England Finally Makes Decisions To Reopen Lines

[The Planner]

Yes. The last time I drove through that area, there were many houses still being built and some newly completed which hadn't yet been sold. It's too early to decide if the station at Aylesbury Vale is a success or not.

It has been open 11 and a bit years, clearly the developments around it have stalled for a number of reasons.

 

[Bald Rick]

It's too early to decide if the station at Aylesbury Vale is a success or not.

It’s only been open 11 years!

 

[Railwaysceptic]

It’s only been open 11 years!

Yes, but the houses haven't!

 

[yorksrob]

The big two advantages of Ollerton are that there's track there and there's a service that can be extended there fairly easily (rather than, say, somewhere like Grangemouth which is larger but there's no obvious way of serving without disrupting other services/passengers).



It's worth considering what the forecast passenger numbers were though.

My understanding is that Ebbw Vale was built on the basis of a service to Newport - but in the end got a service to the bigger city of Cardiff (and came at a time when the steel works were closing, so the need to travel outside of Ebbw Vale to seek employment suddenly increased significantly). So comparing final passenger numbers to predicted ones isn't wholly fair.

The Alloa branch was re-opened to get freight off the Forth Bridge - sticking a platform for a passenger service was the simple cost of running freight trains through the town.

Similarly, a line to Tweedbank was the price paid to get the LibDems into coalition at Holyrood.

So in both the Scottish cases, the passenger service was going to happen regardless - these branches weren't built because of an amazing business case, they were built to suit political demands - hence nobody doing a huge amount of work to assess demand - they weren't built because they had amazing demand - the fact that the passenger numbers are higher than expected is great but the two lines could still be running significant financial losses even if passenger numbers were double projections. There's probably a few Scottish schemes with better business cases and better projected passenger numbers that never saw the light of day. And some Scottish schemes that were built that never get discussed in these debates (e.g. anyone boasting about Larkhall?).

I have nothing against tackling the low hanging fruit. Ollerton sounds like a very good case that can be axhieved comparatively easily. But even with those low hanging fruit, you need a commitment to funding them, otherwise you get locked into the cycle of endless studies with nothing actually achieved.

You cite the political impetus to the reopenings in Scotland as though it is some sort of an aberration, where as I consider it to be a political system that works and delivers what people want. I'm interested in what has gone wrong with the political system in England, that has led to the pitiful lack of progress in this area over the last twenty years.

I think the word is "realists".

No I think I'll stick with Beeching nostalgists.

There's certainly a strand of thought on this forum that would just love to go back to an era of being able to slash whatever they like, without tiresome public scrutiny.

As @HSTEd pointed out above, there are lots of basket case stations/lines but nobody dares even close something like Breich - the fact that nobody in any position of power is suggesting closing lines where the average passenger load could be accommodated by a minibus (e.g. Burnley - Colne) doesn't mean that they are a "success", just that no politician is going to ask for something that'd be unpopular with the public (even though 99.9% of the public don't use it).

See my comment above.

Firstly because we already waste huge sums on evaluations (the "Aberystwyth to Carmarthen feasibility study" industry is one of Wales's major employers!)

Secondly because you are clearly asking for something which is guaranteed to give the answer "re-open some long abandoned railway" - by all means assess which railway project has the best business case but by demanding we have a separate pot just for re-openings and that we must only spend that money on re-openings, you are trying to fix it to only give you an answer you'll want to hear.

That's because we never get around to building the damn thing because there's never the funding. I would like to see some of these endless studies come to fruition.

I want a separate pot for expanding the railway over where it already serves.

The Government is fond of telling us that HS2 is a separate pot of funding from the funding needed to maintain the existing railway.

The £5 billion is specifically for bus and cycleway enhancements.

If separate pots of funding are appropriate for these things, why is expanding the railway network to new communities any different ?​

You're going to have your mind blown when you hear about things called "buses" and "coaches".

You're fond of making the argument that different modes suit different travel patterns. It's clear that buses are best suited to short hops within close urban areas. I would suggest that the far north line is not one of these.

Coaches have their place. They seem to serve a particular market - budget Inter city type travel. They complement long distance rail, more than compete with it.

Remember, Wick sees an average twenty four departing passengers a day. That's not "per hour" or "per service", that's two dozen departing passengers a day. We're talking minibus levels of demand (but operated with a 158 that only manage a mile or two to the gallon, at least two members of staff on board, large sums required on infrastructure/maintenance/ signalling etc).

Heavy rail really isn't the answer to every problem.

Do 158's really only manage one or two miles per gallon ? The reason I say is that that's what the thumpers tended to achieve with 1950's technology - One would have thought that 1980's technology might have improved in efficiency ?

Anyhow, the heavy rail network is the primary public transport system between towns and cities in Great Britain. This means that towns need to be connected to it, even though many on here would wish it were otherwise.

 

[yorksrob]

No, the argument ‘on here’ is that money on rail improvement schemes is best spent where it achieves the best result for society. It’s difficult to argue against that.

Well, if that's the case, why has a specific pot of funding been set aside for buses and cycleways ?

Judging by some on here, it seems that dedicated funding is appropriate for everything in the world except expanding the rail network.

 

[HSTEd]

If separate pots of funding are appropriate for these things, why is expanding the railway network to new communities any different ?

Expanding the rail network to new communities is not the same as "reopen old lines".

You're fond of making the argument that different modes suit different travel patterns. It's clear that buses are best suited to short hops within close urban areas. I would suggest that the far north line is not one of these.

That is emphatically not what conventional buses are suited to.
As the experience in London has demonstrated, as well as around Oxford Road in Manchester - buses traevlling on open roads are suitable primarily for low population density areas where traffic concerns are not significant.
London buses and off-Oxford Road sections of the Oxford Road bus corridor are painfully slow.

Coaches have their place. They seem to serve a particular market - budget Inter city type travel. They complement long distance rail, more than compete with it.

A properly engineered modern railway should be able to drive most budget coaches out of the market.

Do 158's really only manage one or two miles per gallon ? The reason I say is that that's what the thumpers tended to achieve with 1950's technology - One would have thought that 1980's technology might have improved in efficiency ?

Well Cl158s are much higher performance units than Thumpers.
Indeed we are looking at about 200hp per car in traction power on a Cl201.

This is one of the reasons Pacers are economical to run. Short light trains with not particularly good eprformance to operate.

Anyhow, the heavy rail network is the primary public transport system between towns and cities in Great Britain. This means that towns need to be connected to it, even though many on here would wish it were otherwise.

Again, connecting towns to it is not the same as trying to rebuild the Edwardian railway.

 

[yorksrob]

Expanding the rail network to new communities is not the same as "reopen old lines".

Again, connecting towns to it is not the same as trying to rebuild the Edwardian railway.

This is true. Skelmersdale new town is a case in point, as you wouldn't have a new station where the old one was.

But realistically the vast majority of places that currently require reconnection to the railway network, will have had a railway at some stage in the past, and the line of least resistance will, in the most part be reopening the Edwardian line.

Connecting communities isn't exactly the same as "reopen old lines". But most of it is.

That is emphatically not what conventional buses are suited to.
As the experience in London has demonstrated, as well as around Oxford Road in Manchester - buses traevlling on open roads are suitable primarily for low population density areas where traffic concerns are not significant.
London buses and off-Oxford Road sections of the Oxford Road bus corridor are painfully slow.

The majority of conventional buses are used for short intra-urban hops. They may be painfully slow, and it may be a case of them being the only thing available for such flows in many cases, but that is what they are suited to.

What they are emphatically not suited to are long inter-urban journeys of several hours, like Inverness - Wick.

A properly engineered modern railway should be able to drive most budget coaches out of the market.

It should, but it won't.

Realistically, with the honourable exception of LNWR, the railway simply isn't interested in providing cheap, walk-on, long-distance travel, which is the market coaches cater for.

I suggested on here once that they should consider using one of the long distance paths on the East Coast main line for a LNWR style budget-walk on service, and was berated for it and had the thread closed down (even though this was in the speculative ideas section).

National Express coaches aren't going to be run out of business by the railway, however technologically modern it may be, any time soon.

Well Cl158s are much higher performance units than Thumpers.
Indeed we are looking at about 200hp per car in traction power on a Cl201.

This is one of the reasons Pacers are economical to run. Short light trains with not particularly good eprformance to operate.
.

It's always interesting to consider the technical advancements of units over the years, but I digress....

 

[HSTEd]

The majority of conventional buses are used for short intra-urban hops. They may be painfully slow, and it may be a case of them being the only thing available for such flows in many cases, but that is what they are suited to.

They aren't really suited to it, they just are used beause the government doesn't want to spend money on any of the capital intensive options.

What they are emphatically not suited to are long inter-urban journeys of several hours, like Inverness - Wick.

Inverness to Wick by rail is so slow that it would struggle to compete with a modern fast ferry.

The evidence available to us is that there are serious express buses on the route, and they appear to make money as they run on a purely conventional basis.

Realistically, with the honourable exception of LNWR, the railway simply isn't interested in providing cheap, walk-on, long-distance travel, which is the market coaches cater for.

Partially this is due to the ancient infrastructure we are saddled with rendering it impossible to pack enough people in to pay the fixed costs they are required to pay by the network operator.

I'd rather any new infrastructure brought into use not be hamstrung by those restraints, which means any new alignments will have to have any and all retained overbridges on abandoned lines massively rebuilt and huge earthworks provided to increase the available height and such.

 

[Starmill]

Realistically, with the honourable exception of LNWR, the railway simply isn't interested in providing cheap, walk-on, long-distance travel, which is the market coaches cater for.

Coaches often don't cater reasonably to walk-on travellers. Walk-on fares can be remarkably high, on National Express, even when there are passengers booked on that coach for 400 miles at £10.

The reality is, increasingly, that the railway is way too expensive both in advance and on the day. Honourable mentions go firmly to West Midlands Trains, as you hint (whose brand names are London Northwestern Railway, or LNR, and West Midlands Railway, or WMR), and also to Northern on the Manchester to Liverpool and Manchester to Leeds axes.

 

[yorksrob]

They aren't really suited to it, they just are used beause the government doesn't want to spend money on any of the capital intensive options.

Realistically, you're never going to replace every urban bus route with a tram. One only has to look at London, which has one of the most capital intensive urban transport networks in the world. Yet the bus is still the best option for many, many flows.

Inverness to Wick by rail is so slow that it would struggle to compete with a modern fast ferry.

The evidence available to us is that there are serious express buses on the route, and they appear to make money as they run on a purely conventional basis.

You are correct - there does appear to be a 3 hour bus between the two. I suspect that three hours on a bus with no toilet isn't ideal though.

Partially this is due to the ancient infrastructure we are saddled with rendering it impossible to pack enough people in to pay the fixed costs they are required to pay by the network operator.

I'd rather any new infrastructure brought into use not be hamstrung by those restraints, which means any new alignments will have to have any and all retained overbridges on abandoned lines would have to be massively rebuilt and huge earthworks provided to increase the available height and such.

I think you're conflating two issues.

If you had a twelve carriage train using similar stock to that used by LNWR, full of people with cheap walk on fares running up the East Coast Main line, you'll make enough money to run the train. That would make a dent in the coach market. Given the number of paths on the ECML today, there's no physical reason why one of these couldn't be such a service. However, the railway industry wants to offer a premium product and ration any cheap fares so that people will pay more if they can be made to. That creates a conflict with cheap walk on fares, not Victorian infrastructure.

In terms of reopenings, much as I think they're needed, few of them are going to be as intensively used as the InterCity main lines. With the exception of some bridges, if electrification is on the cards, the Victorian infrastructure really won't be a constraint on traffic levels.

 

[yorksrob]

Coaches often don't cater reasonably to walk-on travellers. Walk-on fares can be remarkably high, on National Express, even when there are passengers booked on that coach for 400 miles at £10.

The reality is, increasingly, that the railway is way too expensive both in advance and on the day. Honourable mentions go firmly to West Midlands Trains, as you hint (whose brand names are London Northwestern Railway, or LNR, and West Midlands Railway, or WMR), and also to Northern on the Liverpool <> Manchester <> Leeds axis.

Perhaps I'm relying too heavily on my own limited experience of coach travel. If NE puts prices up too much, it will damage it's own business, but it won't be the railway stealing it.

I agree with your second point though. Northern on the Liverpool - Leeds axis does offer some competitive fares, but they're not to my knowledge, "walk-up" fares alas.

 

[Bald Rick]

Do 158's really only manage one or two miles per gallon ? The reason I say is that that's what the thumpers tended to achieve with 1950's technology - One would have thought that 1980's technology might have improved in efficiency ?

The answer is “it depends”, on the cycle the unit is working on, ie speed, stops, gradients etc. The far north line is a 175 mile trip with stops on average every 7 miles of so (albeit some are request stops, but the driver will still be braking and accelerating), with most of the route at 60mph or above, and plenty of stretches and 75mph. I’d be surprised if the 158s did much more than 2-3mpg per vehicle on that route.

Whilst technology has moved on, a 3 car 158 weighs only a few tons less than a 3 car thumper (114t vs 118t) but does have a lot more more power (1050hp vs 600hp); some of that power is driving the aircon and other services that the thumpers didn’t have. However most of the extra power is ‘buying’ better acceleration.

 

[yorksrob]

The answer is “it depends”, on the cycle the unit is working on, ie speed, stops, gradients etc. The far north line is a 175 mile trip with stops on average every 7 miles of so (albeit some are request stops, but the driver will still be braking and accelerating), with most of the route at 60mph or above, and plenty of stretches and 75mph. I’d be surprised if the 158s did much more than 2-3mpg per vehicle on that route.

Whilst technology has moved on, a 3 car 158 weighs only a few tons less than a 3 car thumper (114t vs 118t) but does have a lot more more power (1050hp vs 600hp); some of that power is driving the aircon and other services that the thumpers didn’t have. However most of the extra power is ‘buying’ better acceleration.

Thanks, that's very interesting !