Unfortunately one has to consider where it will stop (or not). Once this supposedly painless 1% has been cut this year, how long will it be until the TBTC's of this world are calling for the next "only 1%" of cuts.
You may call it "only 1%", but taken with the cuts we've already had since Beeching, this is just adding to an continued unacceptable shrinkage of the passenger network
This is what BR used to do though - they seemed to close stations every year for fifty years - demand obviously changed over those fifty years - it's natural that any network reassesses things periodically - I wouldn't expect Tesco to keep all of its shops open indefinitely, I wouldn't expect a publisher to keep printing all of its magazines indefinitely, things that were once necessary become obsolete - but we seem to be stuck with the railway version of the Yellow Pages, some people cannot accept change
I don't think that anyone is arguing about shuffling rolling stock on this thread. The successful deployment of 159's to NSE solved a gap in provision and allowed all routes involved to continue. This is somewhat different to permanently closing railway routes
That's exactly what "robbing Peter to pay Paul" is though - reallocating resources to where they are best suited/needed - same goes for deciding act the money being spent on heavily subsidising a small number of rural passengers could be better used by improving services on lines with growth potential elsewhere
There are lots of people who want to visit Whitby. Provide a half decent service frequency and even more passengers will roll in
Any failing line always has people excusing it on the grounds that "if we significantly increased frequencies then more people would use it" - this is true, but is true of every lien in the country - but any additional resources being used on Middlesbrough - Whitby are resources that could be used on Middlesbrough - Hartlepool - Sunderland - Newcastle, and I know which route has more people regularly standing
How often do you want the Whitby branch to run then, before we could be in a position to decide whether it was busy enough?
I'm sorry "TC" you'll have to point out where I'm "consistently calling for the government to run all of the railway". It seems fairly obvious that the far greater day to day interference in the running of the railway exercised by the government today, than under BR, is proving to be counterproductive in many ways
What did you expect to happen, after years of complaining about privatisation, given how badly this Government has treated other public services under its direct control?
Barton's an interesting one. When I had a friend who lived there I did use the branch to visit him. The off-putting aspects were the extortionate fares that blight most middle distance journeys on the regional railway (we don't have network cards, groupsave offers etc that the South east does to keep the cost down). Also, there was no Sunday service, so I had to raise over to Hull the Sunday morning to get back. I'd rather address these two issues as well as the fact that the railway has just ditched it's more cost effective single railcars for the route than close.
It's quiet enough Monday to Saturday, without a year round Sunday service to drain more funds
What worries me is that we are entering a period of "slash and burn" economics. It's particularly worrying when people say "why should we keep lines like S+C and Whitby open when the money could go to the NHS". You could trot out the NHS as an excuse to cut everything - and this indeed often happens when cuts-oriented economic policies are argued for.
This is what you get with a nationalised railway though - you're asking the Government to allocate *billions* of pounds in subsidy to it each year - and that rail budget will always be enviously looked at by Ministers who are seeing their share of Treasury monies struggling to provide adequate public services
The "we could spend this on the NHS" argument got brought up time and time again when enthusiasts were discussing the HS2 budget, but they get strangely awkward at the idea that the same logic applies to the money thrown at propping up branch lines
Which begs the question, why has the Heart of Wales not yet featured in this thread? It seems that infrequent single 153s are considered adequate to meet demand on this line, despite the capacity reduction from installation of the PRM toilet. And infrastructure repairs must have cost a pretty penny over the last few years.
I've not brought up the Heart of Wales for two reasons:
Firstly, it's harder to quantify passenger numbers on a through line rather than a branch (where you might assume that all passengers head to the "big city" at one end) - there will be some end-to-end passengers and the "local" passengers will be spread between "local journeys to Shrewsbury" and "local journeys to Swansea" (so it's not as easy to assess asa simple dead end branch line).
Secondly, whilst it's a lightly used line through the middle of nowhere, it's not changed over the years (in terms of the demand/markets), I've tried to focus more on the routes that were once fit for some purpose but have since become Oxbow Lakes as the world has moved on (Kyle of Lochalsh and Barton upon Humber both used to be a way of getting to a ferry, but a road bridge removed much of the justification for the branch lines... even before Stranraer lost it's ferry terminal the market had dwindled as the planes over the Irish Sea were much more popular/ convenient...) - some people can accept that the rail network needs to evolve to recognise changing demand (e.g. we stopped running trains to the Baseball Ground when Derby County moved to Pride Park), some people want to keep running trains to places that have lost their raison d'être because they see the railway as some kind of sacred network that cannot be revised
On the contrary, there is a bus that goes from the end of my street to the centre of Wakefield that I find very handy and use weekly or more. That is the sort of local journey that buses are well suited for.
The middle of Wales to Cardiff, on the other hand isn't, and I would no more use one for that journey than for Leeds to Settle. I'm sure the majority of the traveling public would make a similar distinction.
Have you looked at a map ?
The reality is the journey from Llandrindod is North-South, whereas the rail line runs East - West - do do that journey by train means a roundabout route and at least one change.
The vast majority of the travelling public (and the majority is usually locals making regular journeys, rather than Railforum's very own Phileas Fogg who looks for the most obscure way to make a journey) will look for the quickest / cheapest / most convenient way - and on this example, the journey time is neutral - the train has one journey which appears quicker and the rest slower (owing to connections) the bus will be cheaper and probably more convenient.
Leeds - Settle is a poor comparison, because there is already a direct rail link there, this one is more akin to something like Peterborough - Kings Lynn or Peterborough - Kettering.
This is a wonderful example of
@yorksrob 's inability to see the world through the eyes of
non-rail-obsessives... the idea that a normal person would go from Llandridnod Wells to Cardiff via either Shrewsbury or Swansea is the funniest thing I've seen today - the kind of mentality that every journey must follow the route that some nineteenth century entrepreneur speculatively built their railway line on
(The S&C is a different story, as it goes in a fairly straight line between the intermediate towns and the biggest city in the region )
