schrieb:


The S-Bahn is way to heavy to be a light rail system in anybody's book,
including in the US, I think.

Think again: Siemens Desiro and Stadler GTW are operating as light rail,
in the USA.


Same goes for the ICE.

It is illegal to operate such train in the USA. You have to add 50 -
100 tons of ballast weight. That's why the USA will never have working
high-speed rail without a change of regulations.



Hans-Joachim



--

Frieda Uffelmann * 15. August 1915 â€* 9. Dezember 2011

http://zierke.com/private/tante_frie...abgestellt.jpg

On Dec 30, 6:09*am, Lüko Willms wrote:
Am 29.12.2011 22:25, schrieb The Real Doctor:

On 29/12/11 21:05, Lüko Willms wrote:
The thing is that railway workers are workers, and not so easily purged
as all the professors at the university and journalists in the media.

And if there is one group who should know about purging, it's apologists
for Stalinism.[1]

* *Whatever; the purge in the ex-GDR was of a magnitude which exceeded
everything ever experienced under the rule of a stalinist burocrady.

There is something especially poisonous about Stalinists, still
attempting to minimise his crimes so long after Khrushchev's secret
speech, isn't there? Are you seriously saying that there was mass-
killings and show-trials in Germany post-unification on a scale to
dwarf the killings in 1937-8?

ian

Am 30.12.2011 19:42, schrieb Hans-Joachim Zierke:
Please name the "German equivalent of TUPE".

Betriebsübergang.

BGB Paragraph 613a:
http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/613a.html


MfG,
L.W.

Am 30.12.2011 19:08, schrieb Neil Williams:
That is what is happening in the Thatcherized Britain, but not
in
Germany.

TUPE is not Thatcherite, quite the opposite.

I know, having the franchise changes in the railways is one thing her
politics could not smash.

Is there no German equivalent?

Yes, the issue is called "Betriebsübergang", and BGB (Civil code)
paragraph 613a describes the rights of workers under such a change. The
english translation of BGB gives "Rights and duties in the case of
transfer of business" as the title of that section:
http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_bgb/englisch_bgb.html#p2428

But the German rulers have conceived the tendering of transit
operations more to the way you would chose your paperhanger or
construction company or the janitor or office cleaning company: you call
another service provider who brings his own personnel and tools and
machinery. In the case of railway operations, bringing their own
engineers, locomotives and other rolling stock, guards, etc etc. (There
are some exceptions, where the Land or the designated public transit
authority is the owner of the rolling stock, in order to "facilite
competition").

To the difference of the British rail privatization, this does very
well allow to drive wages down.

I guess the German capitalist politicians have also thought of this
when they decided their way of railway privatisation: maintaining the DB
AG as a "national champion" who could become an international "player"
(today effectively the 200 pound gorilla in the European transport
market), while introducing a tendering system which allows upstarts to
win market share from the "incumbent" mainly by paying lower wages, and
by this token putting pressure on the wages at DB and other (former)
public transport companies.

A number of municipal transit companies (e.g. the Frankfurt/Main one,
the one of Berlin, and others) have set up a low wage bus company where
bus drivers are paid 30% less than the ones employed directly according
to the old public sector collective bargaining contracts. To add insult
to injury, in most cases Social-Democrats and trade union burocrats have
voted for such moves, in order to "save the public company" which would
otherwise lose out completely to the private competitors from Veolia etc
with their lower wage bus drivers.



Cheers,
L.W.

Am 30.12.2011 19:58, schrieb ian batten:
There is something especially poisonous about Stalinists, still
attempting to minimise his crimes so long after Khrushchev's secret
speech, isn't there? Are you seriously saying that there was mass-
killings and show-trials in Germany post-unification on a scale to
dwarf the killings in 1937-8?

If you could read or even understand what you are reading, you would
not ask such silly questions.

Show trials were held, yes. Mass killings not, but lots of people got
thrown into misery, with their old age pensions cut because of their
political stance.

But there are lots of German capitalist politicians who dream of
using the army against their own population. In Afghanistan they have
tested a terrorist attack killing 150 people by making two tank lorry
explode, which were stuck in a sand bank in a middle of a river
crossing, unable to move forth or back.

But I can't let you blur the actual issue we are discussing he the
railway workers in Berlin, whose social conquests of the past 6 decades
could not be destroyed by the FRG taking over the GDR, what Herr Schnell
now wants to accomplish by dissolving the current S-Bahn Berlin GmbH and
making all their workers jobless.


L.W.

In article ,
(Neil Williams) wrote:

On Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:55:17 +0100, Lüko
wrote:
That is what is happening in the Thatcherized Britain, but not in
Germany.

TUPE is not Thatcherite, quite the opposite.

Is there no German equivalent?

There must be - it's an EU-based provision.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

On Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:22:20 +0000 (UTC)
Hans-Joachim Zierke wrote:
schrieb:


People are not dumb cattle and will not just sit on a train with no
information forever if they can get out and continue their journey on foot.
This has happened in the UK a number of times and train operators need to
take
human behaviour into account when failures happen. Just expecting people to
sit and wait for an indeterminate period of time and do nothing is moronic.


I think that this here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRhNAql6foA
qualifies for "moronic".

If you listen at 0:29 it says a message from the conductor asked them to leave
the train and the doors were opened onto the track, not the platform. So it
wasn't the passengers fault. Unless my french language isn't as good as I
thought.

B2003

On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:51:41 +0000
Charles Ellson wrote:
On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:31:20 +0000 (UTC), d
wrote:

On 29 Dec 2011 12:16:58 GMT
Hans-Joachim Zierke wrote:
Without the angry passengers, it might have been 1 hour. "Persons on the
tracks" means, that operation can't resume, even with everything back to
normal.

People are not dumb cattle and will not just sit on a train with no
information forever if they can get out and continue their journey on foot.

So not dumb cattle but still a bit thick WRT hazard awareness ?

Perhaps they are. They're going to get off though.

B2003

On 30/12/11 16:38, Lüko Willms wrote:

But you have sense of facts: you know how to avoid them like the plague.

Stop it. You're killing me. And no machine gun nests needed.

Ian

On 30/12/11 21:39, Lüko Willms wrote:
Show trials were held, yes. Mass killings not

Is that you defending the Gulags again?

Ian