Hi everyone.
Back in March 2024,
gedwards made a post about the prospects of re-opening a railway to Monmouth. The reply made by
stevieinselby prompted me to contribute my own thoughts to this matter. I will address each of the points he made in turn.
- Not a chance that it would be anywhere close to viable.
- It's a challenging route, even if you reuse the disused trackbed where it is available, and would need a number of structures such as bridges and tunnels reinstating or renovating.
- It is a very winding alignment that would only be suitable for slow speeds, so would not offer any significant attraction over the current bus services.
- The route south to Chepstow is the only one that is remotely plausible – the old line up to Ross and on to Gloucester would be cataclysmically expensive as well as untenably slow and circuitous.
- The tranquillity of the countryside and the amenity for walkers and cyclists of the old trackbed is of far more value to the area than a rail connection would be.
- If there's money to spare then it could achieve a lot more benefit a lot quicker and for a tiny fraction of the cost by supercharging the bus network. At the moment there's roughly one bus an hour to Chepstow, buses every 2 hours to Ross, Newport and Abergavenny, and an infrequent service to Hereford. All of the buses use small or medium single-deckers, which doesn't suggest that there's anywhere near enough demand to warrant a rail service, let alone one that would be so expensive to build. (Part of the reason for that is that demand is spread relatively evenly across multiple directions – there is no one regional centre acting as the main draw).
- If you're suggesting an LRT for an interurban service then that's basically a tacit admission that it won't attract enough passengers to be worthwhile.
So in response to his comments above, here is my response in turn.
1. Viability. If a railway is so unviable, why was it so necessary to construct a dual carriageway all the way from Newport, through Monmouth, on to Ross on Wye and beyond in the first place. Prior to the construction of the A449 and associated A40, the railway was apparently struggling to be cost effective, so where was the viability case study for constructing an even more vastly expensive dual carriage way along the very same route, just for a town with a small population. When it comes to cost and viability, the cost of the now abandoned M4 relief road, was quoted by the contractors at a cost of nearly £100 million per mile... Per mile! Building road infrastructure is literally like asking the public and the treasury to write a blank cheque without any accountability... Another example of these kinds of costs is the A465 heads of the valleys road which is so expensive, so time consuming and so over budget, no one will even tell the public how much has been spent on it, so far! Did someone, anyone for that matter, ever question the viability of the A465. The M4 already connects the East with West Wales, so why do we need another major road going to the same destination via Merthyr... It isn't that much bigger than Monmouth, so why is that "viable" given the "cataclysmic costs" of that ... Yet a railway apparently isn't viable... There are numerous other examples of very questionable cost effective road building all over the UK, but I will leave that there for the time being, other than to say, they have all been far more "cataclysmically expensive" than any railway could be.
As for saying "Not a chance", this is precisely the kind of attitude that makes getting a proper modern sustainable transport system so difficult to make happen, and any engineering challenges pale by comparison to such negative and dismissive thinking that's stuck in the very short sighted past of the Beeching Report. Beeching may not have had a crystal ball to the look into the future when it came to cutting running costs, but he had an extraordinary lack of vision when it came to appreciating that the future demand for good public transport was only ever going in one direction, and that is up and up! He also failed to have even the most elementary understanding of long term economic, social and environmental costs when it came to the transport of both the public and goods. The legacy of Beeching can be summed up excellently by this quote about scrapping HS2, "He may have known the cost of everything... But he failed to understand the true value of anything". This remains the case today, for example just the wages alone of one train driver versus the number of lorry drivers wages to transport the same amount of cargo, does not need a maths genius to appreciate which is the cheaper, let alone all the other associated costs. Someone once described the dismantling of the railways in the UK as "The road back to roads"... Backwards being the operative word as the UK is now stuck with an extremely expensive road network that has a near total monopoly on transport that can ironically be best described as a total train wreck for both the long term of the economy and the environment.
2. Yes, accepted, it is a challenging route and yes there are bridges that would need to be renovated or rebuilt and the same with trackbed in some places. Although none of these issues would be insurmountable and let's not forget or overlook the fact that with a lot of these old railways, that could be brought back, most of the costly major work shifting millions of tonnes of earth has already been done, which as road projects like the A465 in Wales proves to be the case in terms of what costs the most.
3 & 4. The Route. It would make the most sense to link Monmouth and potentially Ross on Wye with Raglan and Usk to get onto the main line at Pontypool for the easiest and most direct access to the cities of Newport and Cardiff, for the benefit of the most number of commuters, rather than just to the small town of Chepstow (and then onwards). This route south-west via Usk is by far a straighter alignment than is to be found between Chepstow and Monmouth, although the disadvantage is that it would have to be rebuilt along side the A449, although there seems to be plenty of space for it to do so. As to why such a public transport corridor scheme would be viable, consider that in the last few years, Ross on Wye, Monmouth, Raglan and Usk have all seen exploding populations and numbers of businesses, yet all of them remain in a railway infrastructure Sahara desert.
5. The railway is more value to walkers and cyclists. This has very mixed success at other locations. For example the cycle trackbed between Newport and Blaenavon has been mostly obliterated and is interrupted at numerous points making it impractical as a proper commuter cycle route. The same can be said for the route between Abergavenny and Brynmawr. The only relatively practical example of this in the vicinity is the cycle track around the Forest of Dean, although again there is a significant missing section due to private land ownership and it can hardly be of any use at all as a green form of transport to and from residential and retail areas, as it connects nothing to nothing. But its a good example of an old railway being used as a cycle route in tranquil setting if nothing else.
6. "Supercharging the bus network". This phrase is difficult to understand as to what it would be trying to achieve and more importantly, how it would be trying to achieve it. But more is understood by the following facts. Buses throughout wales, are extremely "slow and circuitous". This is only appreciated by people who actually use buses in Wales, rather than by people in offices who just stare at pretty multicoloured flat maps. For example, a bus from Cwmbran to Pontypool can take up to an hour to travel the 6 mile journey. A bus from Newport to Tredegar can take more than 4 hours to do the 22 mile journey. As for a bus from Monmouth to Newport which is some 30 miles (via Pontypool and Usk or via Chepstow, makes no real difference to the distance), it can take even longer. Bearing in mind of course these journey times are real world experiences, not based on meaningless bus timetables and are only one way!
Buses like this, supercharged or otherwise, are totally impractical as a mode of public transport for commuters and it is hardly surprising that such buses are only every two hours! It isn't because there is no demand for public transport, it is because they are far too slow and utterly useless to anyone, apart from a day out for the Mr Magoo appreciation society! One of the reasons buses in Wales are so slow is because of the geography and countless steep gradients along the whole road network. Another reason is that buses rarely achieve average speeds of more than 25mph and along some bus routes in Wales, there are bus stops every 250 yards. Buses also frequently stop for up to 10 minutes at a time due to numerous reasons, taking fares etc, etc, etc. The least said about several buses all stuck in the same line of traffic, the better. So, whatever is meant by "Supercharging the bus network", unless that means turning buses into things that literally fly or virtually turning them into trains with a complete road system dedicated only for them, it is unlikely to make any difference to the actual services provided by buses in the current configuration.
7. "It wouldn't attract enough passengers to be worthwhile". If this railway between Pontypool, Usk, Raglan, Monmouth and Ross on Wye had been retained and mothballed during the 1970's and brought back into service some time in 2000's, there would be absolutely no question about its viability today. This is evidenced by the success of the newly reinstated railway to Ebbw Vale, which has seen more than three times the numbers of passengers than was expected, with a population not much bigger than Monmouth. They nay sayers said it would never give any returns for the public purse, and just how wrong were they! Whilst the passenger numbers for a Monmouth railway connection may have been low during the 1960s and 1970s, likely passenger numbers today are considerably higher, because there are now far more people are living in those areas. This is similarly the case throughout most of the UK, for example the need for railway connections at places like Thornbury and Portishead in Somerset are nothing short of desperate and urgent and long overdue with the development of massive housing estates over the last 10 years.
For those that have read the whole of my response, thank you for taking the time to read it, I hope you have found it informative and thought provoking.
