A long tme between drinks....

Once again I must apologize to the person who reads this blog. Yes you know who you are!
It's been a long time between drinks!

I've had some major changes in my life over the last couple of months, I've moved and had to set up a new house. My work committments have and will continue to change and I have a future wedding/marriage to contemplate. Hopefully I'm more settled now so more time to blog. As the wedding will be in Vietnam it will be strange and interesting for me. So I've had no time for website updating or modelling until very recently.

I've  added some more bits and pieces to the website so hopefully some people will find that useful. I intend to do a major revamp when I get time so watch out for that, especially the freight and passenger sections, with a seperate page for each kind/class of vehicle..

As my future wife's family comes from the Phan Rang/Thap Cham area you will forgive me if lots of my photos on my website are from that area. It's the place I know the best.

I've had a bit of a think about the matters in the previous blog (relating to travelling on the DSVN) and now feel that maybe I was a bit harsh. I'm sure the DSVN staff were doing that best in a less than ideal situation.

I'm reminded of something that a manager in the rail system that I work for said a few years ago. He said we have to change the way we think about the main aim of what we do from 'running a railway' to 'providing a service'. When you 'run a railway' you concentrate on operating technology, changing points (turnouts) running locomotives and trains, operating signalling systems, shunting (switching) and so on. In this scenario customers are really a bit of a nuisance. In 'providing a service' we turn everything around so the customer becomes the most important aspect, 'operating' is just a way of providing the service that customers want. It's a big change and not so easy to introduce. I feel that DSVN hasn't quite made the shift yet. Just my personal thoughts.

The above photos was taken at Thap Cham in March. It's amazing that the D9Es (GE U8B) are still going strong in the south after all these years. Some of them must be nearly 45 years old!


And I'm not getting any younger either. So on that note I'll finish this blog. See you next time.