Recent content by Gadfly

Countries such as Mexico have negotiated free trade arrangements with the EU without having to comply with EU rules. The UK can negotiate its own trade agreements with the EU, the USA and the rest of the world.

The UK pays far more in contributions to the EU than it gets back. Many of the grants we receive depend on "matched funding" i.e. the EU tells us how to spend it and we have to pay half ourselves.

Trade will continue regardless - a free trade deal would be signed because the UK buys far more from the rest of the EU than it sells.

I remember them 20 years ago on routes south of the Thames. The seats were virtually unusable when the trains were crowded because the designers made the seat backs slope excessively, forgetting that people can't share leg room with the person sitting opposite.

Neutered?

It would be nice to convert some old manual signal boxes into pubs. The levers could act as beer-pumps. "A pint of down home / up starter please!"

By that logic, we could also shut the Reading - Taunton line and go from London via Bristol, or shut the whole GW and go via Birmingham.

Neither - in the short term, road transport is the only solution when the line is blocked, as is the case with most of the rest of the country.

A DAL would improve the resilience of the railway for Cornwall, Plymouth, Totnes etc as well as Torbay and Newton Abbot. Therefore it is preferable to the Okehampton route.

So you seem to be agreeing that the sea-wall section will need to be replaced. I am baffled however why you think the Okehampton route is worth considering when it is obviously no use at all for Newton Abbot and Torbay, the major traffic centres in south Devon.

We seem to be going round in circles here - surely the point is that if it is thought that the sea-wall route will eventually become impassable, a replacement route will be needed, even though the old route will be kept for as long as practicable. The new route will have to be from Exeter to...

An direct inland route from Exeter to Newton Abbot would not be coastal.

Eventually the Dawlish line will become impassable, so unless another route from Exeter to Newton Abbot is built, Exeter will become the railhead for South Devon - in practice, the coach companies will scoop the traffic. Furthermore, a reopened Okehampton line would not survive on Plymouth and...

Even better, fast trains could go non-stop from Exeter to Newton Abbot via the DAL, and stopping services going via the original route via Dawlish, which would still be available for diversions, before eventually it is forced to close.

The problem with this discussion is that some people want not just a Dawlish avoiding line, but a South Devon avoiding line.