there are a few things in liverpool that have pet names. the supermarket in town tesco is affectionately renamed stressco. the commuter rail line that i use every morning appropriately named mersey rail is rightly known as misery rail.
for 6 weeks in april/may the trains that run from james street around the liverpool loop - to three other centrally based city stations - was undergoing maintenance. so for those six weeks i hiked down to james street in the morning and back again in the evening and that didn't bother me one bit. however, the throngs of people that usually get on at 4 stations now getting on at one certainly did.
so on wednesday night when some misery rail official decided they needed to undergo emergency repairs to the carriages and take half of their fleet out of service, i was quite dismayed to get to the station on thursday morning to find out that again it was going to be down to james street for me. trying to walk down to a platform where a train has just arrived is probably better done by crowd surfing.
oh, and they are reducing all of the services to only running every half hour, which doesn't affect me so much because i can take two seperate routes to work, but still...get your act together! this morning the staff couldn't even tell me which platform my train would be leaving from and proceeded to argue amongst themselves.
talking to peter last night, he told me that apparently it's all got something to do with production in china and copper. a president bartlett answer if i ever did hear one.
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Well, I may be only a *little bit* Bartlet (much to the annoyance of Nick)...but copper prices have gone through the roof (currently over $7000 USD per tonne, a five-fold increase on prices in 2001).
China (the worlds largest consumer of copper) is not the only factor though, trade (and thus prices) in most base metals has risen on the back of the sub-prime mortgage debacle that has gripped financial markets in the last month.
In addition to this union problems in Peru has closed some of the major copper mines in the region, cutting supplies and driving up prices.
High copper prices are also having an effect in Coventry. Recently they had to suspend one of the train lines running out of the city as some enterprising people had decided to steal the copper cabling that runs the track side signalling system for the scrap value.
Here endth economics 101 for those of you not asleep yet.
and i thought only scousers would stoop to such levels of stealing copper ;)
Never have I known so much about copper! And I was starting to do the head bobs, but then a screaming baby reminded me that her bottle was falling out of her mouth. Seriously though...very enlightening, Davoud. Thank you!
If I ever have any more confusion over metals...(is copper a metal?) then I know where to come!
SIL
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