Where the ELR shed is, to the south of Bury Bolton Street.
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Restoring your Railways: Winning schemes announced
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Where the ELR shed is, to the south of Bury Bolton Street.
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BURY?? Surely one means Burnley, or was it Blackburn, or Bolton, or Blackpool, or Barrow .... Blah, blah, blah ... (Chancellor of the Ex-checker interviewed in the excellent
Rishi Sunak confuses northern towns in market visit gaffe
The chancellor praises the "world-famous Burnley market" during a visit to Bury, 20 miles away.
www.bbc.co.uk
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ChiefPlanner
Established Member
Very good. Flexible South Walians add an "o" to "make Welsh" - as in stopo bws.
Rail Ranger
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This makes the point that no one at the DfT is proactively planning any rail reopening schemes as part of a national plan unlike what is happening in Scotland. Local areas in England don't have to bid for funding for business cases for road schemes.
jonesy3001
Established Member
I see the Fleetwood branch didn't make the list, maybe next time if there is one
A couple of observations-
Remember- the 'starting point' is restoring/ reversing/ undoing 'Beeching'
The questions you ask are amongst the many that could/ should be considered in a business case and then the feasibility of a particular proposals.
As many contributors here observe often, there's a lot of fanciful/ unrealistc/ 'good old days' stuff about. Whatever goes forward has to be capable of being presented by 'the powers that be' as a great investment, offering a great 'return' however presented- financial, political, maybe (?) 'social', eg 'levelling up', just maybe also technological eg 'green' (hydrogen?) ...
My own 'take' on this to look at the electoral map, an that's it!
and this ...Looks like I got it,
Cash to help restore Crewe to Mid Cheshire rail link part of Budget Levelling Up awards
CREWE'S MP Kieran Mullan has welcomed the Chancellor's Autumn Budget and Spending Review, which includes plans to invest in restoring passenger services on a forgotten South to Mid Cheshire rail link.crewe.nub.news
and a reminder that this is a list from THREE rounds of BIDS- each submissions requires a lot of time, energy, words, lobbying, ie COST that 'winning' politicos will take credit for and have YOU the council tax payer pay for, including MORE expenditure yet in the FURTHER studies and 'justifications' that consultants will have to be paid well to come up with convincingly.In my area seem to have got 2 feasibility studies for station reopening
Corsham, a town which has grown hugely (especially if include a number of surrounding small towns and villages), and for many, lot easier to get to than Bath or Chippenham stations which are in traffic congested areas. Oddly initial drawings seem to include huge footbridges with lifts, car parks on site of old stone yard (which served the Bath stone quarries), but short platforms. There is an artists impression in local newspaper link
MP welcomes £50,000 grant towards station
THE Government has awarded £50,000 towards feasibility studies for a new Corsham railway station.www.gazetteandherald.co.uk
Stonehouse (Bristol Road), the old Midland Railway site, which was also junction for Nailsworth branch. (The other station is on former GW Golden Valley line). There has been huge developments in the area (north of Yate) so is seen as a big commuter railhead to Bristol. Area even has the upcoming football team Forest Green Rovers. Clearly as it was formally a junction with lots of space, it would not be that hard to have a third platform with middle one available for local terminating trains from Bristol (so as not to block lines)
Both are sensible, effectively mini parkway stations for the areas around (and thus serving considerably more than the immediate town). Both are clearly aimed at Bristol commuting.
Although both sites have lost their platforms, I do not know if they were completely removed, or if the platform edge foundations still exist which might make it easier to rebuild.
Restoring your railway: successful bids - GOV.UK
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk
No. Personally, I can’t see them returning in the near future.
So obvious that nobody proposed it. But in any event it couldn’t be used without Ely being sorted.
They are. Several.
They do for local road schemes.
It was already in the ‘system’ as an ‘Advanced proposal’, so no need to be submitted again (although that didn’t stop some proposals!) Although I can’t see it going any further. Too many issues that are difficult to resolve.
tbtc
Veteran Member
Why should anyone be proactively planning reopenings though?
Unless you start from the position of "we must re-open old lines, because re-opening old lines is a goal in itself, rather than just one tool that can be used to tackle problems"
Fine if you want to consider how we improve the railway/ tackle bottlenecks/ increase speeds/ resolve reliability etc - reopening an old line is one option - but I don't agree that we should be starting off with Which Old Line Can We Reopen as a first objective
this is a list from THREE rounds of BIDS- each submissions requires a lot of time, energy, words, lobbying, ie COST that 'winning' politicos will take credit for and have YOU the council tax payer pay for, including MORE expenditure yet in the FURTHER studies and 'justifications' that consultants will have to be paid well to come up with convincingly.
Restoring your railway: successful bids - GOV.UK
Agreed - I guess that spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on consultants to re-re-review lines with pretty marginal cases is "cheap" for the political goodwill that it generates
(looking at how the "New Headquarters For GBR" debate got lots of regional chatter - even though most of these places won't see any scraps from the table)
It doesn't really help the railways, it's just a waste of attention/ money/ focus, it should really be paid from a "politics" budget rather than coming from a "railway" budget since it isn't really helping the railway, it's just giving politicians something to be seen to "fight" for, in the hope of positive local press attention
Rail Ranger
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The DfT should be proactively planning rail reopenings because rail is more environmentally friendly than road. Also road traffic congestion costs billions. Many of the lines which Beeching recommended for closure were basket cases but many people including myself think that the closures went too far. The Government claims that Reversing Beeching is one of its policies. It could do far more to implement that policy. Too few lines are being reopened and the reopenings that are happening are taking far too long to come to fruition.
OK to do that you need to identify where this is a problem, and determine that rail will achieve this objective, as opposed to another solution.
Understanding the problem comes before determining the solution.
"Reopening" a 30mph meandering branchline (for no other reason than it used to exist) won't necessarily achieve that if it is up against a 70mph Motorway.
Look at East West Rail. That's not a "reopening". It's wholly newly engineered line to compete with the road journey (but coincidentally happens to use a decent chunk of the old railway alignment)
tbtc- greetings to Reston- QED!
Do we know if, and if so, how many, well- motivated and qualified people have been diverted from work on whatever the latest iteration of an Integrated Rail Plan, which I note was mentioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Budget/ Spending Review speech only in that it would 'follow' at some undefined time in the future- shortly, in the fullness of time ... all paid for by us
Do we know if he mentioned anything about TRU, NPR, HS2 to be or not 2b while in Bury, aka Burnley, wherever the whippets, pigeons, cloth caps, black pudding is on a
Did no-one sbmit a case for re-opening to Uxbridge- High Street, Vine Street, both, ... and onward to Poyle Halt for Staines West Parkway and Terminal 6 ...?
I don't understand. There are several new railways for England & Wales in long term planning right now! The Northumberland line, HS2 Phase 1, Barking Riverside, and East West Rail Stage One are under construction. Portishead - Bristol is very well advanced by the WECA, Southampton - Fawley has made significant progress just now. There are a significant number of others that have also been studied and have reasonable prospects. Unfortunately many of the winners definitely don't but all the same.
If you mean diverted from IRP to Restoring Your Railway - I think I can confidently say none.
And Okehampton reopens in 3 weeks!
The problem with that approach is that it assumes UK railway provision is somehow logical and rational, that there's some underlying decision process for which cities, towns and villages get rail services and which don't and how good those services and connections are. But when you look at the UK rail network as it stands today, there's very little logic or reason to it's design, it's a patchwork quilt of different historical lines and stations and whether a town or village has a station, or the quality of its connections is determined more by shear luck about what was happening in the 1960s when the network was rationalised.
The Beeching Report was released in the early 1960s, that's 60 years ago, many towns and cities have changed dramatically, some are entirely new, others have grown massively, some have grown little or even shrunk. Freight flows have changed, commuting flows have changed. You can find towns and cities of comparable size, some with lots of connections, others with next to none.
So it ends up with the situations where access to a good rail services depends more on grand-father rights, of having inherited one from the 1960s, than it being justified today by a logical decision process.
jonesy3001
Established Member
Ashton to stockport line, how is that going to work when Ikea and housing are built on most of the track.
Agreed, but none of that justifies not using so und, logical analysis for future railways.
But it then creates a real and justified sense of unfairness when communities which don't have access to decent rail services face very high, often insurmountable hurdles, to get a station or a new service, whereas communities which already have them get to retain theirs with no questions asked.
If you have rules and apply them fairly, then there are lines and stations which are open today which logically should be closed.
The hurdles are high because there's next to no capital available. The government does not particularly want to spend much on anything.
zwk500
Veteran Member
I agree with you. However it's the politicians who ultimately decide what the rules are.
Personally I think that we should just bite the bullet and shut some old lines, re-investing the operating and maintenance spending elsewhere. But that's just too tricky.
Well looking at transport investment across the country that's not the case because there is capital investment in many large programmes particularly in London and the South East, what there isn't is consistent and equal levels of investment, per head, across the country.
Ongoing programmes in London and the South East? Such as?
It is undoubtedly true that it has been the case in the past decade that London has had a massive proportion of the expenditure, but there is a vanishingly small chance that will be true in the current decade
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Much as I dislike the current government, £44bn is not "next to no capital". By any definition
Very true - but "reopening" a line is politically easier to sell than a brand new alignment across green fields.
What should matter is what lines are needed now. Not where they were more than half a century ago. If old winding rural lines still exist then they would be better made into cycling routes
Sense of unfairness, but not logical.
But it is a lot easier to justify economically a rail service when you don’t have to build anything to operate it. This is the key issue - building is expensive. (And not just railways)
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Many ‘reopenings’ do involve brand new alignments across green fields. Even the Robin Hood line had some of this.
Split across five years and more than 60 million people it comes to remarkably little.
In any case that money is already committed. There is going to be more needed for further additions to the network.
While what we're getting so far really are reopenings ( for business at least ), anything that's been pulled up in the mid 60s is far beyond a "reopening" - so why aren't they talking it up as "Look at our plans for new railways!". And then they could actually check where a line really needs to go instead of where it went. HS2 and the east end of EWR will be mostly genuinely new railway - I feel like not enough has been made of the latter ( HS2 is a little bit special as a new type of railway to most of the country ). We too, should look at these proposals as brand new. You can always spin it as giving something back to a place that it once had anyway.
Not quite sure of the funding for Wellington & Cullompton stations, but given there's huge housing development going on in both places I doubt taxpayers are going to foot all of it.
*Sticks head out door* that's assuming Cowley isn't washed out inbetween...
Not quite sure of the funding for Wellington & Cullompton stations, but given there's huge housing development going on in both places I doubt taxpayers are going to foot all of it.
*Sticks head out door* that's assuming Cowley isn't washed out inbetween...
AlastairFraser
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Just south of Bury town centre as the other user said, where the ELR and Metrolink interchange. Proposed to be a Metrolink stop there to plug the large gap between Bury Interchange and Prestwich in future.
pdeaves
Established Member
That is, of course, a very separate issue to whether £X should be spent on (re-)opening something. It shouldn't become 'you can't have this until I've taken it away from them'.
AlastairFraser
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Or we could level the costs of private and public transport by using single occupancy vehicle tolls to push people onto the railways?
It would be far better to do that yes. However that's even less on the table than closing little used lines is.
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