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My ideal tunnel setup would have two stations, each located at the country end of the two termini. The key is to extend the city centre northwards and southwards, rather than keeping it locked in between Argyle Street and Sauchiehall Street. The southern entrance to Central would front onto the...

Issues like this are why it's so hard for someone to draw up a definitive scheme. Until there are detailed geological surveys done, we can't know what might be feasible from a civil engineering perspective. If there are significant geological issues between Queen Street and Central that might...

Even four platforms is unnecessary. A tunnel should serve the trains which would gain most from running across Glasgow. There are plenty of suburban and regional services that would use 380/385 style trains and have short dwell times in the busy core station(s). Having only one platform in each...

IIRC the Millerhill loop will be part of the South Sub resignalling project, so in future it'll be ready for passenger trains to divert.

I think the best comparison scheme would be the Leipzig City Tunnel. In the UK the only real comparison is with the Elizabeth line, but that's quite a different beast given that it's about relieving the London Underground more than a real need to connect up the Great Western and Great Eastern...

That's not how transport planning works. Inherently sound ideas aren't forgotten unless the justification for them falls through completely. What can happen is that the world changes and other things become higher priorities. In Glasgow, we had decades of motorway construction when the railways...

A heavy tunnel is not out of the question. It has been proposed before by SPT back in the 80s/90s, and has been included as a concept in a variety of transport planning documents since devolution. Unlike Edinburgh, Glasgow isn't really on the way to any other city. While the ECML logically...

Virgin Trains West and East Coast have some of the earliest WiFi installations on trains. Since the kit is older, it is much worse than the state of the art. It was designed for a time when a few first class passengers might be checking their emails. If they made it free, it would overload the...

DMUs are different because each vehicle powers itself independently. On an EMU, the traction system will typically be distributed across different carriages. There might still be some restrictions (such as the reason why the two spare Voyager driving vehicles couldn't make a train) but in...

The Desiro City sets come from Siemens, who are running 8 and 12 car single trains on Thameslink. If I'm not mistaken, the 8 and 12 car sets are both formed of two half sets. A 6 car train could just be the same as a half 12-car set.

It's still part of the NR network, so higher platforms would have caused compatibility issues. Other, more segregated lines like the ELL, the Elizabeth line and the Heathrow tunnels are able to have level boarding. Merseyrail will be getting level boarding in a few years, with a combination of...

For that to work, you need a station capable of handling lots of passenger interchanging between InterCity services. OOC will have 8 GWML platforms, 4 for the Main lines and 4 for the Reliefs/Elizabeth line, and enough escalators and lifts to get people on and off the platforms. When the Main...

As I was saying though, the term 'light rail' is rather expansive. At one end of the scale it could be like the Essen Stadtbahn with fairly long high-floor metro-style vehicles permitted to share the roads. At the other, you've got tiny little 3-segment trams with little more capacity than a...

What does conversion to light rail actually mean in practice? Light rail could encompass a very wide range of technical components and solutions. Trying to work out exactly what the final outcome would be from a set of environmental, ecological and heritage docs is rather hard. If light rail is...

I think you're conflating two different issues. Autonomy is essentially just the idea of trains being able to run without a driver. Then there's massively upgrading the signalling systems so that you get DLR-style moving block signalling to maximise capacity. The latter essentially requires full...

On a busy train the cost of the driver is indeed not significant. However, for all of the times when there are many passengers, there are many more times when there are rather fewer. Autonomy will make it much more financially viable to run off-peak trains and to do other efficiency measures...

Autonomy on the railways is going to use train-mounted equipment that doesn't require any meaningful changes to the physical infrastructure. The same sensors that can read traffic lights from a car can read any age of colour light or semaphore signalling. That autonomy in the 70s and 80s...

That is a sensible suggestion. 9-car 802s with 7 powered intermediate vehicles could replace the HSTs and in the meantime before there is sufficient electrification, the 222s can continue to run. If the AT300s are like that, they'll be formed of entirely standard carriages which can then be...

I wonder just how rigorously ScotRail will keep HSTs to HST services. While I assume they won't ever end up on the Anniesland turn, it seems semi-plausible that they'll run an E&G service once in a while (e.g. at the end of the day when they need to get back to Haymarket).

While other manufacturers have full rights to propose competing designs, it seems highly unlikely that anyone other than Hitachi will be that interested. Bombardier and CAF have plenty of work on the order books through 2021. Siemens and Alstom don't depend on British orders, and Alstom have...