Monday, 31 October 2016

Bike shed inside

A bicycle shed has appeared in the forecourt of Ewell West Station, currently the south pole of London's Oyster card system. A very grand two-storey affair clad with what I think used, on farms, to be called Yorkshire boarding. Breaks up the wind without eliminating ventilation, and can stand up better to serious wind than solid walls. Same sort of principles as are followed in the design of breakwaters at the sea side.

This interior view shows one of the two banks of racks, together with the services pole (on the right in this snap) which provides air & tool facilities. Brought to us by a new-to-me company called Cyclepods, a company which one supposes makes most of its living by selling cycle racks to factories, towns and railways. Presumably this one has been funded by some combination of Transport for London and Network Rail. See reference 1.

Does Bullingdon Boris have a finger in this particular pie? Or one of his Bullingdon friends?

I shall try to make a point of counting the bicycles when I pass it - which, at a guess, will run at around twice a week on working days, on current routing. Something to do when there are no trolleys to be found.

PS: I was interested to read that the once exclusive Bullingdon Club is on the point of collapse for lack of members. A fate foretold more than a century ago in 'Zuleika Dobson', in the affair of the Junta, an exclusive Oxford dining club. Turning the pages of the book to check this important factlet took too long, so I was reduced to downloading a text file from Gutenburg (see reference 2) and using the Word search facility to turn up the second occurrence of the word 'club', about a third of the way through. The same trick had not worked on the kindle, as it had told to me wait while the file was indexed - with my not being at all convinced that the kindle did that kind of stuff in the background. See also reference 3.

PPS: it turns out that I had underestimated the sophistication of the kindle. What was not indexed at the time of loading the book onto the kindle, is now indexed, some four or five hours later, despite the kindle having been turned off as far as I was concerned. And gives the same answer as the MS Word search.

Reference 1: http://www.cyclepods.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.gutenberg.org/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/a-tale-of-two-charities.html.

Group search key: ecs.

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