Friends of the Rail Forum

New locos on track to speed up Eurotunnel cargoes

Eurotunnel has successfully completed tests with the new Siemens Vectron loco...

John,

I know newspapers are moving towards paying for content. On the link you supply here, I get a request which obscures the underlying page, asking for $0.99 to get any further.

The article may be interesting, but not worth that much and particularly giving the newspaper all my details so they can spam me.

Just a note for consideration when supplying further newspaper links.

Scottish Turtle.

That's interesting. I've just gone back to the link and I don't get that advert, just the story. I wonder whether it is country-specific?

Anyway, the story is:

A major breakthrough that will enable British exporters to more easily dispatch cargo to travel by rail throughout Europe could be just weeks away after Eurotunnel ran successful trials of a new train through the Channel Tunnel.

Until now, only Class 92 locos have been allowed through the tunnel, so firms wanting to haul freight by rail to or from Europe spend an hour or more either side of the journey changing train.

But Eurotunnel has successfully completed tests with the new Siemens Vectron loco to show it can haul traffic directly to and from the Continent and the UK.

Yes, I would think it is country specific.

Interesting to know if anyone else gets it and where they are.

Here's the story from a different source:

Eurotunnel tests freight loco

Eurotunnel has tested the Siemens Vectron locomotive to prove its compatibility with the systems and safety rules in the Channel Tunnel, to boost cross channel rail freight...

Mike H wrote:I know newspapers are moving towards paying for content. On the link you supply here, I get a request which obscures the underlying page, asking for $0.99 to get any further.

The article may be interesting, but not worth that much and particularly giving the newspaper all my details so they can spam me.

I had no problem in viewing The Independent's story. I do know that many newspapers are switching to website paywalls in an attempt to increase revenue from content on those sites in the face of dwindling revenues and circulations of their print editions. Perhaps The Independent sees the USA as being a "high net-worth" market into which they could launch an experimental paywall version; a model that they may plan to implement elsewhere later.

Certainly this story is not worth the US 99 cents they asked you for, particularly as it is a short PR shot that is also available elsewhere for free. I see no problem in legitimate subscription-based services which represent good, honest, hard-won research and provide quality offerings, but this kind of unqualified greed will drive visitors away from such websites.

I do know that most web advertising is definately target-market driven. Usually served up by embedded calls to third-party ad suppliers' websites which use various techniques to get ther viewer's demographic and location. Of course getting users to logon through paywalls improves that ad targetting and helps raise ad revenues.

I'm now in the USA, like Turtle, and I've just tried that link again and accessed it without any problem. Maybe it's not just country-specific but also depends on your server?