The First company of... okay, heroes, I've no Kerbals currently

Recently gotten round to re-installing Company of Heroes; they seem to have shifted to steam, which is a goddamn boon since I no longer have to remember my convoluted COH login.  I've also had the opportunity to compare it to COH2, so consider this an epilogue of sorts.

What I imagine the landscape of love and dating to look like...

The cutscenes of COH2 I found to be stiff and lacking character, and I can say that they certainly don't hold a candle to the highly stylised, watercolour cutscenes of COH (above).  These have this effect often seen in animated comics, with static images sliding in relation to one another for effects of movement and depth, and they definitely help to cement the atmosphere of a dreaded undertaking at the beginning and a costly aftermath at the end.  COH2 cutscenes, even away from the interrogation room, simply have no charm.

The UI in COH2 is genuinely something you don't notice being slick until you use something less so, as in COH.  In this case it is marginally less so, but for one thing the units are more difficult to keep track of since they are buried behind some kind of blue shield; in COH2 they are always on display.  If COH2 sorted its buttons out (they sometimes skip a beat, not activating upon a click), this would be a whole-hearted step forward.

A poignant scene of morose victory.

I still cannot give a full opinion of COH yet, since I am only 4 missions into the original campaign (there are 6), it'll be a god knows how long, and god knows how much wasted productivity, before I can review it...  Perhaps...

Company of Heroes 2: The Human Floodgates open!

I don't really feel all that bothered about spoiling the story for this review, since Animal Farm is pretty much required reading in English Secondary Schools; if you are *really* that bothered about it, the back button comes in useful today.

The Mighty Whitey SturmGeschütz, commanding it's very own native population

COH2 centres itself around Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's headfirst charge into wiping the Slavs off the face of the earth, and I'm not just lacking tact today.  The Campaign sees you through 14 missions chronicling the actions of some guy who leads some soldiers, then becomes a journo who inexplicably stumbles on some facts about the war that fail to uphold his communist sense of self, consequently his CO assigns him to a "СТРАФНИКИ" (Strafniki) Penal Batallion where he continues to uncover uncomfortable trinkets to the point where, his faith completely destroyed, he attempts to defect; attempt being the word used since he gets caught.  The delivery of this narrative doesn't do anything to break the mould, it's told a lot like a distinctly more popular title, Battlefield 3, through flashbacks and the fact that the character is under interrogation.

It doesn't help that the animation has a stiff, railroaded quality to it, indicating that it was done using the game engine; the campaign also suffers from what I like to call "Call of Pripyat cut the crap Disorder" - super brief cutscenes lasting a few seconds which add little to nothing to the exposition ("So, the underpass was filled with gas after it was sealed?").  This happens twice, once when you breach the fortress walls and see dead Soviet Prisoners that could already be seen during gameplay, and once more showing troops charging the Reichstag.  The only saving grace to this otherwise mediocre story is the ending, which I will leave up to you to uncover...  or just give youtube a bell, I did that for the story of Modern Warfare 3.

Well, it was either that or some powermongering git with a pistol...

While COH2 was never meant to set the world alight with it's dashing wordplay and eloquent social observation (here's to you, Dishonored!), it doesn't need to; not when the gameplay leaves the game comprehensively spoken for.  Company of Heroes completely turned my perceptions of RTS gaming on it's head, and up until that point I believed the ability to churn out tanks like queen bees on E was the height of tactical achievement.  With it's ability to give even single machine guns imperious weight and heavy tanks the weight of celestial bodies, suddenly you felt like a right gimp chimp when that Panther sped into the cottage out of control as though it were coming to breakfast.  This forces you contribute more to maneuver and demand less in slaughter.

This is especially so when even the environment seems to be after your dignity, frozen rivers can cave in under artillery or even the heavier tanks,  towing them under the ice to provide a new home for all kinds of weeds and fish for centuries to come; Infantry shouldn't feel too safe away from the rivers, blizzards occasionally ravage the battlefield regardless of what us mere monkeys are fighting over, and fire is often all that stands between them and hypothermal metabolic seizure.  This is somewhat pretentiously called "ColdTech", and a system which shows you precisely what your units are perceiving through the fog of war is called "TrueSight"; personally, I'm not so sure that features which cause people not to see what destroys the nearest building causing them to freeze to death warrant the status of separate coding packages.

Snow could be the death of your men out here

The two armies in the conflict are balanced spot on against one another, with the Red Army suiting human waves, bombastic artillery and other assorted zerg rushing; the conscripts are offered anytime for free pretty much throughout the campaign and they are often the first to snuff it in combat, so when you get the chance to let them fall in with better units, do it.  The Wehrmacht, having more class than this, is much better suited to considered tactical planning with more expensive but more powerful units and fewer soldiers to a squad.  I tend to do a lot better when playing the Wehrmacht, moral implications of Lebensraum aside.

Worthy of honourable mention is the Theatre of War DLC, offered to pre-purchasers (me) and available with a lot of skins and a few commanders for £30 on steam (or just buy the digital collectors edition for £70).  Fucking steep, but just about worth it when you consider that Relic stated they were going to add to it, and Relic is not a company to abandon a fanbase.  This is a series of missions, co-op and singleplayer, which place you into specific situations in the war that limit resources to the point where most modern commanders would give up; this is where the game genuinely beats out any other RTS you care to name, and shows that the scale of an RTS, while admirable in the major, can be just as stunning in the minor.  The example I would like to pick out is the mission where using just infantry, 2 starting Katyushas and abandoned Katyushas scattered across the map, you need to knock down all the German buildings in the region with civilian buildings netting an extra minute.  You have to count on footsoldiers to scout out these buildings, since the list includes ammo caches on capture points, MG bunkers and other trivial constructions; to make matters worse, panzer IVs stand in your way (thankfully they are the "stubby" variant).

Scorched Earth is visually arresting...

Sound design, something I feel is not often considered in game reviewing, even though it could be the difference between mowing the human lawn and avenging the villages wiped off the map in the name of meaningless racial purity - there's a reason why I still play Medal of Honor: Airborne from time to time in spite of it's right honourable brownness, and that is because the attention to it's soundscape is exquisite; that and the fact that I am terminally addicted to it's upgrade mechanic.  There is a clear, distinct hierarchy of weapons communicated by how heavy they sound, i.e: sniper rifles trump infantry rifles, the T-70's 45mm vs the Sdkfz 222's 20mm and ideally the Tiger vs many T-34s :) .  I have to say that the idle chatter in this game falls significantly flatter than that of COH, probably owing to the indoctrinated nature of the soldiers dampening their personality, so ultimately it does fit in and keep the immersion going.

So what does it come to?  Definitely not a 10/10 given how flat the story felt to me, but no lower than a 9/10, yep, let's go with that.  For an RTS trailblazer, it doesn't get much (or any) better than this; was it right that the game was put before the story?  Absolutely.

Dual CPU Motherboards - The End?

Dual CPU motherboards, where will they go, will they ever go?  I am a frequent reader of Custom PC magazine, a UK publication owned by bit-tech; but it's not often that dual cpu motherboards make an appearance, not even in the "Crazy-but-Cool" category; the last time I can observe one is in issue 104 back in May 2012, page 36 (yep, I spent some 45 mins of my time checking that!).  In the November 2003 Issue, the 2nd issue and the oldest issue I own, there are two SMP motherboards on review and also the first Athlon 64.

This is a question I bring up because I spent some 2 hours on Ebay checking out potential motherboards for my new PC, a backup PC that will serve as my main PC when I am on my Easter and Christmas breaks from university and perhaps stand in for the actual main PC should it break (if my Graphics Card or CPU become silicon crackers through an OC'ing accident or a fall, I'll probably have to wait 2 months for the money to get a comparable replacement).  One of the specimens I came across was this, an Lga771 Dual CPU eATX motherboard for £30; accompanying CPUs were similarly astonishing at £7 for two and Israel can provide a suitable stack of memory at 8GB for £25.  Better still, spend £33 more and you get 8 cores with 16MB total L2 cache :)

To put this into perspective, £40 will get you a bog-standard Lga775 board that supports Core 2 Duo CPUs (sure, you can go as low as £15 if you fancy the Intel 915 Chipset THAT much), I spent £8 on a Pentium E2160 that didn't play ball with the ASUS P5SD2-TM/S I had because of it's obscure SiS chipset from the depths of Netburst, and I hold onto a stick of 2GB Corsair Dominator which has a bluescreen-churning brother simply because to get the same amount of DDR2 for £25 these days makes you supernaturally fortunate.

What this signals to me is that Dual CPU motherboards are becoming less relevant to the common man - Why would an enthusiast get an eATX monster-board that requires a corresponding cage to put it in (looks like a deal?  It comes with everything but all the things that make it a computer case as opposed to bent metal and plastic...  thanks lads) when a single CPU socket can play host to 8 CPU cores, even if the individual cores are not much cop?  There is also the fact that the cores arms race between Intel and AMD has juddered to a halt, largely due to the fact that programming an existing single-threaded game engine for parallel computing is a task comparable to writing an entire new DirectX Generation.

So why were these things desirable to begin with?  I suspect that back in the days when Pentium 4 was "winning" the Gigahertz war while simultaneously being tailed by Athlon XP at every turn (so much so that AMD called a 2.2GHz CPU a "3200+"), trying to edit a word document while a game was idling in the background could be described as flaky at best and rage-worthy at worst; what we needed, we thought, was a second CPU to handle the word document or perhaps something more risque like running video encoding alongside Bf1942 or maybe just open piles of word documents without reducing the windows desktop to a single-digit frame rate.  

Then along came Athlon 64 which roundly trounced Pentium 4, followed by Athlon 64 X2 2 years after in 2005; Netburst's final stand was with the Pentium D, the Presler models practically on fire with a TDP of 130 watts.  Two CPU cores in one package was a big deal in 2005 simply because it became so much less stressful to Alt-Tab Half life 2 to look up a walkthough owing to the second core being available for the browser; as was said before, parallel coding for consumer apps is a significant stumbling point even today.  In 2006, Core 2 Duo from Intel was released, finally putting that crispy-pink burnt old Netburst dog to rest and ushering in the "multicore war", a war which saw AMD, now on the losing side, stuffing as many cores as was humanly possible into an ageing architecture, resulting in this virtually meaningless overkill today.

Intel, meanwhile, saw no reason to give the enthusiast more than six cores and the consumer more than four; even the server motherboards of today don't get more than 16 physical cores from them.  And herein lies the answer - CPU cores simply outstripped the ability of reasonably-sized coding houses to take advantage of them, why trouble ourselves to code for more than 4 cores when the user is probably going to use the 4th core to surf the net while our program runs anyway?  Why take on such a gargantuan task within a 1 year release cycle?  In the aftermath of all this, we enter Core ix generation (I did my best to delineate the x from the i!), and TDP now becomes the battleground with Ivy Bridge i7s at 77w from Sandy Bridge at 95w (Haswell moves some of the voltage regulation circuitry on-chip, hence the 84w TDP).

The one customer base that stands no chance of relinquishing these gems, however, is computing-based research; Organizations that not only stuff as much CPU and RAM as they can into a case only 44.5mm high, but daisy chain hundreds of the damn things and pack them into a practically refridgerated room that reaches 30 Degrees C in spite of that, all to simulate a mouse brain in real time.  A fascinating phenomenon in relation to this is that for 8GB of RAM, error rates due to cosmic radiation is around once per 9 years non-ECC, 45 years for ECC memory; remember that as memory increases, the error rate increases with half as many years between errors for double the memory - the upshot is that based on these statistics, even WITH ECC, a server farm totalling 400TB of memory will have a single-bit error every 7 hours and 53 minutes (1 hour and 35 minutes without).

When PCs have arguably reached the point where CPUs are considered must-have at the same level as network cards, it is easy to forget just how desirable dual CPU boards once were - they once commanded massive attention from performance freaks and made a colossal difference in performance to everything imaginable; the idea of multi-tasking as fluidly as we frequently do now on an 11" netbook was a pipe dream worthy of comparison to interstellar travel.  Since server farms are compulsively upgrading to expand their research capability, there will be a steady flow of decommissioned server motherboards for us to play with, and if that isn't a dozen of fun, tell me what is!

Perks for Pocket Change: Hobo survival for Graphics Cards

My GTX 560 has really been getting on my nerves recently, with it's fan ragged and rattled by 2 years of only seeing an air duster twice (Delta fans all over the world attempt to pull a Yao Ming face...  and pull it off somehow, stunning server monkeys everywhere).  Problem is, this particular Graphics Card has a proprietary bolt spacing as a result of the GTX 560 spec for such things being "Scatter them over the board for giggles if you like", i.e:  There is no reference card.  It is upon this situation and others like it in future, which I bestow this installment of Perks for Pocket Change:

How to wrap up cool:  GTX 560

The Problem

Taken off google image search on account of "couldn't be stuffed to revert my card" 

As I mentioned before, the fan for my GPU is noisy as hell, due to a combination of the card being OC'd to 952MHz and the fact that the fan bearings are bashed; in any other situation I would by an aftermarket GPU cooler such as the Akasa Vortex Neo, but due to the bizarre bolting that remains out of reach.

The Build:  Phase 1

Only the outer 4 holes are used(?)

I chanced upon a discovery:  An 80mm fan fits snugly in the fan recess once the original fan and shroud are removed; this calls for a hoedown of all the fans I had in storage:

From Left to Right:  Cooler Master 92mm fan (80mm mounts), Intel (Delta) Reference Fan, GTX 480 Reference Fan, Zalman 92mm fan (came from a flower CPU cooler), GTX 560 cooler

Here is a rundown of the fan characteristics:

• Cooler Master:  Quiet and powerul, but frame wouldn't be too sturdy once it was cut for radial airflow
• Intel Reference:  Reasonably quiet, good airflow, open and sturdy frame
• GTX 480:  Showed promise when it sported the same connector as the GTX 560 fan, but stuttered upon application of 5V; doesn't bode well for reliability
• Zalman:  Simply too big

I ended up selecting the Intel Reference Fan and with a junior hacksaw, cut away the push pins and half the outer frame to get a fitting result:

My handiwork

Cable ties sorted out the mounting issue

Ordinarily, this section would be 'The Perk' detailing how well it turned out, but unfortunate events put paid to those plans; the new arrangement sat idle well enough at around 31 Degrees C at 51MHz (50 Degrees C idling at 952MHz, it does that sometimes), but under Furmark it hit 90 Degrees C and crashed; the prelude to which featured an alarming temperature climb which I have no evidence for sadly, so just take my word for it.

My theory as to why this went down was that the fan that the air was shifting wasn't entering the heatsinks but simply blowing away at the sides since air readily takes the path of least resistance.  This is the wrapping up part of the project where paper...  yes, paper, will come to the fore.

The Build:  Phase 2

A good place to begin is to make some support struts for the shroud you are about to build - to do this you take an offcut of paper long enough for the strut but several times wider, and you fold it up, tape it down, and you have a  sturdy support for the shroud worthy of Brunel...  If the only alternative material was papyrus:

Be sure to channel air through the fins by making the shroud as wide as the fan to begin with, then touching the fins at the end.

The Next step is simple enough - sheet her up!  Also be sure to account for the sides of the fan as otherwise it is these parts that most of the airflow will go instead of the fins.

Legit Larrabee?

The Pocket Change

To make things crystal, I am assuming that the Graphics Card is already owned, and that the items being bought are specifically to initiate this project; so here we have:

• Intel Reference Fan - £6 on Ebay, and you get a free heatsink for future projects!
• Paper - I used 80gsm Copy Paper which is around £3 if you take the cheapest packs, that said the choice is ultimately yours and cereal boxes could work even better.
• Standard and Double-Sided Tape - Poundland offers both for £1 I suspect.
• Cable ties can be had for as low as £1

Totals out to £12

The Perk

Evaluation will occur based on this scoring system out of 100 points:

• Cost - for every pound under £30, 1 point is obtained
• Looks - only 10 points given that I could care less about them
• Practicality - 60 points, this is the heart of the matter

With that in mind, here are the scores:

Cost:  18 points

While a replacement fan may be cheaper, it would not necessarily be easy to find if possible at all.

Looks:  3 points

Doesn't scream 'Professionalism', so don't think you can get away with this in the IT Dept. unless the computers you work with remain shut for decades at a time.

Practicality:  30 points

While I have noticed a drop in temperature when idling at 952MHz (47 Degrees C vs 50 Before), after a while my PC will still crash when doing Furmark, so maybe that was the result of my own stupidity and pig-headed refusal to downclock back to 810MHz (EDIT:  I've caved in, and the cooler is now capable of sustained 100% running):

Playing Chicken with GPU temps, if only to prove that my card is indeed overclocked (if you can even see that).

Also of a concern is durability, don't go manhandling this card, I'd suggest 3D printing an adjusted shroud - or modifying the stock one - to accomodate the new fan ASAP.

Final Score:  51%

This isn't the kind of handiwork I would rely on for a server, nor would I want people to gaze at it; that said though, it does work well enough while a proper solution to the dilemma is sought.  I can only suggest this when you have a card with a non-reference cooling solution that you want to shut up, but cannot find an aftermarket cooler to fit the bill.

On a side note, I still stand by my previous post; the upshot is that I really don't care who uses the title or the entire system.  I personally love open source stuff even though I am a lamentable coder.

EDIT:  The cooler has disintegrated, I redact the Practicality score to 5 points, making my Final Score 26%; you may have better luck with superglue but then that brings a lack of flexibility into play.

"We're still here if anyone cares!" - minor updates

This is pretty much just a micropost with a few updates wrt blogging matters, done just to keep this page updated while I stall for worthwhile content.

• I have made leaps and bounds in progress on my carriage, go here for comprehensive updates; point is it shipped today after 5 days(!), apparently will be with me tomorrow (it's currently in Eindhoven, NL).
• Perks for Pocket Change could see the light of day, but that's in doubt; so if anyone wants a catchy name for a similar series, here you go - I promise I'm no patent troll.
• I may do some videos on youtube at some point, but expect little to no speech, since my vocals provoke entertainment in the same way that Coppercab's hysterical nonsense provokes rational debate.

That's that.

You have been accused of remembering your wife's birthday, how do you plead?

Credit goes to Simierski for Publishing that video, I believe ChrisTheXelent made it - both channels are well worth a look, especially Chris' Steam Locomotives in Profile.

Anyway, the reason why I bring this up is because of an incident which happened at London Cannon Street Station when I attempted to photograph the exterior and the platforms; a steward came up to me quite intently, intercepted me and asked me what I was doing, naturally, I responded "Taking photos of the station, is there a problem with that?" or words to that effect; he then ordered me to delete the photos on account of "fighting terrorism", as well as some photos taken of the station at Tilbury in Essex (I had come from Gravesend in Kent and had taken the ferry over).  Thankfully the rest were saved by hiding behind a shot of an obscure burger chain which used to have an outlet in Frimley:

Starburger, I salute you and all my cherished memories of never visiting you but once!

Naturally, I don't blame the steward for any of this, though I did label him a "joyless corporate tool" in my head; aside from making the political class look oh so compassionate and active, surely banning photos has done the sum of shit-all to stop terror, in fact the terrorists themselves are proving to be more effective than any new law we have put into action by the looks of it!  Does this stop their fury-filled drive for united action and radical change characteristic of cult indoctrinates?  No, but that goes to show that savages will be savages no matter what tools they are given:  Ban photos, they will use sketches; ban drawing at stations, they'll remember the details; what are you going to do?  Ban remembering things?

Yeah, ban memory why don't you?  Let all those businesses collapse due to inability to keep even the simplest of deadlines, or let nurses forget to change the toilets of the bed-ridden or perhaps let psychotics forget their Valium and go out to stab some hapless government official - hey, what goes around comes around!

Clamping down on the citizenry in such petty ways as this simply shows Al Qaeda and other militant groups that they create massive hysteria necessitating such tightened controls, ergo, they double their efforts.  On the other hand, let's imagine the opposite case; we pay little to no attention and keep on visiting the shops and stations and such that were targeted, we keep taking photos and we even manage to make public jokes about how Abdul chose an indestructible car to blow himself up in; like that infantile kid acting all gimpy for attention, the militants will come to the conclusion that their blows are harmless, only serving to cement themselves further into the social category of "hopeless puppet".

Or maybe we won't see that, because in this case we are dealing with people who teach their kids that having your body parts rocketing in all 6 degrees of freedom, and taking a bus stop full of nuns along for the ride, is the difference between a boy and a man.

Space Program of the Second Company of Kerbals

This is a warning to anyone who has work to do, who is trying to build a future for himself whether through a business or a career; people who wish to become free in the future to pursue whatever nonsense pleases them:  Do not download an open beta for a game which has been making you count the days forever - get the current task far out of the way, preferably in the opposite hemisphere.  I bring this up in light of two new games I have attributed to my recent spike in procrastination; these be Kerbal Space Program and Company of Heroes 2.

Both of these titles are open beta currently, and in spite of my cut-and-shut attempt to mix those two names up in the title of this post, they need distinct attention.

Kerbal Space Program

Sorry to lead you on a bit, but I really cannot give a comprehensive opinion on this title currently.  All I can say is that the method of building spaceships couldn't be simpler - all it lacks is some cylinders which are wide at the top and narrow at the bottom (EDIT:  You can rotate these parts, according to the controls), to enable a colossal fuel tank to sport a tiny, frugal engine without it looking like a toothpick supporting a barrel of crude oil.  I say I lack much of an opinion because all I have achieved to date is:

• Numerous crashes
• One satellite in a comet-style eccentric orbit
• One satellite off into space...  somewhere...

So yep, no opinion.

How North Korea would handle a space program, except that Kerbal looks too well fed...

Company of Heroes 2

Company of Heroes wasn't just an RTS to me, not even just a great RTS; it completely changed how I thought about the entire genre to the point where I feel entitled to all future RTS games being called "like COH but".  I remember playing titles like Red Alert (featuring the funniest death sound ever to grace a nuclear blast), C&C Generals (which for some reason I played to death) and Star Wars:  Empire at War (Space battles only, the ground levels can eat a gun).  All these titles were good, but they lacked an essential quality that sets COH well apart, and that is a essential humanity in the way the game feels; the dialogue from your units and others sounds organic and improv-ed to a T, the vehicles move according to their weight and all munitions used have a distinct, vibrant impact.  COH2 has proudly carried on the tradition... to the Eastern Front!  Relic could have just made another expansion like Opposing Fronts or Tales of Valor, but no, they gave the theatre playing host to half of all the blood spilt during the conflict it's own damn game - exactly what it deserved!

Oh, right, is it any good?  Are you mad?  Why would I wax lyrical about probably the least relevant (wrt gameplay) facet of this title like it was the goddamn life's work of Brunel if I didn't love this game?  I fucking adore it and wait like a widowed bride upon the cliff pining for her soldier to return home!  I especially can't wait to see how they handle the drama of the Eastern Front through the campaign; we needn't worry about gameplay getting lodged in the works since it is as streamlined as a swan with twice the bite.

In conclusion, say what you like about COH2; you scratch it's back, it introduces yours to a dagger, it will keep you starved and awake, it will even have you fight to the death when the writing has been sandblasted into solid steel mounted to the wall...  but it is never, ever dull!

Terminal Addiction: Circling the Train

It has been quite a while since I went by train to a destination...  somewhere.  The last time I can remember is the 4th of April when I went with 2 of my friends to Portsmouth Harbour and they goddamn well paid for it!  Furthermore, it'll be another week before I have the capital to pay for another one (perhaps), so in the meantime I would like to give my review of all the London Termini I have been through; I have a whimsical fascination of these places - even when it is simpler to avoid them I will still seek them out!

Bear in mind there are 18 stations in the London Station Group, 13 of which I count as Termini to visit (more terminal platforms than through platforms), I haven't been to Moorgate (EDIT:  This station is now closed wrt national rail, so there is only 12 Termini with 1 left) and Charing Cross, .  With all this in mind, I begin in ascending order to my verdict:

London Euston

Oh how the mighty have fallen...  I am loath to say that this station was up there with Paddington, but it had a respectable look to it with it's Great Hall and Euston Arch:

Etch of the Great Hall

Euston Arch, 1896

Platforms, 1962 (Ben Brooksbank)

They took these magnificent, Avant-Garde features, bulldozed them in the 60s and replaced them with these:

Station Exterior, Rush Hour 2.10.2013 (My own photography)

Concourse, taken on the same day, before the blogger ate a burger the size of his face (My own photography)

Not so dingy as I seem to remember, but I dread to wait for the Caledonian Sleeper here (My own photography)

You probably wasn't expecting such a deluge of photography, but I feel quite repulsed by this "renovation"; I am hardly alone too, since I have here some very choice quotes from Wikipedia and other sites:

• "A dingy, grey, horizontal nothingness" - Andrew Martin, New Statesman
• "Opened in 1968, the new Euston certainly reflected the tawdry glamour of it's time" - Gavin Stamp, Apollo Magazine
• "What masterpiece arose on the site of the old station?  No masterpiece." - John Betjeman, campaigner for retention of the old arch

Where is the sense of the start of an epic adventure that the older, Victorian Terminus gives the traveller?  If I wanted to travel by air, London Gatwick is but a train away from Farnborough North, so to argue that it was meant to look like an airport is laughable; Airports completely fail to excite me, and so does this station.

Euston is a tragedy more than anything else, call it a victim of the 1960's blasé attitude towards the classical arts; art can be anything, I suppose...

London Fenchurch Street

Being goddamn careful to avoid a bollocking (My own photography)

Nothing much to say here, looks just like any other London station aside from the fact that it's a Terminus; incidentally, I came through here after visiting Burnham-on-Crouch (and it's remarkable Mangapps Railway Museum, didn't bother with the town :) ) to avoid bus travel, since the route I came there on was subject to engineering works.  Yep, that's how little I can stand buses.

Out towards Shoeburyness and Southend...  hmmm...

The super-compact concourse :D

Outside looks intimidated by Erno Goldfinger's Legacy...

London Cannon Street

This is what I have to make do with thanks to "terrorism" (Wjfox2005, Wikipedia)

One of the more spartan London Termini, with no concourse to speak of and Euston-esque trainshed.  This station is at least halfway over a bridge, so at least that's one notable feature.  Funny how google maps has no images of the interior of this station while most other stations do have such photos; this is probably due to the staff I met there who thought that my photos of the platforms and front of the station somehow made good recon material for nail-bombers...  cunts.

London Charing Cross

I passed this station on my way to the London Transport Museum and I've got to say I'm looking forward to being inside this station, with it's intricate cast concrete details it'd make a fine subject for a Z gauge layout.

Just move that office block and we're good to go ;)

London Bridge

Nuclear footbridge in the distance (My own photography)

This station quite fascinates me - on the one hand we have the greenhouse-like station concourse à la Waterloo, on the other hand we have this gigantic hunk of brown concrete masquerading as a footbridge!

Seriously, I feel like I'm entering Kelvedon Hatch! (My own photography)

Other than that, London Bridge is an average station in terms of London stations, the obligatory coffee shops are there as well as a cornish pasty shop (extreme left):

The sausage rolls are well worth plunderin' from that shoppe! (My own photography)

London Marylbone

I apologize for any blurriness, but this is the Exterior (My Own Photography)

Getting better, it at least it begins to look like a interesting place to wait for a train (or do what I do and grab fast food then scoff it on the train).  Turn of the last century architecture with some modern bits, goes to some interesting places like High Wycombe and Beaconsfield, line ends at Birmingham.

The Concourse, which seems to be unusually cramped for a Terminus this size (My Own Photography)

This station does have some fantastic ironwork, but it's not a very open station given that half the platform area is blanked off by the food court, a confusing decision if you ask me.

Yep, this is the area from which you access the platforms; seems like few people use this station and prefer the WCML to reach Birmingham (My Own Photography)

Admittedly what little roof area remains is well maintained and gives a bright interior which allows those red pillars to properly shine, but even Hull Paragon keeps most of it's platforms open (even though they can take HSTs while most trains have 2 carriages). The thing that strikes me here is that Marylbone has had it's heyday.

I will say that Marylbone is in a nice area, with less skyscrapers contributing to a more friendly feel to the platforms (My Own Photography)

London Liverpool Street

Frame-Laden roof neatly fits in with the positively ancient rolling stock of East Anglia (My own photography)

Class 90s hauling Mk3 stock heading to Norwich (My own photography)

Now we are getting somewhere, we are starting to gain some Architectural Merit, some idea that we are in a place where great journeys begin.  Just as well since it serves East Anglia, a place I would like to go to more often if I can brave the natives ;)

Stepping through the ticket gates to the platforms is like travelling through time here!  (My own photography)

This is all I could capture of the original exterior, it being encroached by modernity.  (My own photography)

London Waterloo

So this is the UK's busiest station?  (My own photography)

It is, apparently.  With over 91 million people moving through in one year, I am genuinely surprised that the platforms are frequently as empty as this; then again I actively avoid rush-hour for fear of being implosively compressed.  Still, I have never seen the concourse of this station in a quiet state, so it should come as no surprise that meeting "under the clock at Waterloo" is a tradition for Lambeth Londoners.

That's more like it! (My own photography)

London Kings Cross

Magnificence, as imagined by Poseidon (My own photography)

When you come into Kings Cross from the London Underground (and notice that St. Pancras shares this station), you expect the exact same place 4472 Flying Scotsman and 4468 Mallard enthroned themselves in history by making their respective speed records of 100mph and 126mph.  Instead, you come to exactly that, encased in this shroud of modernity which is a fantastic building in it's own right.  I'd say that checks out given that it is the longest single-span structure in Europe.

Platforms 9 through 11, local services (My own photography)

Platforms 0-8, with much appreciated clean glass in the roof (My own photography)

London Victoria

Points off for that Euston bit snuggled down under the half-hidden departure board (My own photography)

This is where the Brighton Belle left from; don't believe me do you?  Well, here is some grandeur to go with the train:

Perhaps now you can imagine pullmans being hauled away from here (My own photography)

Victoria is a splendid place, a miniature version of Paddington that seems to feel pissed off at being held back by 'only' going to holiday destinations like Brighton, Bognor Regis and the like instead of Industrial Powerhouses like Bristol and South Wales.  Gatwick Express also leaves from here, when I next fly I may consider buying a ticket from Farnborough Main, taking the loopiest route possible just to travel on it - especially since they now use Class 442 Wessex Electric Stock.

London St. Pancras

ICE train in St. Pancras, can you wait for trains to Germany? (mattbuck, Wikipedia)

I certainly can't, what really clinches the place at number 2 is the underdog story behind this glorious revival.  I couldn't find a copyright-accessible photograph of the station around 1990 to demonstrate the case before the revival, but this steam age photograph circa 1957 isn't much cleaner:

That is indeed a Caprotti-Valved Black 5 (Ben Brooksbank) 

The place where the shops are now was a gigantic Beer Cellar built by the Midland Railway, bet they couldn't have been sparkling either.

The Grade 1 Listed Midland Hotel, £325 a night in July 2013 (My own photography)

London Paddington

Best for last and all that; ladies and gentlemen, London Paddington!

... (My own photography)

I don't feel I even need to comment; the imperious iron roof, the gargantuan platforms and the sheer scale of the station all speak for me!

The platforms are a happy accident of the station's tenure as a Broad Gauge Terminus, 7 feet and 1/4 inches was the gauge so you can imagine how massive the trains would have been; they also reputedly averaged speeds of 50mph in service... in 1840!

Perhaps more humble is this view from the Circle Line Platforms (My own photography)

Fit to be a royal palace methinks...

Just to prove that this really is Paddington :D

Conclusion

I appreciate that most of these photographs are not mine, and where possible I sourced them from wikipedia under creative commons (in the links).  I hope to rectify this by adding my own photographs as I revisit these stations, as well as add the stations I have omitted as I visit these places.  Overall, I look forward to both completing my long-overdue photos of these places and visiting Moorgate in particular, which at 2 terminal platforms, is probably London's Smallest Terminus (EDIT:  Ahh, how dreams can be so callously dashed...).

Just for fun, let's end on a panorama shot of Paddington :)