Recent content by Lurpi

I thought it was expected in April? That's when the government said construction work would begin, in a press statement when Boris announced the green light last month.

Putting aside the fact that that sounds like advocating for so-called discontinuous electrification, which is generally a bad idea, Sir Peter Hendy is not in charge of approving electrification projects; the DfT and Treasury are, and the DfT remains hostile to electrification. Plus, NR tends to...

Where do you get the idea from that electrification is back on the agenda? The DfT's recently published Rail Network Enhancements Pipeline lists a grand total of one electrification project, namely the Wigan to Bolton electrification left over from the scaled-back North West Electrification...

In other news, I hear that East West Railway Company, the govt delivery body, has recently appointed PwC as financial adviser to develop the financial aspects of the public private partnership project that will be eventually awarded to a bidder to design, build, finance, maintain and quite...

Oops... my bad. There is a video in the link I posted of Rob Brighouse, chairman of East West Railway Company, calling it Bletchley to Cambridge. That's what planted it in my head. I knew the Marston Vale line was still open, but somehow I managed to practice cognitive dissonance.

Not the point I was making either :p The point I was making was that the EDP is up to date; therefore, if it says wiring to Oxford and Bristol Temple Meads, and along Filton Bank, is earmarked for completion in CP6, then that is the current plan, and is not some out-of-date target that's been...

More convincingly, this is confirmed in the latest version of NR's Enhancements Delivery Plan (see here). I can't quote the relevant bits in a meaningful way, as they're in a table, but you can see for yourself on page 80 that Thingley Junction to Bristol Temple Meads (via Bath Spa) is due to...

The central section of East West Rail (which incidentally is Bletchley-Cambridge) will be built as long as the momentum from government persists. According to May's Modern Railways, Chris Grayling regards it as his pet project. At this moment, the new delivery body, East West Railway Company, is...

I understand that Network Rail is planning to put the Woking flyover scheme forward as a candidate for being financed by the private sector. It might be done along the lines of the western rail link to Heathrow, which the DfT is planning to procure as a public-private partnership - financed...

Are you sure about that (the maintenance regime as a driver, I mean, not the use of slab track )? Because if my quote above was accurate and Phase 2 will be mainly ballast, it was tunnel clearances and not maintenance that was the main driver.

Pedantic point (and I don't disagree with the thrust of what you're saying) - but TOCs don't, by and large, pay for upgrades on a project by project basis do they? In fact do they contribute at all, if their access charges are lower than the cost even of OM&R? Apart from the Chiltern Evergreen...

P.S. The best bit of evidence I've managed to find is this article from New Civil Engineer last year, which says that Phase 1 won't be ballasted, but Phase 2 will, for the reasons given below.

Well, there was the project specification I referred to. I know that's even older, but are you positively saying that ballasted track has been explicitly written out of the civils contracts?

Are you sure about that? The HS2 project specification from 2012 says ballasted track will be used, apart from in (bored) tunnels. And if you think things might've changed in the past five years, here is a more recent source - from when Phase 1 procurement was already underway...

I'd quite forgotten that I posted this and am pleasantly surprised by the replies... ... All of which however don't answer my original question: is Virgin Trains East Coast getting rid of its shaving sockets, or not?