Brighton – Worthing tram

[A S Leib]

How realistic would it be to construct a tramway between Brighton and Worthing or Chichester and to close the national rail stations between Hove and Worthing? Losing direct London trains is unlikely to be popular in Portslade, Shoreham or Lancing, but if it could speed up Brighton – Littlehampton, Chichester and Hampshire journeys, I'd argue it would be worth it, especially if through tickets could be provided and interchange at Hove, Brighton or both could be kept simple. Worthing has the 1535th best performance with one in eight trains at least five minutes late, according to On Time Trains, which doesn't suggest that the current situation works particularly well. Further west, Chichester – Bognor Regis is the second most common journey in Great Britain without direct trains**, so I think a tramway there would at least be used, although I don't know how difficult it would be to build.

* By 'towards London', I'm adding up Victoria, London Bridge, East Croydon, Clapham Junction, Gatwick, Haywards Heath, Burgess Hill, Hassocks and Preston Park. By Brighton – Worthing, I'm adding up Brighton, Hove, Worthing, Portslade, Shoreham and Lancing. Annual journeys:

	Towards London	Brighton – Worthing
Portslade	150,000	157,000
Shoreham	130,000	272,000
Lancing	60,000	227,000

** The actual most common is apparently Stirling – Glasgow Central, which seems like an error with Glasgow stations allocation. Liverpool Lime Street – Edinburgh's the most common excluding that, but not vice-versa due to the 19:11 via Newcastle providing a (very limited) direct service.

 

[stevieinselby]

How realistic would it be to construct a tramway between Brighton and Worthing or Chichester and to close the national rail stations between Hove and Worthing? Losing direct London trains is unlikely to be popular in Portslade, Shoreham or Lancing, but if it could speed up Brighton – Littlehampton, Chichester and Hampshire journeys, I'd argue it would be worth it, especially if through tickets could be provided and interchange at Hove, Brighton or both could be kept simple. Worthing has the 1535th best performance with one in eight trains at least five minutes late, according to On Time Trains, which doesn't suggest that the current situation works particularly well. Further west, Chichester – Bognor Regis is the second most common journey in Great Britain without direct trains**, so I think a tramway there would at least be used, although I don't know how difficult it would be to build.

Not realistic.

The 700 bus runs about as direct a route as you can get between Brighton and Worthing, running every 12 minutes, and takes about an hour. By contrast, the stopping train takes about 25 minutes. You're unlikely to find a better route for any tramway than battling with the traffic on the A259, where there is little prospect of any segregation. So even with the tram having fewer stops, it won't be running appreciably faster than the 700, so you're looking at significantly extended journey times for local passengers, and that's before you factor in connection times for those continuing further afield. What does the tramway give you that an express bus wouldn't, apart from several years of chaos and carnage from roadworks and a bill for a billion quid?

And the coast road is quite some way from a lot of the stations, with several of them between half a mile and a mile away and with a catchment that extends away from the coast road, so as well as the already extended journey times you're now asking people to add a 15 minute walk on top.

Portslade, Shoreham and Lancing each have about 1 million entries and exits a year. That's a lot of passengers to put two fingers up to.

 

[HSTEd]

It's rather telling that the largest single flow reported in the ODM data for Portslade is London Victoria, it beats out Brighton (which is second) by 87,702 to 76,347.
The next highest is Worthing at 27,951.

Withdrawing the trains to London is probably not going to be popular unless it somehow comes iwth journey time reductions with the change (which obviously this solution can't provide).

 

[PGAT]

How realistic would it be to construct a tramway between Brighton and Worthing or Chichester and to close the national rail stations between Hove and Worthing? Losing direct London trains is unlikely to be popular in Portslade, Shoreham or Lancing, but if it could speed up Brighton – Littlehampton, Chichester and Hampshire journeys, I'd argue it would be worth it, especially if through tickets could be provided and interchange at Hove, Brighton or both could be kept simple. Worthing has the 1535th best performance with one in eight trains at least five minutes late, according to On Time Trains, which doesn't suggest that the current situation works particularly well. Further west, Chichester – Bognor Regis is the second most common journey in Great Britain without direct trains**, so I think a tramway there would at least be used, although I don't know how difficult it would be to build.

* By 'towards London', I'm adding up Victoria, London Bridge, East Croydon, Clapham Junction, Gatwick, Haywards Heath, Burgess Hill, Hassocks and Preston Park. By Brighton – Worthing, I'm adding up Brighton, Hove, Worthing, Portslade, Shoreham and Lancing. Annual journeys:

	Towards London	Brighton – Worthing
Portslade	150,000	157,000
Shoreham	130,000	272,000
Lancing	60,000	227,000

** The actual most common is apparently Stirling – Glasgow Central, which seems like an error with Glasgow stations allocation. Liverpool Lime Street – Edinburgh's the most common excluding that, but not vice-versa due to the 19:11 via Newcastle providing a (very limited) direct service.

It actually ranks #16, I don't know where you got that from

 

[A S Leib]

It actually ranks #16, I don't know where you got that from

I think I missed out the bit about being second outside Greater London; almost all of the more common ones include at least one station within London.
https://railalefan.co.uk/labs/flowstats/NR03/

 

[AlastairFraser]

Not realistic.

The 700 bus runs about as direct a route as you can get between Brighton and Worthing, running every 12 minutes, and takes about an hour. By contrast, the stopping train takes about 25 minutes. You're unlikely to find a better route for any tramway than battling with the traffic on the A259, where there is little prospect of any segregation. So even with the tram having fewer stops, it won't be running appreciably faster than the 700, so you're looking at significantly extended journey times for local passengers, and that's before you factor in connection times for those continuing further afield. What does the tramway give you that an express bus wouldn't, apart from several years of chaos and carnage from roadworks and a bill for a billion quid?

And the coast road is quite some way from a lot of the stations, with several of them between half a mile and a mile away and with a catchment that extends away from the coast road, so as well as the already extended journey times you're now asking people to add a 15 minute walk on top.

Portslade, Shoreham and Lancing each have about 1 million entries and exits a year. That's a lot of passengers to put two fingers up to.

What about a metro Falmer to Worthing? It certainly would be very expensive, but it's the only real viable replacement for the smaller stops, if you wanted to speed up journeys.

If you just wanted more capacity, I think a more viable project would be ETCS with turnback sidings at each end (maybe overlaid if some units couldn't be fitted) Falmer to West Worthing, then run as many trains possible on those sections (say 6tph Brighton to Falmer/West Worthing, plus the existing service pattern on the East Coastway). I'm not sure if this is viable with the existing infrastructure, I'd expect you'd need loops at a lot of stations.