"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 13:13:57 on Sun, 27 Oct 2013,
Mizter T remarked:
Sounds like it could get ugly.

Some TOCs are planning on running an amended timetable (East Coast, c2c),
others have one up their sleeves, ready to go (or not go, as the case may
be).

This afternoon might be a good time to go out and enjoy the splendid
autumn colours - in southern Britain at least - might not have any
autumnal leaves left on the trees come tomorrow, indeed might have fewer
trees as well.

I agree. I remember the 1987 storm, and the smaller one in Jan 1990 which
was actually more of an inconvenience (both for my personal transport
needs and for domestic electricity supply).

Like 1990, this one is apparently going to be in the daytime, which makes
it more disruptive than the 1987 one which was at night.

I remember being on the 10th (top) floor of the ICL tower block in Bracknell
during the 1990 storm. I swear the building was swaying slightly - certainly
coats on a coat-rack well away from the windows were swaying. And the
aluminium window frames were rattling like crazy. I worked with a disabled
guy who was allowed to park in a special place beside a 15-foot high
100-yard long brick wall that separated a path from the loading bay. That
lunchtime he'd been out and found a lorry parked in his space so he'd parked
in the normal car-park. And he was very glad - later that afternoon the
whole wall collapsed, right onto where his car would have been :-( I
noticed that when the wall was later rebuilt, it was much more substantial,
with buttresses every so often and a double course of bricks with some
through bricks - they were taking no chances of it every happening again.

The 1987 one was very frightening: my house was a few hundred yards from the
thick pine forest just south of the railway line between Bracknell and
Ascot, and I could hear the crack and crash as one tree after another fell
over. Interestingly, many of the trees had snapped off low down and then the
top bit had landed, still fairly vertical, to one side, rather than them
being horizontal as I'd imagined. I earned a lot of brownie points as I was
one of relatively few people who made it into work that morning, having
walked a couple of miles after deciding that the local roads were so clogged
with stationary traffic that it wasn't worth even *trying* to drive. My wife
was living in Worcestershire at the time (long before we met) and did not
have a TV so she never saw a news report. And it wasn't until several months
later when she say huge gaps in woodland when she went to visit somewhere in
the south east that she even *heard* that there'd been a great gale and that
it had devastated huge areas of woodland. She'd been far enough north west
to avoid the effect of the gale and had never seen/heard anything on the
news, though it's surprising that no-one she worked with, who may have seen
a news, mentioned about it at the time.