RIP Farsley Celtic

Nutter that he was, I feel sorry for that Dave Pace as well as all their fans. What a great shame.

What a shame, it`s gotta hurt the fans, I feel for them!

Farsley have been - to use the words of their website - "resuscitated". They lost 2-1 at home to Stalybridge Celtic on Saturday. I'll leave you to speculate as to who scored the winner for the visitors.....

Now come on Chris you know how you hate Steve Woods threads ;D and I think you may have just opened up a can of worms here.

I see Accrington Stanley are very close to going out of business. They need to find £308,000 very quickly else they're facing a winding up order in 8 weeks time. Burnley have offered to stage a friendly game and are letting Accrington keep all the gate receipts.
I guess the writing has been on the wall for a while now. It must be unbelievably difficult to run a football club when the gates are generally in the low 1000s for most games barring the local derbies. I think we mentionned this in a thread during last season about whether clubs should think about going part time or not. You wonder how many clubs are struggling both in the lower leagues at the moment. Grimsby and Darlington both seem to be operating with a loaded financial gun pointed at their heads and it looks like Morecambe and Macclesfield are going to struggle again this season. Perhaps this might explain the added prudency of the board this season. After all if the primary goal is to stay in League 2, is it a good idea to spend more than we need?

I seem to remember that they sponsored the stadium as well. I found quite an interesting article about them on wikipedia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraser_Eagle

They also sponsored Blackburn and Rabat Ajax FC of Malta. When you think about it, from an economic point of view, their whole business model was never going to be sustainable, as it was primarily based on large scale disruption to the rail network. Its not just the core business that got affected but the funding of any expansion plans into other more sustainable areas or actually having enough money to make a success of Grand Central Trains.

I was looking at train fares from London to Rochdale on saturday. To my amazement, the cheapest fare one way was £46.50 on virgin trains. £46.50 in first. £82 in standard would you believe?

Its an absolutely shocking state of affairs really which I really think will go on forever and ever. I think we have the worst transport network in Europe when compared the bigger countries. The motorways aren't bad I suppose but its still awful when you compare to the likes of France, Germany and to a lesser extent Spain. Italy is something else though. The motorways are pokey, mostly two lane affairs with concrete barriers either side with one lane taken up by a endless convoy of lorries transporting goods from the ports of Bari, Brindisi, Taranto and Ancona and the train system, although impressive on paper, is run by a bunch of lazy bastards, all of them on state pay and conditions. They run one decent service, their own Eurostar (very nice trains) but they run on old lines and can't really run to their full potential of 300kmph. There's only high speed lines between Florence and Naples, Novara and Turin, plus a small line between Padova and Venice. They are upgrading the lines at the moment to connect Milan with Bologna and Florence, plus linking Milan to Padova. I will say though that although its sometimes a bit shambolic in Italy, it is cheap. Compared to here where its both shambolic and bloody expensive.

Train travel should be both a) quicker and b) cheaper than any other form of transport as they don't share the line with other transport and you can fit more people on a train than most other methods of transportation.

When this happens (Switzerland for example) its an absolute joy. You go from city centre to city centre without having to do anything. In France and Germany TGVs and ICE trains whisk you from city to city in record time. You pay a reasonable premium for the service but its a hell of a service.

At the moment the London Paddington to Newton Service takes what 3 hours? I used to take the 0730 service to Paddington from time to time. It didn't stop at Reading to pander to commuters and it usually got in to Paddington just before ten. Not bad at all really. I used to pay 35 quid with a Railway PRIV card and that was ok. Now the fare even with my railway staff discount is around the 55 quid mark. It's quicker and more convenient for me even with the never ending roadworks around Bristol to get from Ealing to Abbotskerswell in around 3 hours and spend less on petrol than I would on a train fare. Its far less stressful than trying to get on a train at Paddington on Friday afternoon/evening. I lost count the number of times I had to stand for 3 hours on friday evenings on trains doing 100mph.

If you started running French TGVs or German ICEs from Paddington to Newton Abbot you would see times tumble to 1 hour 40 mins or so. Would I pay a comparable TGV fare for that and leave the car at home? I certainly would. It would also be nice for them to upgrade the A303. Sod the druids, flora and fauna. Build a decent motorway and give us an alternative to the M5/M4.