"Tom Cumming" wrote in message
om...
Robin May wrote in message
.. .

I can't imagine every else doing it though, considering the fact it's
hard enough to get people to treat actual mini roundabouts as mini
roundabouts. I never cease to be amazed by how few people actually
observe the two mini roundabouts near my house. Even worse are the
people who shout abuse at you and make rude gestures when you pull out
in front of them, acting as if they have right of way!

If you really want abuse try being a cyclist. People just lean out of
car windows and shout things in my ears for no reason whatsoever -
drives me nuts.

What are they usually shouting? "Give me back my wing mirror you *&%£!"
;-)

"Ed Crowley" typed


If you really want abuse try being a cyclist. People just lean out of
car windows and shout things in my ears for no reason whatsoever -
drives me nuts.

What are they usually shouting? "Give me back my wing mirror you *&%£!"
;-)

Nah, "Would you like to ride *my* crossbar?" or
"I wish I were your saddle."
"Get off your saddle and milk it!"
"Yer back wheel's going round!"

--
Helen D. Vecht:
Edgware.

Wanderer wrote:

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 04:00:20 +0100, Road Runner wrote:

Depresion wrote:

Why isn't this plastered across all the US news channels the way there power cut
was across all of ours?

A 34 minute power failure affecting 10m people is far less serious
than an 8 hour power failure affecting 50m people.

Err, except that National Grid are claiming 3/4 million 'customers' lost
their supply.

The London Underground is one customer - how many people were affected
by the loss of power to that one customer?
--
remove RRR to reply

Nick Cooper wrote:

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 04:00:20 +0100, Road Runner
wrote:

Depresion wrote:

Why isn't this plastered across all the US news channels the way there power cut
was across all of ours?

A 34 minute power failure affecting 10m people is far less serious
than an 8 hour power failure affecting 50m people.

Let's not kid ourselves - if those times and numbers had been
reversed, _we_ would still have heard of the events in the US, but
most Americans would be blissly unaware of what happened here. Yanks
don't do "foreign," remember.

The whole of England and Wales blacked out for eight hours? I bet the
Yanks would have heard about that!
--
remove RRR to reply

Interesting. I thought the Underground still took its juice from Lots Road
(ie its own dedicated power station). Or is that closed now?


Lots Road closed earlier this year.

Marc.

In article ,
says...
There has been a power cut, affecting the Tube and trains
BBC News Reports:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3189755.stm

I live in East Yorks. Strangely, it's had no effect here.


--
________________________
Conor Turton

ICQ:31909763
________________________

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 16:41:44 +0100, Road Runner wrote:

snip

The whole of England and Wales blacked out for eight hours? I bet the
Yanks would have heard about that!

Don't kid yourself. Most rightpondians think the world stops at their
shores.

David Hansen wrote in message . ..

Largely, however there are questions for the railways about whether
a failure on this relatively small scale should have affected
services over such a wide area.


Perhaps a small scale in terms of the number of substations, or even
the geographical area affected, but big in terms of consumers,
megawatts, gigawatt hours and ciruits to which the surface railway are
connected.

From the information I have to hand, we lost the 132kV bar at
Wimbledon at 18:17 and the whole of New Cross and part of Hurst seven
seconds later. We have 5 33kV circuits from Wimbledon rated at 70MVA
and 3 66kV circuits from New Cross rated at 135MVA, thus losing 205MVA
of capacity. Given that these Supergrid sites feed a large area of
South London via 132kV and lower voltage circuits, any connections we
had in that part of London would also have been lost (not that we have
any so connected). There are no other Supergrid sites within London
where a connection could be reasonably made.

We tried to restore supplies from Byfleet, Croydon and Northfleet
132kV supplies, but the voltage drop and charging currents involved
made this a non runner.

From our records, we have never experienced a simultaneous loss of two
supergrid sites in the London area before now and it is not a
contingency we plan for, neither to the Distribution Network Operators
(Used to be called RECs and before that, Electricity Boards).

The great storms of 87 did involve the loss of several Grid Sites in
Sussex and Kent.

Looks like some NGC folk have got some explaining to do.......as have
LUL. I presume that they lost Lots Road BSP (fed from Wimbledon), but
retained Neasden, Mansell St and City Road. As far as I know, the
turbines at Greenwich were not started or did not load (Tim Collins,
Energy Minister said so on the news, so it must be true). Given the
loading conditions on the Grid post fault, it could be that LUL were
prevented from increasing their load from other bulk supplies, which
begs the question of not using Greenwich? I wouldn't mind betting that
the situation between LUL and EDF was uncertain immediately after the
fault, whilst its impact was measured up. Eventually, LUL decided that
it could be long time before supplies could be relied upon that they
would take no chances and evacuate the trains and hey presto 20
minutes later in mid evacuation, the power comes back on.

Richard

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 09:34:34 +0000 (UTC), "Mark"
wrote:

Connex are based on the South Bank, so I guess they would have been in the
dark for a while as well...

We've been hit with a few power cuts at work recently, and minimal
disruption was caused because we all use laptops, while the telephone
system has backup batteries. We lost network connectivity, but could
have dialed up to the Internet if necessary (indeed, some people for
whom it was critical did so).

Assuming the telephone system was not affected, I don't see how Connex
(or indeed any other TOC) couldn't have uploaded a simple message in
the same situation.

Neil

--
Neil Williams
is a valid email address, but is sent to /dev/null.
Try my first name at the above domain instead if you want to e-mail me.

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 14:25:37 +0000 (UTC) someone who may be "Terry
Harper" wrote this:-

When plans for closing Lot's Road were drawn up it was stated that there
would be three bulk supply points on the National Grid for London
Underground, any two of which could keep the system running if there was
a failure - so I guess at least two supply points must have failed.

So, triple redundancy (almost) like you have on airliners.

Three separate feeders into each supply point would be ideal, or two with a
standby generator and a UPS as an alternative.

In a building a UPS will typically only support small loads for a
short time. This is to allow standby generators to get going, even
if it takes a while to get them going (the things can perform
faultlessly when tested with a simulated mains failure every month
and then refuse to start with a real mains failure).

Typically the standby generator can only power a small part of the
building load. Non-essential circuits are shed as the generator
starts up. With the generator running it may not be desirable to go
back to the external supply automatically if it does become healthy,
it might fail a minute later. Thus the building may run with only
essential circuits for some time until people are happy with the
external supply.

Trains consume large amounts of electricity. I hate to think what
size the battery bank would be to run a railway on UPS. There would
not be a standby generator, but a standby power station. Think in
terms of the size of some of the old ones.


--
David Hansen, Edinburgh | PGP email preferred-key number F566DA0E
I will always explain revoked keys, unless the UK government
prevents me using the RIP Act 2000.