Reedham speed restriction is the line curvature both on the station side & Lowestoft side of the swing bridge as well as accross the bridge itself.
It is the riskyness of going digital signalling on the Wherry Lines as they have deadline to meet as there are a number of signallers due to retire by 2019 as well as maintaining the existing equipment which is proving difficult so rather than risk an overrun they are not going digital but will look at other lines to experiment with digital signalling.
The new signalling will be digital anyway using computer based interlocking, VDU control screens, electronic axle counters, LED signal heads on lightweight folding structures, etc. In many respects it will thus also be 'ETCS ready'. Using the 'modular' range of equipment and techniques developed in conjunction with NR, suppliers can deliver this technology quickly and cheaply unlike ETCS level 2 which is a much bigger job and full of cost and timescale unknowns both for infrastructure and traction. I'm sure the new Anglia fleet when it arrives will come with ETCS built in, but it is impossible to precisely match the signalling changeover to be at the exact same time as the whole train service switches to new stock, so either you'd have to retrofit trains that might be shortly going for scrap, or somewhere they wouldn't need ETCS, or you'd have to dual fit the new infrastructure with signals and TPWS and AWS. If only the UK had a ETCS Level 1 limited supervision option, that could be a very quick retrofit following resignalling to replace TPWS and AWS, and probably just perfect in terms of cost/capacity for such a rural railway. Perhaps the Route Director should have a word with the Swiss train suppliers to see how SBB are getting on with their limited supervision project (full network wide ETCS fitment on target for next year!).
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Thanks I hadn't read that very interesting piece. I'd always felt doing the Wherry Lines was just repeating the Cambrian line all over again, and that proved to be a very difficult and expensive pilot project. Level 2 'mainline' is also heavily over engineered for a largely single track rural line anyway as it's the single line that fundamentally defines the capacity and, no matter how fancy your signalling is, it can't make trains magically pass through each other!. Note David Waboso is reported as heaping praise on the Thameslink core resignalling project, which, as a high capacity project and with pretty much all the elements the DRP was supposed to be looking at, is much more useful than yet another rural experiment.
