Hello and welcome back to The Traffic Circular! It’s our third - and final - instalment of 2021, with a more concise helping as we head into the festive period! Don’t forget, The Traffic Circular is our regular newsletter where we keep you updated with all the latest server news, views, comings, goings and more! We aim to release a new edition every month; the link will be posted in #public-address on our Discord server, and you’ll also be able to find the whole archive on this wiki.
Whilst The Traffic Circular is kept up to date by our staff team, don’t forget that we want your input too! Drop your feedback and ideas into the thread in #feedback-and-suggestions.
Meet the Staff
We’re continuing our journey around the Discord staff, telling you more about the faces behind the On Our Lines Discord server - the @Operations Superintendent, @Controller and @Signaller grades.
This month our featured staff member is Casey (@BipedCroissant8#9479), one of our @Signallers.
Hi, I’m Casey and I’m part of the On Our Lines Discord staff team. Whilst my job sees me installing archaic software and fixing printers, the railways are what I’m most keen about. I aspire to work for the railways but, in the meantime, I shall continue to appreciate them.
My interest in railways started from a young age – I had a wooden trainset that grew over many years through my older siblings and it wasn’t long before this was replaced with OO gauge railways. Whilst I no longer have the models, I did still keep the first set that was gifted to me, The Hamley’s Express. Since then, an interest in small railways evolved to be an interest in big ones, or regular sized ones I guess, as well as ones made of pixels. At present, my interest in railways was accelerated by the All The Stations team in 2017 and continues to grow.
I’ll always travel by train whenever the option is available to me. I used them for 7 years of school, and then for an additional few years of commuting and for countless day-trips and holidays around Great Britain. I love to cover new ground on the network, take unusual services and my ultimate goal (for now) is to visit every station as per All The Stations rules. Invergowrie is my most recent ‘new’ station, being number 1,016 out of 2,569. While that rumbles on, I run a twitter account called Every Station Bot where every day, twice a day, a bit of trivia will get tweeted about a National Rail station, a task that should be complete at some stage in 2025. I also get to look into some of the additional statistics surrounding the stations on our network.
I’ve met so many brilliant people because of On Our Lines, my 2021 has undoubtedly been a better year because of it. Let’s hope this December is a peaceful month and let’s go full steam ahead into 2022!
Noteworthy Notices
You’ll notice the staff will be creating a few threads, and we’ll plug certain ones occasionally in The Traffic Circular. We definitely haven’t been doing that already… 👀
#On The Bash is the place to tell us about the nerdy parts of your adventures! Whether you’ve ridden on a new train, traversed an unusual section of track or visited your 1,000th station, we want to hear about it!
#The Quiz Room is, as the name suggests, a room full of quizzes! Whether they’re transport-related or not, share your favourites here or take part in ones suggested by the community! We’re currently working through every UK Railway station in alphabetical order… what will your score be?
#A Thread of Musicals - whilst we might primarily be a space for trains we have a large contingent of musical theatre aficionados on the server. This is the place to chat about shows, revues, performances and more! Recent highlights have included Six, Heathers the Musical and & Juliet - let us know your favourite!
#Spotify Wrapped is, simply, pure chaos. From 993 listens of Olivia Rodrigo’s good 4 u through to being in the top 0.01% of Taylor Swift’s global listeners, our community is a varied bunch! Share your shame or showcase how proud you are with your 2021 Spotify Wrapped results!
We’d also like to thank @Arturs (@arturs#0001) for all their hard work and dedication to the server over the course of the year. Arturs has stepped back as an admin due to time pressures elsewhere, and we wish them well with his future endeavours.
Want to be alerted to our monthly games and challenges? We’ve added a new role, @challenges, which we’ll ping to alert you to the Picture and Station of the Month threads. You can add or remove this yourself at any time in the #automatic-train-zone.
Stations of the Month
Each month we randomly select one National Rail station from each region of the country, one London Underground / DLR, one light rail/tram and one heritage railway station every month to be the Stations of the Month.
To earn points, just take a selfie at one or more of the Stations of the Month and at the end of the year there will be a prize for the person with the most points in each category - and maybe some bonus prizes too, so be creative with those selfies!
NR Winners: @Jarley (@jcmgio#2168) - Hatton, Milton Keynes Central and Sileby; @Chris M (@Thryduulf#8980) - London St. Pancras.
LU/DLR Winner: @Chris M (@Thryduulf#8980) - Seven Sisters
Heritage Winner: (no entries)
Light rail/Metro winner: (no entries)
Bonus: (no entries)
That means that the leaderboard at the end of November looks like this:
Username
Points
@Thryduulf#8980
5
@jcmgio#2168
4
@soundsystem#3141
1
@Minion_Josh_#8802
1
@casimmons#3091
1
The stations for December have been chosen and are listed in the December 2021 Stations of the Month thread in #challenges-on-our-lines, where you should post your pictures. Full details are on the Stations of the Month page here.
The stations of the month for December 2021
RailMiles
In our monthly roundup of the RailMiles league, we take a look at the top of the leaderboard to see what’s what! A number of the usual suspects are back but we’ll be eliminating our staff team from the running for the final round-off of the year next time!
Currently, we see @laurencec123#3791 is out in first place with 30,205 miles 36 chains; second place is @jcmgio#2168 with 18,730mi 29ch; and bringing up the rear in third place is @overground#3141 with 14,419mi 74ch.
Keep on adding your journeys and see how you stack up in our On Our Lines league. Ask @jcmgio#2168 to be added to the On Our Lines RailMiles league if you are not already in it.
Our monthly challenges with different themes will be launching in 2022 to sit alongside our RailMiles league - and we’ll also be making it possible for those of you who record your journeys but not on RailMiles to be included in the League too! These challenges are designed so that those who can only travel less frequently are able to compete with those who pile on the miles commuting or working on the railway - stay tuned for more!
Upcoming Events
Our popular SimSig Sessions will be making a return on Wednesday December 29th! We’ll be having a seasonal, festive trip to the West Midlands, with a variety of panels and activities to suit all experience levels available. Sign up now, and keep an eye on the Discord for more details as we have them!
The next edition of London's Transport Race - a fun jaunt around London’s Transport network with no running allowed - is happening on Saturday 5 February 2022 - registration is now open and you can reserve your free ticket by heading over to our EventBrite page.
We had hoped to hold a Christmas gathering in lieu of a December Transport Race, but have decided to postpone this due to the latest concerns around the Covid-19 virus. We will, instead, be having a New Year Gathering (public health permitting) - this is tentatively pencilled in for Saturday 8 January 2022. We’ll release more details nearer the time but put the date in your diaries! There’s no need to register - just turn up at the start. If you want to be reminded about the details, you can mark yourself as ‘Interested’ on the Discord event here.
You’ve Got Mail?
Want to stay in touch by email? If you'd like to receive future editions of The Traffic Circular by email, just let us know. Send an email to [email protected] and if there is interest we'll set it up in time for December's issue.
Picture of the Month
The November picture of the month competition saw a total of 14 entries from 8 people.
The winner, as voted for by Ticket Holders and staff, was @deadly (Adrian) (@deadly#3721) who got the same number of votes as @Mitchel Merryarty (@MitchelMor#6969) but won on tie break with this photo of Chinnor Signal Box.
37227 waits to be put to bed at the Chinnor and Princes Risborough Railway while attendees at a training day are debriefed.
Credits
Written and edited by Chris M (@Thryduulf#8980) and Jarley (@jcmgio#2168).
Photo by deadly (Adrian) (@deadly#3721). On Our Lines logo by Arturs (@arturs#0001).
If you've made it this far, well done.
