You are totally missing the point. If 2200t of stone is required at the destination every 2 hours, if it doesn't move in the single train it will move by HGVs which requires on average one every 90 seconds.
But it is not uneconomic to ship limestone aggregate by road. Much goes by road even from rail-connected quarries, especially for shorter journeys. And some quarries do not have rail access.
There must be very few destinations that will require loads every 2 hours! There aren't the sidings and unloading facilities to deal with such quantities, and nor are there enough sidings to load so much. That said the combined capacity of all the quarries and the cement works needs a lot more booked paths to cover potential movements as well as shunting of empty wagons and locomotives within the yards and to holding sidings and for servicing.
Where is the traffic or potential traffic to justify this very expensive re-opening? Passengers from Manchester/Stockport to Derby have a choice of 2 existing routes, and as for local services, Buxton-Matlock can barely sustain an hourly daytime bus service (Transpeak). Freight traffic can run via the Hope Valley, and it would be much cheaper to build some additional freight loops on this line for slow freight trains to be passed, than rebuild the Buxton-Matlock line.
The confusion is that at times you want it to be a freight relief route, at others you want it to be a local branch line with both freight and stopping passenger and then yet others you want it to carry Manchester-bound expresses. It can't be all 3 without a loop
Hixon/Stafford, Weedon/Northampton, Trent Valley/Birmingham and Quarry/Redhill suggest I'm right. Even Sheffield-York via Leeds or Milford shows you can only have 2 of the 3. On the Anglo-Scottish Mainlines, Carlisle-Carstairs has no local passenger service leaving Express and Freight (using a vast amount of loops), and Newcastle-Edinburgh has almost no freight, leaving Express and Locals.
Both could serve many markets, so the trick is to pick which ones go via which route. Both require the local services (because the whole point is about local connectivity), so the freight must go via one route and the expresses by another. You've repeatedly suggested sending both freight and express via Bakewell & Hope Valley.
Isn't the point to get the recreational cyclists onto the trains?
In all fairness car users are not going to leave their cars on the drive and catch the TransPeak bus.
The trackbed of the triangular junction at Great Rocks is largely intact, with the west to north curve still in use for freight.
The vast majority of the cost will be in the legal and design work, not to mention modern standards for freight will be equivalent to permit passenger traffic. Any costs you might save are totally negated if you need passive provision for passenger traffic.
Having taken the trouble to google the population of the places along this line I'm becoming even less convinced! Bakewell around 4,000, Rowsley less than 1,000, Buxton 22,000, Matlock 12,000 (and, of course, the latter two already have links to where most residents probably want to go).
No doubt the current bid will be considered and a feasibility study arranged. That will go over all the ground covered in this thread and in all probability won't come up with anything particularly new. More statistics, costs and ifs and buts. Costs very high. Benefits? Post Covid hard to evaluate.
Yep. The only beneficiaries will be the consultants who get paid for producing the feasibility study.
Agreed, probably the same consultants will be eyeing up:
Actual running is not really relevant here, given that it may have been pathed to follow a train that did not run on the day. However any freight path in the timetable would not be able to take such an advantage.
The weight is a bigger factor in this than the length. A heavy train takes forever to get up to speed, and longer to slow down safely. It will also have much longer running times uphill, something the Peak Line isn't exactly going to help with.
Agree absolutely.
At a very rough guess - and using VERY rough numbers. JNA wagons are 14m long, and have a maximum total weight of 100t over 4 axles. So for 3,600t you'd need 36 wagons at 504m. Plus 20m for each loco (in this case 2x) so total train length in the region of 544m. I may be very, very wrong on which wagons the jumbo uses or how I've worked that length out so approach with caution, but it's still much shorter than an intermodal freight (775m max).
Stone trains from Peak district quarries currently run uphill from those same quarries.
Current peak district trains don't run anywhere near 3,600 tonnes. They're in the 2,000-2,600 tonne range (I think).
1 in 90 is still a significant gradient for a freight train. And heavy train running downhill take a lot longer to stop. 3,600tonnes at 1 in 90 is going to have a fair bit of momentum behind it, so the driver will need to brake earlier and on a much shallower curve to bring it to a stand safely. Which makes regulating those trains just as difficult. Trying to find a non-stop path on the MML either side of Ambergate for such a long train will not be easy (otherwise they'd be running already!)
Braking performance surely has little to do with the number of wagons in the train. Each wagon has its own brakes, which provide the same deceleration rate regardless of how many other wagons it is hooked up to.
There is a delay in braking application along the length of the train - hence why american trains have locos in the middle - due to the nature of air-pressure operated brakes. More wagons = longer train = having to brake earlier to make sure the back wagons stop themselves.
Indeed, but the time for the brake pipe pressure change to propagate along the length of the train is only a matter of seconds. It does not "take a lot longer to stop" as you suggested. American trains are far longer than we are discussing here.
