Eastvale: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

Membership is free to anyone who lives, works or studies in the county; bring something that shows your address when you join. You may have twenty items out at a time. Books are lent for three weeks and films for one, and you can renew twice online or by telephone unless another reader has reserved the item. Overdue items cost 20p a day, up to a maximum of £5 per item, but nothing at all is charged to readers under 16 or over 65.

There are twelve computers for public use on the ground floor, free for up to two hours a day. Sessions can be booked at the desk or online up to a week ahead. Printing costs 10p a sheet in black and white and 40p in colour. The wireless network is free and needs no password. On Tuesday mornings a member of staff runs a drop-in session for anyone who would like help filling in forms on the internet.

On the first floor, open Wednesday to Saturday. It holds parish registers, estate maps, photographs and forty years of the Eastvale Gazette on microfilm. Nothing may be taken out of the room, and only pencils may be used at the tables. You do not need an appointment to consult the collection, but the microfilm reader must be booked in advance because there is only one.

Rhyme Time for children under three runs every Thursday at 10.30; there is no charge and no need to book. Homework Club meets Monday to Thursday from 3.30 to 5.30 during term time only, for pupils in school years 5 to 9, with a volunteer on hand to help. The Summer Reading Challenge opens in the first week of July and runs to the end of August.

This service is for readers who are unable to come to the library themselves because of illness, disability or caring responsibilities. A trained volunteer chooses a selection to suit your taste, brings it to your door once a month and takes away whatever you have finished. To arrange a first visit, ring the number at the foot of this page, or ask a friend or relative to ring on your behalf.

We have two rooms, one seating six and one seating twelve. They are free to community groups that make no charge to their own members, and £12 an hour to everybody else. Bookings must be made at least two working days ahead. You are welcome to bring cold refreshments, but hot food may not be prepared or eaten in either room.

Fill in the application form online and give us the names of two referees, at least one of whom should not be a relative. You will then be invited to an induction lasting an hour and a half, which covers the kitchen layout, fire procedures and how a service runs. We also pay for every volunteer to take a short online course in food hygiene. It takes about two hours, has to be completed before your first shift in the kitchen itself, and must be repeated every three years.

Closed shoes are essential; sandals and canvas trainers are not permitted anywhere beyond the dining room. Please remove rings and bracelets, although a plain wedding band may be kept on, and tie long hair back. An apron is provided and laundered here at the end of every session, so please leave it in the basket by the door rather than taking it away with you.

There are three shifts each day: preparation from 8.00 to 12.00, service from 11.30 to 2.30, and clearing from 2.00 to 5.00. Sign up on the rota by the Wednesday of the week before the one you wish to work. If something prevents you from coming, let the shift leader know as early as you can. There is a messaging group for informal conversation, but a message sent to the rota inbox is the only notice we treat as official.

Every dish on the counter carries a card listing which of the fourteen allergens it contains. Never guess: if a guest asks about a dish and the card is missing, find the shift leader before serving it. For the same reason, please do not bring in food you have cooked at home for guests to eat, however kindly meant, because we cannot tell them what is in it.

We reimburse travel for journeys of more than three miles each way, either at the standard mileage rate or against a bus or rail ticket. Claims are made once a month on the yellow form in the office and paid into your account within three weeks. No payment of any kind is made for the hours you give, and volunteers are not employees of the charity.

Every new volunteer has a named supervisor for the first three months, with a short and entirely informal review after six weeks. Free places are offered on first aid and safeguarding courses several times a year. Anybody who wants to help at the Saturday club for under-18s must first have a criminal records check, which we arrange and pay for, and which takes about a month to come back.

For most of the twentieth century the sleeping car was an ordinary way to cross a continent. You boarded in one capital in the evening, ate in the restaurant car, and woke as the train came into another. Between about 1990 and 2015 nearly all of it disappeared. Budget airlines undercut the fare from below, high-speed day trains took the shorter journeys from above, and one operator after another withdrew its sleepers and sent the carriages for scrap. By the middle of the last decade the German railway had closed its overnight network altogether, and travellers who wanted a bed on a train had a handful of routes to choose from where there had once been hundreds.

The economics were genuinely difficult, and it is worth being clear about why. A sleeping car carries perhaps thirty passengers where a day coach carries eighty, so every kilometre of track costs several times as much per head. The vehicle then stands in a siding for most of the day, earning nothing, because nobody wants a bed at two in the afternoon. And a night train usually crosses borders, which means paying several different railways, training staff in several different signalling systems, and finding a path through each country on the same night. Set against a cheap flight and a hotel, the numbers rarely worked.

The turn came from Austria. In 2016 the Austrian state operator took over the sleeping cars that the German railway had just abandoned, rebranded the network and began running it as a serious business rather than a heritage service. Passenger numbers rose year after year. New routes followed to Amsterdam, Paris and Rome, other operators returned to the market, and a handful of private companies announced services of their own. The recovery has been uneven and several of the new ventures have failed, but the direction of travel is no longer in doubt.

Part of the explanation is a change in what passengers want. From about 2018 the environmental cost of flying moved from the margins of the conversation to the centre of it, particularly in northern Europe, and a generation of travellers began to treat a long journey as part of a holiday rather than an obstacle to it. Governments noticed. France now prohibits domestic flights on routes where the same journey can be made by train in under two and a half hours, and several countries have put money into new sleeper carriages. Whatever one makes of the individual measures, the night train is back in the policy conversation in a way it had not been for a generation.

The obstacles, however, have not gone away. A modern sleeping carriage is a specialised vehicle with plumbing, air conditioning and crash protection, it costs several times what a day coach costs, and the factories that build them have order books measured in years. Every railway levies access charges for each kilometre a train runs on its tracks, and a night train runs across several countries in a single journey, collecting a bill from each. Nor is the timetable friendly: the hours when a sleeper wants to be moving are exactly the hours when engineering work closes the line, so paths at night are scarce and often circuitous.

The pricing is misunderstood by almost everybody who complains about it. A berth is not an airline seat; the passenger is buying transport and a night's accommodation at the same time, so the honest comparison is with the cost of a flight and a hotel room together. Even so, the operator faces a problem no hotel has, which is that the same space cannot be sold twice in a day, and the yield obtained from each vehicle is therefore low. Most operators now sell three grades on the same train, a reclining seat, a shared couchette and a lockable private cabin with its own washing facilities, and it is the private cabin that makes the arithmetic work.

The environmental argument is strong but it is not unconditional. A passenger on an electric night train is responsible for a small fraction of the emissions of the same journey by air, but how small a fraction depends on the mix of electricity that drives the train, on how full it is, and on the awkward question of whether the journey would have been made at all. Transport economists call this last problem induced demand: a cheap and pleasant sleeper may add journeys to the total rather than move them off aircraft, and a service that runs half empty in February may be worse per passenger than the plane it was meant to replace.

What all of this suggests is that the night train is neither a curiosity nor a solution to aviation. It is a good answer to a particular question, which is how to cross a distance of roughly six hundred to fifteen hundred kilometres: too long to be comfortable as a day train, and short enough to be covered between dusk and breakfast. Within that band, a bed on a train beats an early flight on almost every measure a traveller cares about. Outside it, the enthusiasm tends to run some way ahead of the arithmetic, and the services that have failed in the past five years have mostly been the ones that forgot where the band ends.