An alternative view is that railways are probably the most energy-efficient part of our transport infrastructure and need to be expanded to move the greatest proportion of whatever we really need to move around that is sensible
Your alternative view, sure.
But if you've got DMUs chugging along managing maybe a couple of miles to the gallon versus modern cars that can do thirty or forty miles to the gallon then any train service with an average load capable of fitting into a minibus is presumably a train service that is bad for the environment and should be scrapped?
Bad news for places like Kyle of Lochalsh and Thurso, mind. Probably a lot of evening services across the UK ought to be scrapped, if energy efficiency is so important to you.
I think that it has been established that notwithstanding some sensationalist coverage in the press (e.g. The Guardian) there are hardly any genuine 'new roads' planned beyond an additional Thames crossing
Agreed - typical re-hash of Government commitments etc.
The thing is that when they do this for
rail the reaction on here is along the lines of "its unfair to bundle all of this spending together as a lot of it is things already promised and some of it relates to maintenance and things like replacing existing infrastructure with minor upgrades so it's unfair to roll it into one massive figure"... but when a similar announcement is made about
roads we treat the whole amount as being
entirely for brand new roads (rather than digging down and finding that some of these things were already in the pipeline, some of the spending will be minor things like sorting out accident hotspots at junctions or adding a filter lane - it's not all for completely new roads.
No need to apologise.
The 3rd-railing of places like Aylesbury (and other places on the periphery of our 3rd rail networks) is an easy-win for removing diesel-worked trains, obvious to anyone outside a hide-bound civil service department. Unfortunately we have a government department (maybe 2) with absolute control that cannot see the wider picture.
They are so obsessed with not upsetting precedents set by their current superiors (or undermining principles that they have established) that any wider benefits get lost
We need a name for the phenomena of "the more that people complain about how badly the various Public Sector people are in running the railways, the more popular nationalisation seems to be" - presumably from people who think that a nationalised railway will magically be in the hands of completely different people to the DfT/ Network Rail etc
It's pretty well universally recognised (and as plain as the nose on your face) that if a road journey looks as though it has got easier then more people will try it. I have driven car-based holidays that would I never have dreamed of doing if various road upgrades hadn't been done. I bet most people have done the same, and can recognise it too.
If you can't see (or won't admit) that easier driving encourages more of it then no-one can help you.
...and presumably, if a rail journey has got easier then more people will try it, yes?
But I guess that you see all rail traffic as A Good Thing, rather than an increase in pollution (given that not everyone on a train would otherwise have been driving a car - one of the excuses people have for building railways is the large number of people without access to a car - running more trains means more electricity/diesel etc (which is sometimes more efficient than everyone driving a car, but with modern fuel efficiency, it's nothing like as clear cut as it used to be.
Wondering ... from a position of relative ignorance ...
How many (few?) diesel services still into London(from anywhere); thinking Air Quality/ particulates etc.
Lines in London other than into Marylebone not (yet) electrified?
How easy to 'ban' diesels already (or how soon)?
I can see potential political as well as environmental gain.
As well as Marylebone, there's still the 171s coming into London Bridge, the 158/159s into Waterloo, the 180s at Kings Cross (I'm ignoring the 221s at Euston and the 222s/HSTs at St Pancras as there are concrete plans to remove them with bi-mode trains which will be running in electric mode at the London end).
(plus freight, of course, e.g. on the North London Line, but you'd have to wire up huge distances to cover freight routes, and FOCs seem very reluctant to swap between diesel and electric locomotives part way through journeys so I think we are stuck with 66s etc inside London)
