Creating a Light Rail network based on Snow Hill is quite easy. Hereford and Worcester can access New St via Bromsgrove. You can have Heavy Rail running alongside Light Rail from Dorridge into Birmingham utilizing the 4 track formation. Stratford can have Light Rail one way to Birmingham and Heavy Rail the other. A heavy rail shuttle between Worcester and Kidderminster would be needed.
We constantly hear from Metrolink fans that the disbenefits to the Mid Cheshire line being diverted at Altrincham are far outweighed by the benefits elsewhere of Light Rail round Greater Manchester. Surely (if true) that should apply to the West Midlands also? The massive benefits of Light Rail to Kidderminster/Stourbridge/Solihull etc surely outweigh the incontinence elsewhere?
The reality of course is that no one sees that the benefits of Light Rail as being that great they can justify some relatively minor rejigging of heavy rail services from Worcester......
The Merseyrail solution of splitting HR services isn't acceptable now. In Manchester, the only service that was affected by conversion without being able to be converted was the Chester one. Even then, this was simply diverted via Stockport rather than cut short. Cutting an existing HR service like you describe has significant problems. What would happen in the Valleys is that the entire service would be converted, because the lines are dead-end branches and a split would be worthless and operationally impossible. LR not being suitable for the suburban parts of through routes in one city does not mean it becomes unsuitable for physically separated branch line routes in another.
The more you write, the planner it becomes that your overriding obsession is with spending as little as possible on public transport. Fair enough: there is no reason why things should cost more than they need to. But there comes a point where the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, by having a system which is so low spec that nobody actually wants to use it, unless they really have to. And the major problem with light rail in this respect, as demonstrated in Manchester every morning, is miserably low capacity, which can only be alleviated by restoring the features that an HR suburban system would have had, in particular the city centre tunnel (despite the fact that you are still using the lack of city centre street running as a stick to beat HR systems with). Pretty much all the other costs-saving measures you advocate could be achieved on an HR system.
This is just nonsense. I don't want to cut spending on public transport. I want the money we do spend to go as far as we possibly can. With that, you can justify having things that we cannot have otherwise. For the same cost you can have a lot more LR than you can have HR, delivering much more for local communities while being operationally self-sustaining. The best way to protect public transport against people who don't like it is to make sure it's able to stand on its own two feet and not be dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Also, I'm sorry, but how does 'nobody actually wants to use it, unless they really have to' square with Metrolink being busy every day? What you cannot argue against is the concrete fact that Metrolink takes in more ticket revenue than it spends on running the network. If Metrolink was a disaster, that simply could not be true. If a system is capable of making an operational profit, that means it's doing something right. Bad schemes can't make money. If Metrolink was that crap, the unregulated bus operations in Manchester would be making a killing by competing against it.
The higher capacity of a heavier rail system is only required because passenger numbers have grown. Passenger numbers have grown because Metrolink has been a success. If Metrolink were a failure, passenger numbers would have stayed static or decreased, and there would be no need to ever think of upgrading it. Isn't that obvious?
No, the only real cost-saving measure you can do on HR is to run DOO. While that helps, it's nowhere near enough. You still have to pay HR drivers' salaries. You still have no choice but to install lifts or massively expensive ramps to provide accessibility. You still have to maintain the track for trains far heavier than are really required to move the people about. If you want to reopen or extend a line you have no option but to build expensive tunnels and bridges to separate the track from even the lightest traffic flows. Your stations still have to be where the railway could be built, rather than where people actually are and want to go. Essentially anything that suburban HR can do, LR can do too. The same is not true the other way around.
More deeply, though, I think we approach this from different starting points. You seem to feel that an urban area of 2.8 million people, like Manchester, or however many live in south-east Wales, will not generate enough journeys to justify investment in the sort of suburban rail systems which are taken for granted in similar-sized congregations in Germany. (You talk about a hierarchy of transport, but those cities use U-bahns and tramways to supplement S-bahn systems, not as the main means of transport for the whole urban area). I take the view that we should be looking at what other advanced countries are providing in terms of public transport, and consider them as benchmarks for our cities. We're really not as special in this country as we like to delude ourselves into thinking we are.
South East Wales has 1.5 million people. What should be a plan for a Metro sytem for the entire region has been hijacked for political reasons into a Light Rail Conversion of existing Heavy Rail lines that serve c250K -c300K of them. Transport for Wales overriding rational for what its proposing has very little to do with Notatrainspott fundamentalist views.
How many cities in Germany have an U-Bahn? Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and Nuremberg. That's really not that many cities. How many have tramways? I count
57 cities and towns with tram and Stadtbahn networks, according to Wikipedia. Clearly the Germans think that tramway and Stadtbahn networks are more universally suitable for medium-sized cities.
It's a mistake to look at population figures. The numbers which really matter are about density. Los Angeles is a huge city by population standards, but it's one of the least dense major cities in the world. Density is what makes public transport actually worthwhile and necessary. Only when you have very large volumes of people moving along certain corridors in an urban area is the cost of building permanent public transport infrastructure worthwhile. You don't need to have Manhattan or Hong Kong density to justify a tunnelled metro. Instead, you just need long corridors of consistent medium density - think three-four storey tenements - making up the core of your urban area. Extensions into proper suburbs are acceptable when the incremental cost of extension is smaller than the benefits you receive. But, if your city consists of lower-density suburbs essentially all the way into the urban core, the sums just don't stack up. While the cost of construction might be slightly lower, the number of people within practical walking or quick public transport transfer distance from any prospective metro line is too small.
On top of that, the transport priorities of people in lower density areas are also likely to be different. In a higher-density area, people are more likely to have work, study, retail and leisure opportunities again within walking or public transport distance, making them more dependent on public transport in general. In a lower density area, public transport is less of an option and other developments don't happen with as much expectation of it. In a dense city built on public transport companies have little choice but to put jobs within reach of public transport. In a lower-density area companies can just rely on people having their own car, and putting them in cheaper but less conveniently located places like business parks off trunk roads.
When you've got people dispersed over a wide area of lower density, your choice of transport system has to accommodate it. LR is better at handling lower densities than HR, because it can affordably penetrate lower-density suburbs built far from feasible HR routes. It can provide some transport, rather than none. When densities and possible passenger numbers are lower, it can affordably provide a good enough service for the people who are able to use it. The 10tph service to Altrincham is great for the people who are increasingly able to and dependent on travel via Metrolink. The alternative is that they have to pay for the capacity for lots of people who aren't currently able or dependent on travelling, or that the service is dialled back to be more affordable to run.
