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Forth road bridge closed completely, effect on rail network?
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90019
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I'd have thought it would be a better plan to have them for foot passengers only.
Having shuttle buses wouldn't be particularly difficult on the South Queensferry side, as there's a nice big car park, but North Queensferry would be a bit trickier.
route:oxford
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Has he been misquoted or has Mick Cash failed the RMT's Scottish Subscribers by failing to know the difference between The Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge?
Class 170101
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According to elsewhere on this board the HST was stabled in Tyne Yard due to OLE being down at Reston the previous evening.
PaxVobiscum
Established Member
Nothing to do with the railway, but of interest to engineers on here I think.
NB this is a historical webpage, not a response to the current closure, as evidenced in the dates I have bolded.
WARNING: click this link at your own risk - Firefox is reporting dodgy certificates (but I'm on a Mac
)
https://www.forthroadbridge.org/projects/capital-projects/truss-end-links/
This appears to relate to a report on another forum of a public contract, cancelled in 2010, to strengthen the end links. Interesting what a wee bit googling can unearth.
NB this is a historical webpage, not a response to the current closure, as evidenced in the dates I have bolded.
WARNING: click this link at your own risk - Firefox is reporting dodgy certificates (but I'm on a Mac
)https://www.forthroadbridge.org/projects/capital-projects/truss-end-links/
This appears to relate to a report on another forum of a public contract, cancelled in 2010, to strengthen the end links. Interesting what a wee bit googling can unearth.
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That *is* interesting. If I'm reading it correctly they ran the numbers, came to the conclusion that "it'll be fine until the new bridge opens" but got it wrong.
PaxVobiscum
Established Member
A bit more googling finds Transport Scotland were asked about this yesterday and stated that it was not the same components which have now failed.
http://www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/20151205/281479275344628/TextView
Can't quote the text, but you can drag the page to the left and it's the first two text columns after the map.
http://www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/20151205/281479275344628/TextView
Can't quote the text, but you can drag the page to the left and it's the first two text columns after the map.
That is a lot less damning then - it would have been a major embarrassment if the specific failure had been predicted.
LeylandLen
Member
I've had a read through many interesting posts suggesting that extra trains could be run over the Forth into Edinburgh or a suitable station. Im sure your input is well meaning and its interesting to read but surely three things have to be considered ..
1 if you want to cater for people who would usually drive over the Forth road bridge then you have to have adequate car parking spaces available at relevant stations or run the risk of places being clogged up with cars looking for somewhere to park near stations and cars being left almost anywhere including double yellow lines ..( Ive seen it many times)
2 even if you could find suitable rolling stock then you would need train drivers and train managers/guards etc. They would have to know the route of course. Would many volunteer to work on rest days for usual pay rates? Rotas would have to be worked out given that they are limited by law to so many driving hours per day/week
3 a lot of the road traffic over the Forth road bridge is mixed freight , consumer items( even more so at this time of year,) not forgetting the extra mail services .
Im sure Scotrail will do there best and Network Rail will do there best.
1 if you want to cater for people who would usually drive over the Forth road bridge then you have to have adequate car parking spaces available at relevant stations or run the risk of places being clogged up with cars looking for somewhere to park near stations and cars being left almost anywhere including double yellow lines ..( Ive seen it many times)
2 even if you could find suitable rolling stock then you would need train drivers and train managers/guards etc. They would have to know the route of course. Would many volunteer to work on rest days for usual pay rates? Rotas would have to be worked out given that they are limited by law to so many driving hours per day/week
3 a lot of the road traffic over the Forth road bridge is mixed freight , consumer items( even more so at this time of year,) not forgetting the extra mail services .
Im sure Scotrail will do there best and Network Rail will do there best.
If the DfT ever decided to buy a limited fleet of emergency standby trains, which isn't actually a ridiculous idea, they'd need to be usable on the whole network and drivers would need to be able to use them. So they'd not be cheap.
And, yes, the media would go mad as well as demanding to know why they weren't put into regular service, when suddenly they'd no longer be available for emergency situations like this!
Also, given their likely use to cover for large events, a crisis like this or another situation requiring the movement of large numbers, I'd suspect the interior layout would mean few, if any, seats.
One train with almost universal route availability exists, the Hastings DEMU... It would hopefully be available for hire. I'm not sure whether the 170s that were sent to Southern are serviceable in their conversion into 172s. If any are usable they could come back temporarily..
Agreed, I can't imagine for one moment that anyone would be looking at a car ferry service. And the latest information about the road bridge closure on the Traffic Scotland website clearly says the option being considered is a passenger ferry.
But even if you were to operate the Queensferry route, how many people would actually use it, given the palaver of driving to one of the park-and-ride sites, then getting a bus to the quay, then another bus at the other end?
All of which assumes you can find suitable vessels and buses in the first place - and the people to operate them, which is probably not much easier than finding more trains and crews is for Scotrail. For all the names of 'spare' CalMac ships being bandied around, how many of them are currently undergoing programmed winter maintenance, for example?
I suspect many people would take one look at how long park-and-ride, bus, ferry, bus might take, compared with catching a train, and just cram on to whatever services Scotrail can provide anyway, or grit their teeth and use a bus or car the long way round via the Kincardine Bridge.
Actually, in the "bad old days" of BR and Inter-City, there was indeed a number of standby trains. It was known as the "Directors Reserve", latterly some rakes of older Mk 2 stock commonly kept at Euston etc, which were able to be sent as required by the Director of Inter-City. They weren't used every day but they dealt over time with a wide range of traffic surges, disruptions, etc.
Blindtraveler
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A use for some Mark 3s when withdrawn on mass?
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...e-of-scottish-steel-industry?CMP=share_btn_tw
The Guardian's take on the incident, which seems to be the 'revenge' of the Scottish Steel industry.
The Guardian's take on the incident, which seems to be the 'revenge' of the Scottish Steel industry.
Xenophon PCDGS
Veteran Member
What a xenophobic piece of Scottish journalism which being from The Guardian is not at all surprising, giving them the opportunity to bring the demise of the Scottish steel industry into the equation.
Where was the steel made of the parts that have failed?
Travelled from Inverkeithing to Edinburgh yesterday on a VTEC HST which was rammed. Looks like there might be something happening with loco haulage - as there were 4 class 67s and 2 ex Virgin Trains mark 2 coaches stabled at Waverley yesterday. Those and the class 90 for the sleeper made it a bit of a loco fest!
theageofthetra
Established Member
What I can't understand is why the bridge has to be closed completely. If the bridge is in such poor condition that it could fall down at any moment then those responsible should be held to account. Could you not just impose some sort of traffic control so that only a certain number of vehicles are allowed on the bridge at any one time to reduce stresses? Or even just open it one way? I went over an old bridge in New Zealand (may well have been an old rail one) & only two trucks were allowed on at any time. I remember a similar one in Canada too.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I think the ex VT Mk2s are for the Fort William portion of the Sleeper.
Philip Phlopp
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The bridge isn't going to fall down completely, but if the same part on the other side of the bridge deck fails, the deck will fall by 6 inches along one of the expansion joints and rest on parts of the structure not designed to have vertical forces directly upon them, causing extensive damage which could require an entire new bridge deck section in the area to repair.
The bridge was run with traffic only operating on the opposite carriageway and the forces detected were still too high, and then HGVs were banned (over 7.5 tonnes) and the forces, even after that, were still too high. They clearly have an idea of how much force is unsafe having examined all of the other instances of this joint and have not been able to find a way to keep the forces below a safe figure whilst the bridge remains open.
The failure wasn't predicted and I can't fault the engineers here, they're working with a bridge that's 51 years old, carrying traffic well in excess of its design, traffic which individually is well in excess of that modelled, both heavier cars and far heavier goods vehicles.
Modelling is great but without experience, nobody can program computer modelling packages to accurately model for this sort of problem - they can get very close (and that'll be what has prompted the inspection in this area) but won't be 100% accurate.
As the week went on I did think it was going to end up closed completely although I thought they would have made the decision to leave it open for service buses which would have greatly reduced the pressure even though the number of buses would significantly increase due to the ban on cars etc. Obviously they feel that even that would be too much in this case.
Splitting hairs, but that's an Observer columnist, Kevin McKenna, who always tries to find the worst and is on constant attack mode against the Scottish Government - he always opposed devolution.
And a general idiot too- whilst ferries have been mentioned on here, we've also identified the issues. He seems to think the Sir William Wallace and Mary Queen Of Scots are tied up in Newhaven or somewhere rather than having been scrapped fifty years ago.
Why the Observer retain an Express editor as Scotland columnist I really don't understand
Dire, dire "journalism".
Anyway, instead of moaning, we can actually turn back to dealing with the situation that has happened. Scot rail have announced details of additional services, click here to have a look.
Note that almost all services start and terminate at Haymarket. I suspect that Platform 0 will get a lot of use over the next few weeks. It's actually a pretty decent effort to supplement services at short notice.
As we've already identified, there are some sacrifices to be made elsewhere, namely...
Presumably down to 1tph. Should manage OK - the line is lightly loaded with plenty of alternative options.
No great loss. 2tph already run as EMUs to Queen Street Low Level. They should cope with the additional strain quite easily. Journey time extension will be negligible.
A no-brainer. Presumably, this path will be filled in by a Haymarket terminator.
Could cause some problems, its busy up that way. It'll be interesting to see what services are going to be cancelled. Still, I'm sure the existing stock will cope, but it will be busy.
I would hope that people would be checking timetables and considering earlier trains anyway, so this shouldn't be much of a problem.
I just hope they do as much as they can advise passengers in the West of the disruptions to their existing services. I suspect most of them wouldn't necessarily assume that their trains will be affected. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out tomorrow.
Great!. Well done Scotrail.
Sam
Sam
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He actually supported independence in the referendum, but his writing is indeed awful.
Agreed they have done a good job. It's interesting on a personal level because I passed through Haymarket earlier today and thought 'I must start a thread about if there's a point to Platform 0' - turns out there is. Also explains why there were so many 156s at Haymarket TMD, I counted five or six.
Peter Mugridge
Veteran Member
I trust the new bridge being built next door is being given some good old deliberate over-engineering?
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