Back from England

Accomplished whirlwind trip to Oxford without breaking anything, forgetting anything, or running into any sort of legal or logistical issues! Yay! Made it to Heathrow on Friday, found bus to Oxford (leaves from Central Bus Terminal -- there are enough busses that such a thing actually makes sense -- pay cash on board), tried to find local bus to hotel but ultimately gave up and took taxi.

Saturday involved some wandering around, including discovering that Iffley Village had a post office (including what in some parts of the US would be a "general store"), a church, and not much more, then finding a mall and sustenance and caffeine. Found iabervon, who was able to lead me to chrysaphi's wedding. Ceremony went well; nice space, officiant and groom both had senses of humor, only one game halt for children, useful invocations of supreme beings. fredrickegerman took us to a pub. Dinner was had.

Sunday I went with fredrickegerman and desireearmfeldt to the Didcot Railway Centre, maybe 10 miles south of Oxford. Lots of historic Great Western Railway stuff; conveniently, fredrickegerman is a GWR fan. There was a very small amount of broad-gauge and mixed-gauge rail, but the only actual broad-gauge equipment we found they had built themselves (a reproduction of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's very first steam engine). Came back, wandered around Oxford for a while.

Monday's plan worked out to "take the train to London, do high-speed external touristing, get back to Heathrow". There turned out to be a £20 ticket that accomplished this, and the next train was a fast (55 minutes for 65ish miles, I clocked it going around 100 mph) direct train. Saw (briefly) Paddington Station (worth seeing in its own right IMHO), Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London and Tower Bridge (the latter "only" 100 years old but surprisingly modern), a chunk of London's city wall, Westminster Abbey, and Westminster Cathedral. Pretty much all of these things cost money to get into (Westminster Abbey was £10, most other things were a little cheaper) and I was already feeling too cheap to leave my bag at Paddington for £6 so I mostly walked around a lot, miraculously failed to get sunburned, and took the Tube to the airport to go home.

Transit Geek: England

I told a couple of people that I needed to write a LiveJournal post on the signalling system of the London Underground. There's actually quite a bit interesting about UK public transit, though...

( Buses... )

( Trains... )

( Underground... )

Transit publicity in England

This probably also belongs under the "transit geek" heading, but it's worth mentioning. In England:

• All of the bus stops in Oxford had complete schedules for every bus that stops there, even when there were multiple bus companies servicing a stop.
• The Tube displays not just when the next train will arrive but the next three trains.
• There are lots of trains: my longest Tube wait was a five-minute wait for a Piccadilly line train that went all the way to Heathrow, and that was the third train from when I showed up, and Oxford-to-London (commuterish) trains ran every half hour.
• Every Underground station I was at in central London had both maps and brochures showing what was around that station and how you might get there (as in, there appeared to be a separate brochure for each station).
• All of the maps were pretty up-to-date with what service ran and what didn't; no map seemed to be older than six months, and the most ambiguous/out-of-date things were about service that reopened in "September 2006" (the Waterloo and City line appears to have just reopened yesterday).

So I was able to find my way around to major sights pretty well with just a day pass and hopping around on the Underground...wouldn't it be great if transit in the US were this frequent and this well advertised?