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The Metropolitan line is still very much like that - the Amersham/Chesham and Watford branches still get proper timetables, Watford trains terminate at Baker Street, there's only 2tph at the extremities of Amersham and Chesham... There were other examples of unelectrified lines that closed due...

My question was more that since OHLE introduces new risks, mitigated though they might be, what method is there for the railway to justify itself regarding the installation of OHLE? What prevents someone from saying "you haven't made the risks as low as reasonably practical, because it's...

Well, since large amounts of third rail electrification was done after 1974, the act itself is not the blocker here. I remember hearing a lot about new regulations about electricity introduced in the 1990s that were pointed to as the main blocker. The other key question is why OHLE seems to have...

I have to agree. Currently there's no public plan for what merits electrification and what can be done with battery units, and LNER still has tri-modes on order and Northern still plans to purchase tri-modes for their new fleet, so clearly at the moment the industry doesn't seem to think that...

There is a degree of the chicken-and-egg problem here - it is difficult to make people, businesses, and planners to make decisions based around living and working somewhere with rail connectivity when the existing service is not at a sufficient level of frequency etc.

But the same is true of a lot of main lines into London.

Rail usage is severely biased towards London. The number of people who use rail travel daily is significantly higher in London compared to the rest of the country. While this is understandable in e.g. rural areas, what about the UK's other major cities and their rail networks means usage is so...

It should be noted that the Australian locomotives are being trialled - none of the Australian iron ore companies have committed to replacing their diesel fleets yet, and indeed the largest operator Rio Tinto abandoned its plans to introduce battery locomotives after placing an order in 2022...

If due to HS2 being designed by a team of experts it is the best possible design, what external factors mean it differs so much in design from, say, the Shinkansen?

You might want to look at the union records for payments to the families of union members that had died - some are available online and these would give you an idea of how common death by accident was vs. other causes of death.

I don't think the high cost of HS2 is irrelevant to why it was cancelled. It made the argument that it was wasting money that could have gone on better things much more convincing to both politicians and the public.

Were North Weald's platforms shortened at any point? They look too long otherwise.

But planning processes aren't identical between democratic countries, so proposing to change the planning process isn't necessarily proposing to make it less democratic.

Loops at stations. With EMUs with good acceleration having the stopper wait a few minutes to be overtaken shouldn't be an issue. It's very common in Japan.

Wouldn't it be easier to retime the connections?

The Kodama stops everywhere but most trains on the Tokaido Shinkansen are Nozomi services that don't.

I disagree with your thesis on the "electro-stack" because the very few sources I can find that discuss the concept (usually calling it the "electric stack") aren't making the argument that manufacturers in the "electro-stack" can easily switch between industries, they're instead focusing on...

I'm not sure a hand coloured postcard would have included enough detail to show yellow first class lines. The colours tended towards large blocks and I've seen examples of e.g. loco smokeboxes being coloured the same as the rest of the loco.

This is the full quote from Gilligan's 2025 report where he sets out what rolling stock he believes is available:

You could add exceptions of course, e.g. "no reservation required for Chippenham-Bath travel on IC services, reservation required for journeys past Chippenham or Bath".