Chain

This January has felt quite long and cold.  My new-ish job requires a change of trains when I go into the office and I don’t think that helps me think it’s warm - even though the walk at the other end if a lot shorter than my last job and I am outside for less time.  

Today’s picture was taken at Twickenham station as I was waiting for my connection. There was a period at the end of last year and at the start of this month when the connections were terrible as the impact of the train strikes had repercussions on the days after the strikes. This week it was all good and I had my ten minutes to wait.  I thought about grabbing a coffee from the coffee shop but decided against it when I saw there was about of queue. It saves me a few pounds and I must start using one of the insulated mugs we have at home to bring coffee with me for this journey as, for most of the hour, I am on a train and it makes sense to  bring a long a drink.

I took a picture of the distance measurement sign as I have been meaning to try to understand them a bit more. I already knew they measure railways distances and that ‘ch’ is a reference to ‘chains’ but I wanted to know more.  I also knew that RDG1 is the route that is being measured but I had to look up to confirm that this is the Reading Line. There is a RDG2 (maybe more) so this is the measurement from Waterloo to Wokingham Junction.  What I did not know is that the measurement is based on Gunter's chain, a measurement scale used across the British Empire that was devised by Edmund Gunter in 1620, using an actual chain.   A chain is 66-feet long divided into 100 links and there are 80 chains in a mile.