How can Paddington - Penzance services be sped up

[30907]

Could you double the West of England line and have that for most slow stopping services to London and have more frequent fast services on the Westbury Line. Would that even be attractive?

You'd still need to serve the intermediate stations via Westbury with (say) a 2-hourly service, not very different from now.

 

[The Ham]

The cost of redoubling would be enormous. Works quite well as it is since the additional long loop was added at Axminster. Plans are afoot in cooperation with Devon CC to extend Barnstaple services there so offering half hourly links to Exeter.

I've seen a suggested value of £1.7bn to redouble (and electricity?) the WofE line (how reliable that figure is, or whether it was to prove a point), as the person suggesting it was saying that would be a better use of money than the Stonehenge Tunnel.

However even if it were off by some way, it should also be noted that there'd still be quite a bit of road building required to dual the A303 for the sections not already done or under construction.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 27 Oct 2023 ==

You'd still need to serve the intermediate stations via Westbury with (say) a 2-hourly service, not very different from now.

Arguably you could run a Paddington, Westbury, Yeovil, Exeter routed service and a Salisbury, Westbury, Taunton, Exeter routed service so that you could have the fast service overtake it or to help squeeze a bit more capacity out between freight services (although I suspect probably not all that much more).

 

[30907]

Arguably you could run a Paddington, Westbury, Yeovil, Exeter routed service and a Salisbury, Westbury, Taunton, Exeter routed service so that you could have the fast service overtake it or to help squeeze a bit more capacity out between freight services (although I suspect probably not all that much more).

The first might be worth exploring once there was line capacity west of Yeovil (20min or so faster than standard times via the LSW, and Pen Mill is better sited than Junction), the second very doubtful - Taunton needs a fast service from London but I doubt there's more than a tiny demand from Westbury and Castle Cary.

 

[TheWalrus]

I think the question os do these services need speeding up? Between London and Plymouth maybe but west of Plymouth are any of the towns served very major places? I’m not sure what benefit there is to speeding up services west of Plymouth. Liskeard, Bodmin, St Austell, Redruth and Camborne are probably used well enough to justify their services and all the other main calls are interchanges for the branch lines.

Unless line speeds across the entire route could be increased to save time are there any calling points you would want to remove? I would imagine all the main regular calls now you would want to retain.

 

[dk1]

I think the question os do these services need speeding up? Between London and Plymouth maybe but west of Plymouth are any of the towns served very major places? I’m not sure what benefit there is to speeding up services west of Plymouth. Liskeard, Bodmin, St Austell, Redruth and Camborne are probably used well enough to justify their services and all the other main calls are interchanges for the branch lines.

Unless line speeds across the entire route could be increased to save time are there any calling points you would want to remove? I would imagine all the main regular calls now you would want to retain.

Yes, just best to leave the route stopping pattern as it is. It is also so curvaceous that any line speed improvements would be minimal and probably not cost effective.