That isn't what many bodies involved with protection of the countryside say. NR are well aware they are open to legal challenge on this, this potentially would stop any work taking place in the affected area, which is why they are changing the design.
If there was a realistic legal challenge, an injunction would have been filed by now. The tactic is to inconvenience the project into either discretionary payments or for the few who are genuinely concerned about views, to try and force what they think (mistakenly) is a better solution - headspans.
There was, until recently (it may still be there, but I've not seen it prominently) some slightly deceptive images on the Save Goring Gap site of the soon to be removed headspans out by Stockley Junction, as a representative image of what the residents want.
Nevertheless, it seems poor practice from an engineering point of view not to take visual intrusion into consideration in sensitive areas.
They're the least intrusive OLE system used in the UK - lower in overall height than Mark 1 or Mark 3 OLE, relatively low separation between contact and catenary, low amounts of small part steelwork, tidy tensioning arrangements and tidy tail wires (or rather a lack of). The only way you're going to get anything lower profile is to fit some sort of fake tree plastic cover (like they do with mobile masts) and I dread to think how complicated that would be with 25kV involved.
This further adds to the mismanagement of the project as a whole, with many basic errors being made. From locations of buried signalling cables (a well known BR WR practice) to poor design on the electrification factory train.
Buried cables aren't the problem per se, it's nobody now knowing where the cables are, and a long term attitude under late British Rail, all of Railtrack and early Network Rail where engineers were told don't both worrying about electrification, and later, bury cables to stop people stealing them.
We also weren't prepared for how fragile the cables were - vibration from piling, which hasn't presented issues with the smaller projects elsewhere, really killed the GWEP in the early days, because you didn't know if it was a broken cable you've just piled through or if it's one which has turned to dust but externally looks fine.
The factory train is crap, it might be working right now, but it's had long enough, just rubbish really. And it's woefully slow moving around in possessions.
It really would have been better hacking up some old Mark 2 stock, using some normal container flats for cement mixers and pile storage, and adding a Kirow/Movax piling setup into a train topped and tailed by a pair of Class 20s. It's working well in Scotland. DBSOs marshalled in the middle for staff facilities, stores and a driving position and you would have a piling and a wiring train capable of 75mph that can be coupled together to leave the possession.
It is debatable if NR was a self funded private company, not backed by the tax payer, whether these errors would have been made.
No doubt this will form part of the current review into the structure of Network rail.
The worst mistakes made on the network came about under Railtrack, they really weren't on top of their network. They were ostensibly a private company and they really couldn't hack it.
Railtrack are also the reason we're in this mess - privatisation was badly handled, and work BR should be doing on the network was put into making routes look good for the hand over to Railtrack - no TSRs on the WCML is the boast, but it left a catalogue of other maintenance to do, which Railtrack didn't really understand how to manage.
Railtrack then spent 8 years doing nothing really beneficial to the railway - what little they did do was way below what BR or NR could have achieved, so another huge amount of work was neglected, upgrades ignored, Network Rail have spent the best part of a decade since just trying to catch up, and we're still not there, not by a long stretch. There's probably 15 years in recent history (1990-2005) where things just were ignored and didn't get done properly, we're still paying for it today.
It's a hard slog - electrification is needed because of increasing passenger numbers and environmental considerations, it's complicated by those increasing passenger numbers happening around us day in, day out, the rush to do more basic repairs and upgrades years ago have come back to haunt everyone of us time again and time again.
I'd really hope GWep has hit rock bottom and is moving forward - piling and wiring data suggests that might be the case now, but there's always a nagging doubt that something botched and undocumented lies around the corner, waiting.
