A fine, warm evening, and getting off at Vauxhall I was rather taken by the mottled yellow tower block rising up on the country side of the station. Must try and get a snap of it at some point as it is nowhere to be seen in either Bing Maps or Google Maps.
Onto the tube to stand in the space just inside the door, right up against a young man eating a fat, filled sandwich with great gusto. Clearly a stranger to the rules about eating in public places which were current in my childhood.
Onto the Goat for an aperitif, in my case a drop of 'Quickie', illustrated at reference 3 and administered by a learner barmaid, not yet allowed to use the till without supervision. But she managed, despite the both of us looking on. Repaired to the empty upstairs where I ate my bread and cheese - I don't usually eat my own food in public houses - but the room was empty and we do put some rent over the bar.
Onto the Institution to a near full house. The talk was introduced first by one of the lady ushers and then by first lady engineer. Onto second lady engineer, featured at reference 1, clearly a very bright cookie, who was able to pull off the trick of talking very fast, non stop for an hour, while remaining comprehensible and interesting. She was also very good with questions and might have been a challenge to work for.
She claimed that her railway, while revolutionary in appearance, was mostly a patchwork of well established engineering. Large steel tubes mounted on concrete columns. Large scale pumps to get the pressure in the tube down to 1% or something of atmospheric pressure, a vacuum to you or I. Airlocks to get trains and people in and out of the tube. Magnetic traction of a railway pod hovering above the guide rail. Capable of accelerating to 1,000 km/hour in the absence of wind resistance.
An individual pod holding around 25 people and looking like a small version of the interior of an aeroplane. Soft grouped into caravans of maybe ten pods, where by soft grouping I mean running very close together but without the usual mechanical coupling.
Said to be good for point-to-point, non-stop runs of between 50 and 2,000 km. Said to be fully eco-compliant, on account of its very low fuel costs in actual operation. Also said to have very low maintenance costs, on account of its very small number of moving parts.
With 'autonomous' being a euphemism for running without drivers. Travelling much too fast for it to be safe to rely on mere humans.
Absence of relevant standards to work to apparently an issue. Maybe regulators feel a bit lost without heavy tomes from ISO and EC...
All very impressive and maybe it will fly in countries with lots of money and lots of space - but I was not convinced. Particularly not by the small numbers of passengers which seemed to be involved compared with something like our own tube, which must be capable of shifting a couple of thousand people at a time.
She also gave us a few minutes on small planes with rotors which could be used as taxis in towns, larger planes which could do supersonic (its seems that sonic booms remain something of a problem) and near space craft.
Caught a handy train at Vauxhall to make the Marquis (of Granby), once a place I used to use reasonably regularly, when still a public house, rather than a food & drink place frequented mainly by the young and once a very lively place on Derby Day, proudly open at 0800. To be agreeably surprised to find that they sold a very decent drop of Sancerre by the glass. Unusual, expensive and good. To quote from the menu: 'Henri Bourgeois Les Baronnes, Sancerre ... Loire Valley ... Sauvignon Blanc is the grape in this steely, green fruit delight'. See reference 4.
Passed on the wild boar and chorizo burgers, but it is maybe time that we tried their food again, despite snide remark about food and foodies above.
The wallpaper in the back bar, illustrated above, very much reminded me of some of the first curtain material we ever bought, from Liberty's. With this looking to come from the same designer and with us coming across the actual material from time to time.
Reference 1: https://anitasengupta.com/.
Reference 2: https://hyperloop-one.com/. Another entrepreneur with space flavoured ambitions. Has he actually put up some of his own money for this one, or has he just allowed the use of his name and brand?
Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/gravitational-waves.html.
Reference 4: https://www.henribourgeois.com/en/vins/sancerre-blanc/.
Group search key: lpa.
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