-starter, other than your inane ramblings and proclamations about being on the edge of massive funding for what is in effect a long siding through bedlam nobody else has ever shown any support or encouragement or written a word to say there will ever be anything there. You managed to get banned from WNXX after the shear number of repetitive posts you put on there and you have seriously p*ssed a lot of industry movers and shakers both in the preservation and commercial railway world by writing letters offering to buy things that you don't have any hope of ever being in a position to buy. For goodness sake man why on earth would anybody want a load of junk imported from Ireland that is basically shagged out, horrible to look at, the wrong gauge and of no consequence to railways in this country? Your typing finger is writing cheques your spanner fingers can never cash or your pockets can meet.

Please, please please for the sake of anyone and everyone who is interested or involved in the world of railways be it preserved or commercial STOP now before you really go too far. Either join another group where your undoubted enthusiasm may be of great assistance to the effort to do something practical, take up model railways where you can run anything in any colour at any time or go out and try to understand what the dangly bits that point towards your knees really do.

 

You'd get a better response if you engaged seriously with the questions people have raised about your schemes - not least the SBR and 45015. As it is, I've seen the difference on two other forums between people with real industry and preservation knowledge, and your comments. I'm with the others on here, who consider you a danger to serious railway preservation, not to mention anyone downwind of your homespun asbestos removal techniques. You are taking serious peoples' time up when the odds on you being able to do anything are just about nil.

When you have a real scheme going, not just a Facebook group, who've got real money and experience, not to mention some credibility, then start asking people to support you. You might get somewhere.

And on the NIR DEMUs. I remember about 10 years ago there were lots of ideas for preserving SR EMUs. How have they survived? Why, because there aren't enough fans who are willing to spend money on them. So why do you think the NIR DEMUs will be any better - when they don't even have the charm of Mk1 SR EMUs?

As I said earlier, I'm out.

 

Silence is golden....

 

I cannot comment on funding applications for the SBR - success or failure - until the results are announced as it would not be up to me!

45015 is zero to do with me as a project - it was two fans from luton that started the facebook group about 45015, but they gave up after a little while, frustrated at having faced nothing but negative comments from people with your mind set.
They regarded people like you as 'idiots', always criticising all the time, and never offering or doing anything constructive.

As regards asbestos removal, I have *absolutely no interest* in doing that kind of work as it requires specialist air recirculation and to an extent, handling techniques, and the working area has to be completely sealed up.
All very time consuming and requiring great deal of facilities - not least to store the machinary.

The only time I have worked in an asbestos environment was 12 years ago, when after *all* the windows on a DMU car were broken and the alternative was to leave lots of asbestos contaminated waste all over the floor of the DMU vehicle, with the risk of wind blowing in through the windows blowing asbestos contaminated material all over the site.

If I hadn't cleared the asbestos contaminated material from the floor of the DMU car and taken it to the Gloucester tip -- asbestos skip then I could have been done for fly - tipping it as there would then have been an obvious hazard from it.
(What a good thing I didn't follow your implied advice).

 

The difficulty with having any two way conversation with the likes of you is that all you ever sit and do is type personal abuse all the time.
Others also have said all some poster's ever do is put obstacles in my way - and bitch all the time!

I did reply to a set of questions in a post from a wnxx man and to be fair it created one of my most successful postings ever.
http://www.facebook.com/notes/south_bedfordshire_railway/organisation-and-funding/10150646607949931

We have a limited company registered.
In a way such an order of proceeding creates a 'catch 22' situation really, as the lack of money or manpower or expertise etc; (people with all that tell me that they have too much on and no time for anything else etc).
The idea is to ask people for support and build up from that.

All I asked was a question about whether things were available I did not say I had money the company doesn't have.

Those people are a set of certifiable nutters and I am glad to see the back of them all.
Those two guys from Luton who ran the 45.015 group got so sick and tired of people (I suspect) were from there emerging on their FB group and typing abuse or bizarre postings.
Dozens were banned from the group, and they, lo and behold, went and set up some sort of group devoted to preserving 46.009 - which was written off in a train smash 25+ years ago.

Good.

 

Yes it is.

 

The asbestos discussion resulted in your banning from WNXX and may well result in legal action and possibly your death. As I said, you are a dangerous fool both to the movement and anybody who you have exposed to asbestos. Don't actually think taking blue asbestos out of a vehicle with a face mask and gloves, sticking it in the car in a bin liner to take to the council tip for disposal is really the way to go is it?

The SBR scheme is absolutely crackers. Applying for funding to all and sundry doesn't mean you will ever end up with a penny being awarded to you. You have been wibbling on about it for years and it is no closer to ever existing then it ever has been. Not one credible person has ever supported the scheme but still you try with the incessant public announcements.

With regard to the cl450 why on earth would want these abominations from Ireland? Who is going to work on them, where are you going to get the funding from (please don't say from a grant which is pending)?, who is actually interested in them? Did you not say (and I paraphrase) they are ready to run except regauging? Well what a minor job that is! IT ISNT A HORNBY TRAINSET. Apart from the 'just' regauging' they are knackered, corroded and life expired. Yep, ready to run. You would be more accurate if you said the Binbrook Crab was ready to run.

Grow up you silly person.

 

Is that a threat?

The owners of the DMU car from 1996 onwards the Essex Rail Traction Group paid for the removal of the DMU car from Norfolk to Dunstable, they said they had approval to bring it from the group running the new railway at AWD siding that they were involved with, and only six to eight weeks later did I discover that the railway had not known whom the owners of their site actually were (they thought it was an industrial site as it was beside old Vauxhall land and seperated from the branch by a fence) or the extent of DMU car's content or its poor condition.

In fairness to Essex Rail Traction, there was a court order from Southend County Court that the DMU car had to be removed from the site at Norfolk where it had been since March 1996, so they had no option but to remove it.

In fairness to Essex Rail Traction, they paid for the DMU car to be sheeted over down to sole bar level, and it was when vandals broke the windows the danger from escaping fibres arose.

It was me who reported the matter to the local council Environmental Health team.

All I did was to pick up the asbestos from the floor of the DMU car where it could have blown out on to the site, I did *not* remove any from between the panelling and the steel bodysides of the DMU car.

I also wore protective overalls.

I put the asbestos in to a boxes lined with plastic.
I seperated out the different levels of contamination - 'high' being pure fallen asbestos, 'middle' being broken glass and rubbish contaminated with asbestos fibres, 'low' being broken glass and waste with no (visible) contamination (but invisible fibres).

What legal action could there be?

Well I can tell you who *might* be able to take legal action....
Battlefield Railway against the Essex Rail Traction Group (the owners of the DMU car after they sold it in 1996), because the Essex Rail Traction Group alleged the Battlefield Railway were still the legal owners of the DMU car - when they were not the owners of it at all.
Battlefield Railway had to spend £3500 to clear their name by their solictors conduct an investigation in to the transaction, the result of the legal advice was that because HSE and HMRI had approved the sale (on basis that Essex Rail Traction Group had undertaken to take the DMU car to a registered site for asbestos removal) and it was Essex Rail Traction Group's failure to comply to the terms of the approval for sale (by not taking the DMU car to a registered site for asbestos removal) that resulted in it remaining contaminated after sale.

As regards this wnxx ban, this happened over a year after the asbestos discussion, after I reported a number of posts on the L835 DMU car as being off topic as they related to SBR scheme - which was a seperate issue entirely.

 

True.

 

True.

That is why SBR have a Limited Company registered.

 

*Not meaning to be annoying or nasty* but here is my reply to the asbestos issue...

What legal action could there be?

Well I can tell you who *might* be able to take legal action....
Battlefield Railway against the Essex Rail Traction Group (the owners of the DMU car after they sold it in 1996), because the Essex Rail Traction Group alleged the Battlefield Railway were still the legal owners of the DMU car - when they were not the owners of it at all.
Battlefield Railway had to spend £3500 to clear their name by their solictors conduct an investigation in to the transaction, the result of the legal advice was that because HSE and HMRI had approved the sale (on basis that Essex Rail Traction Group had undertaken to take the DMU car to a registered site for asbestos removal) and it was Essex Rail Traction Group's failure to comply to the terms of the approval for sale (by not taking the DMU car to a registered site for asbestos removal) that resulted in it remaining contaminated after sale.

The owners of the DMU car from 1996 onwards the Essex Rail Traction Group paid for the removal of the DMU car from Norfolk to Dunstable, they said they had approval to bring it from the group running the new railway at AWD siding that they were involved with, and only six to eight weeks later did I discover that the railway had not known whom the owners of their site actually were (they thought it was an industrial site as it was beside old Vauxhall land and seperated from the branch by a fence) or the extent of DMU car's content or its poor condition.

In fairness to Essex Rail Traction, there was a court order from Southend County Court that the DMU car had to be removed from the site at Norfolk where it had been since March 1996, so they had no option but to remove it.
In fairness to Essex Rail Traction, Essex Rail Traction paid for the DMU car to be sheeted over down to sole bar level, and it was when vandals broke the windows the danger from escaping fibres arose.

It was me who reported the matter to the local council Environmental Health team.

I did *not* remove any asbestos from between the panelling and the steel bodysides of the DMU car, all I did was to pick up the asbestos from the floor of the DMU car where it could have blown out on to the site.
I put the asbestos in to a boxes lined with plastic.
I seperated out the different levels of contamination - 'high' being pure fallen asbestos, 'middle' being broken glass and rubbish contaminated with asbestos fibres, 'low' being broken glass and waste with no (visible) contamination (but invisible fibres).
I also wore protective overalls, a face mask and gloves. (P3 now FPPP3 rated cartridge mask).

If I hadn't cleared the asbestos contaminated material from the floor of the DMU car and taken it to the Gloucester tip -- asbestos skip then I could have been done for fly - tipping it as there would then have been an obvious hazard from it.
(What a good thing I didn't follow your implied advice).

 

45015 was nothing to do with you as a project? That's interesting given the number of posts you made on the 'Save 45015 and 46034' Facebook page and the fact you tried to take over things. Also, they did not give up on it because of frustration. They gave up after an adult person went to see 45015 and reported on its extremely poor and stripped condition, saying it was a complete wreck; something the rest of us had been saying to Scott and Matthew since the beginning. But like you, would they listen to the commonsense position? Nope.

 

Alf,

I'm not meaning to be nasty but you don't do yourself any favours. If you had put all the time and effort that you have used in promoting the dead duck SBR scheme together with the hopeless appeals for inappropriate life expired rolling stock and to wide DMUs into another scheme that was already running you could be on the receiving end of plaudits from peers within the movement, not constant scorn and p*ss taking. We all have a bit of track we would love to see running again, particularly if we have memories of it from our youth. But 99% this is just a personal fantasy. What sane people don't do is try repeatedly to form a group to do the fundraising, engineering and operation on our behalf. This is where you are going wrong.

The asbestos issue. It wasn't a threat I can assure you. I watched my Dad die of mesothelioma in 2004 at the age of 77. He had a small exposure to it when he was an apprentice in 1941. This stuff ain't nice and it ain't a nice way to go either. You may rue the day you went into that vehicle in decades to come as will anyone else who may have unknowingly been exposed. One fibre from one exposure is all it takes. Be warned. See it again like that, head the other way and let someone else deal with it.

 

There is no timescale for the withdrawal of the 150's. The two 150/0's are still going strong at RDG. Therefore there is no chance of them gracing the South Bedfordshire Railway in the next 10 - 15 years, which is just as well as it still won't exist by then....

 

Wow, certainly an interesting thread this one!

 

No Alf, you were Banned from WNXX as a result of your endlessly drivelling on about Asbestos and trying to set yourself up as some sort of guru on the subject. An industry professional with knowledge / experience of the subject PM'd the Moderators and asked that you be silenced fortwith, a view with which they readily agreed. The ban is indeed permanent.

 

of course it isn't a threat , it's a reference to the very real possibility that you may have contaminated yourself as a result of not following the guidelines laid down by law for the disposal of asbestos.

 

Northen irish DEMUs running in Bedfordshire ?
Ugly things the 450s are.
Trains have to have some appeal to Joe Public ,I can't imagine people wanting to travel in these.
Stop ! The project is a dead duck.

Keith

 

The whole project is a dead duck anyway - quack quack quack :lalala: