6/10/14 - not the best day for passengers travelling between Cornwall and London. Apart from the well-covered (on here) severance of cables overnight by electrification contractors there was also the HST from Paddington stranded for hours outside St Austell with adhesion problems which, of course, meant everything behind it in the same boat
Funnily enough, despite the long sections of single track through Cornwall, the "traditional" enthusiasts don't seem bothered about "resillience" through Cornwall - probably because there's not a nineteenth century "solution" to any disruption!
In this case, mainly to tease those who took such great exception to me suggesting Waterloo - Barnstaple services on previous threads.
However, never underestimate the PFLWA*
* (Popular Front for the Liberation of the Withered Arm).
Why have a shuttle to Exeter with 2 car DMUs? Few would use it if they had to change at Exeter, they would just continue to drive up the A30.
Extend the Waterloo - Exeter service to Plymouth (with a North Cornwall Parkway station at the A30/A386 junction at Sourton near Okehampton (using 2 or 3 car class 158/9 DMUs) and you will get plenty of use.
This will no doubt attract the same derison from some quarters that my previous suggestions to extend the Waterloo - Exeter service to Barnstaple have acquired (in fact extension to both would be quite easy, with 2x3 car class 159 sets splitting/joining at Crediton).
I'm coming to the conclusion though that a lot of the derision is from Great Western enthusiasts who don't want to see a Southern rival re-emerge (after its rapid rundown and closure at the hands of former GWR employees within a couple of years of their getting their grubby hands on it on 1st January 1963);
and from (F)Great Western enthusiasts who don't want the competition, given how many of the Exeter/Taunton - London service users SWT have already taken since Waterloo - Exeter went hourly, giving regular clockface times 7 days a week (with no two hour gaps, cough..Taunton.. cough), with consistent journey times (rather than journey times that vary by the best part of an hour depending which train you get) and comfortable seats that line up with the windows (and lots of facing seats with tables)
Then there is much cheaper fares eg:
05:14 Exeter Central to Waterloo, arrive 08.46 Anytime Return £69 (3h 36m)
05:46 Exeter St Davids to Paddington, arrive 08.38 Anytime Return £118 (2h 52m)
Despite the 40 minute longer journey time to Waterloo, from City Centre (Exeter) to City Centre (City of London) it is faster via Waterloo and only with the Waterloo service is is possible to be in the City by 9AM. (via the drain)
Yes, my posts are about as welcome as Posts about Chilterns Evergreen 3 plans were at Euston a few years back in some quarters.
:roll:
While I think the Okehampton route is the wrong solution, if it were to be rebuilt then it needs to be rebuilt as substancial mainline route, the idea of building it as some kind of cheapo glorified preserved railway is ridiculous, paying what would still be hundreds of millions for 1 train an hour and a slow ramble around Dartmoor is crazy you may well just catch the bus on the A38, and in any scenario the investment required to reinstate Tavistock to Okehampton will be massive relative to current proposals to reinstate Bere Alston to Tavistock
If your going to build any kind of diversionary route then it needs to have capacity to deal with it without major disruption to the timetable, not lets build this line as cheaply as possible so it gets our main objective of reinstating the Okehampton service, oh and by the way there might just be capacity to send the odd diverted mailine train this way, ridiculous.
True.
The idea that we can build a 30mph/50mph (predominantly) single track line on a shoestring *and* have something capable of being a diversionary route for HSTs etc is naive.
Can't have it both ways.
Fundamently it doesn't solve any of the problems of the main line and still causes considerable disruption to the timetable, which comes back to a proper solution of diverted mainline between Exeter and Newton Abbot, which has Zero impact on Intercity services, in the event of a Coastal Route closure, either Temporary or eventually Permanent
I agree - an Okehampton route should stand/ fall on its own merits - trying to piggyback upon the Dawlish issue is desperate - if Okehampton is to go ahead then it needs to be based upon what happens 99% of the time (regardless of the line at Dawlish)
Tavistock is already being addressed as a separate project and the rest of the argument for Oakhampton/Tavistock is based on weekend hobbyists fantasies.
Reopening Bere Alston to Tavistock is going to annoy the "traditional" element because the Tavistock to Plymouth market is the cherry on the cake of full reopening. Take that away and the remaining "cake" isn't that remarkable.
- Current London centric UK economy is an implosion waiting to happen and yet Crossrail 2 comes next (I'm involved with that project too) with more investment thrown at what is essentially a service economy with no real wealth creation. Why do you think all the commentators (deputy Head of BofE this week) are suddenly wakening up to the fact that zero is the new norm base rate? It's because London and alike have sucked the life out of the real economy for 20 years now without any real added value - the western world is broke. Yet cost benefit analysis still reckons more of the same will work. It won't. It's time for smaller investments that can make a start on rebalancing our country.
I know that in this dumbed down UKIP environment, it's fashionable to rail against "big bad London" but Crossrail and Crossrail2 (son of Crossrail) are mass transportation projects that'll attract millions of people.
In comparison, Okehampton has a population of around five thousand.
There's an argument about how fairly investment is distributed around the UK, but that doesn't justify the Okehampton railway.
You forget that not only do Tavistock and Okehampton benefit from greater connectivity with the rest of the South West, but other communities on the network also stand to gain from greater connectivity to Tavistock, Okehampton and the hinterland of Devon.
Assuming you're basing that on a position of knowledge (rather than ideological guff), perhaps you could provide us with a technical and engineering critique of the Selby diversion. This was a major engineering project undertaken by BR during the early 1980's which was similar to some of the options proposed for Dawlish.
As I mentioned before, the Selby diversion was a large engineering project which provided a realignment solution similar to some of those proposed in Devon
Selby is a great example.
British Rail decided to solve a problem by building a new alignment that gave longer distance passengers a faster journey (than the existing service through Selby).
If this Forum had been around in the 1980s then we'd have seen people suggesting that the best way of dealing with the Selby subsidence would have been to re-open the line from York to Teesside via Pickering and Goathland instead (and said that no long distance passengers would be bothered about the time saving of the route that BR chose)
Yes I'm sure passengers do prefer to travel by train and will accept an increased journey time up to a point, however the Fact is that many TOC would now rather run a bus even when a diversion exists because its cheaper and less hard work, eg. Virgin would rather run buses than an S&C diversion no doubt its cheaper and less agro than changing the voyager diagrams, and hiring 57's, granted its less of a problem with purely diesels, however what's the betting that with your limited capacity solution many passengers still end up going by bus
Agreed - replacement bus services are a fact of life - whilst they aren't ideal, we can't justify hundreds of millions of pounds for the sake of avoiding them once in a while.
The fact remains that the route tends to be quite severely affected by extreme weather every twenty to thirty years or so, so having an alternative helps
I'm relaxed enough about "every twenty to thirty years" - if we have hundreds of millions to spend on a diversionary route that'll be properly useful once a generation then there are hundreds of more pressing projects that we could be spending the money on (which will benefit large numbers of people on a daily basis).
If every winter is like the one we've just experienced then of course I'll change my mind, but even if the "worst winter for 250 years" becomes something that we experience every 25 years, that's no reason to panic.
Of course not. But it does help those with an agenda against re-openings to paint every reopening proposal as a nostalgia exercise.
The froth about LSWR/ GWR just makes the Okehampton supporters look like they are more interested in fighting historic battles than providing modern solutions.
I really don't care whether the current Exeter - Plymouth line was built by the GWR or LSWR (or UKIP or HSBC or anyone else) - it matters not, in terms of "solving" the Dawlish issue.
Seriously, you go on about the BCR analysis as though it is some totally objective be all and end all, handed down from on high to Abraham on tablets of stone. It's just a set of numbers that somebody's come up which leaves some things out and adds others in. What you call "mumbo jumbo" is the ability of people to go about their business and undertake economic activity. It's astonishing that this isn't captured in the methodology, yet a ten minute saving out of a journey of several hours (I've had longer trips to the toilet) can be calculated to add up to millions of pounds
Given that there are dozens/ hundreds of investments that we *could* be making, the BCR is the best benchmark that we have for some sober comparison/ analysis.
If you don't want to trust the analysis then fair enough, but we need to find a way compare the various different projects - otherwise we get into an emotive mess where everyone wants their own pet project to have some special case.
As an individual element, a branch to Tavistock would be of great benefit to those travelling to or from Tavistock itself, but as part of a through route there are far greater benefits, including to residents diverted at times of disruption and residents travelling to other places in central Devon. Why wouldn't you logically want to capture all of these.
...because there are low hanging fruit and ones that are harder to reach. If you can get the majority of the benefits (Tavistock to Plymouth) for a fraction of the total cost of the full line then the marginal cost of those "greater benefits" are much harder to justify.
Tavistock to Plymouth is the main attraction - if you can do that fairly cheaply (seven miles of single track) then the central section is fairly high cost for fairly low benefit.
Maybe it's something in the water, but the fact remains that Scotland has achieved some notable reopenings during the privatised era while the record in England has been, frankly, lamentable.
There's a lot of "spin" about how much Scotland has achieved, but (since re-openings appear to be your "thing"), there's only been a little in around fifteen years of devolution (around a dozen miles from Caldercruix to Bathgate, half that distance for Stirling to Alloa), plus stations on existing track (Newcraighall etc).
In northern England in the same period we've seen the Brighouse line reopened to passenger traffic, the "big bang" expansion to Manchester Metrolink...
...plenty more to come in the next five years too (Ordsal Chord etc)
You should know as well as anyone that the single track WOE mainline has proved its value as a diversionary route time and time again (as one of your alternative funding suggestions is to improve this capability).
Yes - and it serves a decent number of people day in/ day out (given the population of Yeovil etc) - which is why I think that it'd be more useful 99% of the time than the Okehampton route.
Providing the capacity to allow the full half hourly Waterloo - Salisbury service to extend to Exeter would benefit a large number on a regular basis (the diversionary benefits are a bonus, but not the main reason for redoubling).
Compare the numbers you'd get through Yeovil to the numbers you'd get through Okehampton.
The reality is that Plymouth is the main economic centre of the region. It's also a reality that Torbay is rather closer to Exeter and the rest of the network than Cornwall, so bustitution, whilst not ideal, is a shorter experience.
Ah, so Torbay doesn't justify this much vaunted "resilience", let them use replacement bus services - whilst Cornwall cannot possibly suffer in this way?
Torbay to Exeter is a busy market - one that FGW seem much more interested in throwing any "spare" DMU resource at than trying to serve Okehampton during the week.
PS, stop forgetting Torbay!!!!!!:roll:
Yup
Tavistock (pop 11k) will be provided for by the appropriate level of service for a very small country town if the extension to Tavistock goes ahead. It hardly justifies the expense of a connection to Oakhampton for such a small back-water while a town such as Newton Abbot (pop approx 25k) is cut off by an event at Dawlish
Yes.
The fact that some insist on Okehampton having a year round service, but are happy for South Devon to be abandoned at times of disruption is a strange thing.
Well, I don't have figures for Devon, but Appleby and Settle are both settlements in an area of outstanding natural beauty with a combined population smaller than Tavistock and Okehampton and not only do they benefit greatly from the railway, but areas such as West Yorkshire and Carlisle benefit from quality public transport access to them
Appleby only gets around eighty departing passengers a day - whilst it "benefits" from the railway, I wouldn't get too excited about those kind of numbers.
Settle is on the fringes of the Leeds commuter belt, so sees more passengers (as Tavistock would for Plymouth, no doubt) - but the numbers for stations north of Settle are pretty thin.
