Jeepers there's a lot of negativity floating around here! A lot of interesting posts too mind, and I will say overall I've found this thread to be worth the read. I am looking forward to hearing about the electrification schemes when those details get confirmed, promising and positive times ahead!
On page 1 of this thread, someone mentioned people's attitudes need to change in order to make decarbonisation work. Or something like that, I'm in the middle of preparations for work at 3am so I'm not going back to find the quote. Changing attitudes, yes I thoroughly agree, this is an important step. I've got friends who don't want to recycle, and would rather throw their plastic bottles in the general rubbish bins. They're 20-somethings, so old enough to know better and I'm mind-blown at such an attitude.
Quite, I was fuming at myself for throwing a Lucozade bottle in the bin last week and not recycling it, as I had run out of room in my small backpack for it to be recycled when I got back to the house that evening. In my defence, I will mention everything else I had that could be recycled was in the bag, and was put in the green bin when I got back from my adventure some hours later. I could be here for ages discussing recycling, but I'll move on before I get too into one of my biggest pet peeves!
Back to attitudes in general, I'm continually looking for ways to lower my impact on the environment. I don't drive, and have no intention to either, and my rail travels aren't super high anyway these days. Pretty much every carrier bag I get is reused as much as practical, indeed I have a paper Primark bag that acts as a non-recycleable bin. That gets emptied as and when, to be reused for the same purpose until it inevitably falls apart one day. I have a carrier bag from Subway, which also gets reused and one of its recent-ish reuses was to carry supplements for the following day, in a bid to save space in my backpack. So all in, my climate impact is almost as low as possible there.
My favourite way to reduce impact though is to cut out un-necessary uses of electricity. I've been upping my efforts there in recent times, it's only little improvements for now but things like turning the TV off at the wall and unplugging it at night, as well as minimising use of it anyway, and not plugging in my toaster to make beans on toast, even things like 'do I really need the bathroom light on for this use'. It's little things, but when your carbon footprint is already low then it's hard to reduce it much more!
It's no secret I love adventuring, but even with flying I have plans in place to fly much less than previously. Time-critical flights would be slightly different, but where possible adventures in Europe will be done by rail, ferry etc. Adventures requiring flying, such as the USA, New Zealand and others, will have to involve flights but in general, my flying will be much reduced when world exploration returns to being a realistic option.
What I'd like to see from the world is much less packaging that isn't recyclable. I'm talking things like biscuit packets, crisps packets, other things where the plastic tray is recyclable but not the outer plastic wrap. That nonsense belongs in the past, it is high time we started changing. I've even started avoiding buying things in packaging I cannot recycle!
My point is, attitudes can and do change but there's so much more that can be done.
As for the railway, and the main topic here in general, I'm feeling positive about the changes laid down so far. 2050 is a long way off, but I would say such a huge project needs that time. 28 and a half years to implement the biggest changes ever to the UK railway might sound insane, it might sound like it's too slack to really drive forward productivity, but it is realistic. To put all that new OLE up, it's going to take many teams years to do it safely. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are only so many teams out there who can do such work? To speed up the process, and do multiple routes at once, while also keeping the railway open where possible, there's going to need to be a lot of people trained and educated first. Not to mention equipment manufactured to actually put it all up first, not to mention disrupting many communities to do the works.
Overall, my view is that this is all good news and we're on the right track (pardon the pun) to start cleaning up our act. Things are slowly going to start getting better, and that much is excellent news.
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