WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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I'm in the English countryside near Canterbury,

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and this is a level crossing.

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Nothing too unusual about that, except this

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is a user operated level crossing.

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And they are fairly few and far between.

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This little red and green light here tells you when it's safe

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to cross and then when it is you have to get out

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of the car that you drove up here in, and you have to

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physically pump the barriers to get them to rise.

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I'm aware quite how dodgy this movement looks.

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And this in itself is not too unusual, you know,

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there are crossings like this in odd regional parts of England,

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in the valleys of Wales, on smaller lines, but the thing

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you might not know is that this is not a provincial line

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This is a high speed rail line that has Javelin trains on the London to Ramsgate run.

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The ones that do 140mph.

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And, okay, they're not doing 140 here,

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they're doing about 40, maybe 50mph at most,

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but all that's stopping me from blocking this line,

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or worse, being hit by something on this line, is -- well -- this crossing

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and this little lever down here, that drops

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the barriers and makes it safe for the trains

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to cross again. That is a user operated level crossing

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and that is something you might not have known.

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