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About this blog

Welcome to a random collection of my thoughts and activities. I'll try to make sure that posts here are interesting, which might mean there's not as many posts as there might be. Hopefully the balance will be on the good side!

I generally post about two main areas, and try to use tags to allow you to filter as appropriate:

  • Birmingham : things I've done or seen in and around Birmingham and the West Midlands
  • Transport planning : thoughts that occur to me, often also covering town planning where it impacts on transport, and sometimes with a political perspective.

I hope you enjoy reading, and please do leave comments if you want to.


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Popular posts from this blog

Cofton Park

Today, I ticked off the first in my list of places to visit in Birmingham - Cofton Park. It's within easy walking distance of my house, but I've been waiting for the combination of a day with good weather, when I'm also at home with nothing better to do. That day was today. It's not the most exciting park - the Birmingham City Council page for the park describes it as "mainly made up by open grassland", but there are some trees and certainly plenty to look at. It's also not flat, with slopes and gradients throughout the park dominated by a ridge at the western edge.
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South Birmingham Parkway

A friend on Twitter recently raised an issue that I have also pondered : a journey from stations on the Birmingham and Gloucester line (now the Cross-City south line) to Gloucester and the south west usually involves travelling in to New Street, then catching a train out again - passing through the station you were just at, and adding between 30 and 60 minutes to your journey. The question was what could be done to improve that journey - both in terms of time, and convenience. Is there potential for a South Birmingham Parkway? Developing a new station site might sound appealing, but is expensive and has a range of legal, technical and practical issues to resolve. So let's look at improving or reusing existing stations, specifically Longbridge, Barnt Green and Bromsgrove. We are looking at locations that could be suitable for long-distance trains to call at, with interchange to local services on the Cross-City line, and good road links with adequate parking to act as a ra...
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Moving to Birmingham

After living in Bedford for 15 years, I've finally decided it's time to make a change, and so I'm heading to Birmingham. It's a big city with plenty going on but not as manic as London, and an ideal location for friends and family. One of my friends challenged me to explore a new thing or place every month, so I decided to use this blog as a place to record that. Probably not terribly exciting to anybody except me, but there you go. Feel free to post comments or otherwise get in touch - it will be good to hear from you.
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