Can Count Binface deliver his manifesto?

2026-08-05 00:20:00 +0000

As I write this, we are approaching a by-election in the UK constituency of Clacton, called as a result of right-wing politician and alleged grifter Nigel Farage resigning his seat in a seemingly misguided attempt to outrun a corruption investigation. The major British political parties have declined to participate in this farce, leaving a field of thirty-three other candidates mostly engaging in the traditional British sport of having a go at an election for the fun of it. Foremost among these is Count Binface, a perennial candidate and alter ego of a professional comedian.

Megaprojects and Delays

2026-04-01 23:30:00 +0000

Lately, it seems that every interesting megaproject is getting delayed. I thought it would be interesting to try and plot them, to see if we can understand anything from it.

Drawing fair comparisons when comparing rail world records

2025-11-30 14:00:00 +0000

This was originally presented as a Mastodon thread in November 2025

The EC plan to accelerate high-speed rail across Europe

2025-11-05 22:10:00 +0000

Today, the European Commission released its plan to accelerate high-speed rail across Europe. I haven’t read the document, but have read Jon Worth’s analysis of it. In it, Jon raises confusion over the categorisation of the various, seemingly arbitrarily-chosen connections. I decided to sit down and get them into a spreadsheet to see if I could make any more sense of them. (Not because I think I can do better than Jon at railway analysis, of course; I just like an exercise in putting train numbers into spreadsheets.)