Before I retired, I operated at three different hospitals each week. Although paid by the NHS I was classed as self employed and was able to claim travel "expenses" to the two hospitals furthest away. That was definitely a tax perk as it paid for 60% of my car expenses per year including servicing and repairs, insurance and car tax AND AA subs.. The bigger the car the more of a perk. I do miss my Aston.
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Before I retired, I operated at three different hospitals each week. Although paid by the NHS I was classed as self employed and was able to claim travel "expenses" to the two hospitals furthest away. That was definitely a tax perk as it paid for 60% of my car expenses per year including servicing and repairs, insurance and car tax AND AA subs.. The bigger the car the more of a perk. I do miss my Aston.
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RailUK Forums
Right - fine.
But you're not talking about the stuff 'muddythefish' was.
He was banging on about company cars which an employee receives as being a tax perk - which I and others have pointed out isn't the case.
Whereas self-employed people have various tax breaks - one of which is the ability to claim home to office mileage as an expense that is not permissible for an employee. However under IR35 regs it is now limited to two years from home to a single location - after that the taxman views it as your permanent place of work and removes the perk. That said a self-employed person technically doesn't have a company car in the way an employee might.
I don't think that's correct. I think it's more likely that 97% of posters on this forum would agree with the reinstatement; it's just that you've got into a lengthy disagreement with a few people who don't or have doubts. A large volume of posts by a handful of individuals is not (necessarily) representative of the general forum opinion.
Although of course it depends whether when you refer to 'posters on here' you mean only those who have posted on this particular thread or those who post on railforums.co.uk as a whole (and may be reading this particular thread without commenting because they agree with you or one of the other posters and consider them chiming in is redundant).
Apologies if this is overly pedantic, just don't assume opinion here is (necessarily) against you based on flimsy evidence!
Having helped present the case to decision makers in the Treasury for £800m of public money to be invested in rail in the North, you can take it that I'm in favour of such investment. However I've seen nothing in the case presented here for the Ripon line that would convince any decision maker, let alone the Treasury that a penny should be invested. Which is of course why the campaign for reinstatement has got nowhere in 10 years, 20years, whatever. If afraid Deltic08 and his friends need to up their game when the competition for funds is fierce. Every possible hole in your case is going to examined in detail and challenged before a case is accepted and its no use just blustering and abusing people when they challenge your case. You have to win them over with persuasive arguments.
Apart from the fact that the business case for reinstatement is not particularly compelling, the reinstatement of a rural line serving one market town/cathedral city is just flying in the face of the current "Northern Powerhouse" (sorry) political agreement between the government/Treasury and the major councils that transport links between the North's major cities need investment to simulate economic growth.
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HSTEd
Veteran Member
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I was proposing you divert from Doncaster to Northallerton - bypassing the entire shebang without using the single track bottleneck on the Harrogate line.
Assuming you can stage enough trains to make a difference through the single track between Poppleton and Hammerton.
That would cripple any attempt to use the line for major diversions - leaving you with a feel-good factor diversion that won't actually pay for itself in terms of avoided fines.
That would marginally improve the case but you are still going to have a hard time justifying a psychological improvement in service - unless you want to double track this new line entirely, which will put your cost through the roof - possibly to the extent that you could handle blockages between York and Northallerton with a parallel LGV.
And?
No it doesn't - if that were true then we would never have branch lines, everything would be implemented as loops.
You are doubling, or apparently with your signalling improvements, more than doubling the price of this project - and you have to be able to present extra benefits to defray that cost.
As opposed to a train that just runs into York station and reverses out again?
Journey time from Harrogate to york is about 39 minutes, journey time from York to 23 minutes - so even with a few minutes of timetable slack you have invented a way to travel from Harrogate to Northallerton in about 6-7 minutes.
Most impressive.
Obviously intercity type trains will explode if they are run on the existing lines because they aren't engineered to a high enough standard?
And if you want more intercity trains to Harrogate then you should lobby for that - because even if this line is opened all the way to Northallerton you are far moer likely to get 185 esque things than IEPs.
And? It is not 1967 any more.
Darlington has lost this position and there is no point expending resources trying to turn back the clock. And it seems highly doubtful that Darlington of today could compete with Leeds or Harrogate of today.
Nevermind whether it is right to spend public money on such an evident zero sum game project.
Through trains that almost noone will use and a freight depot that will probably never see a train. And an ineffective diversion for a handful of occasions?
What a great business case that is.
Who said the light rail project would be in Ripon or Harrogate? That money could be spent anywhere on anywhere that wants a lightweight tram system.
This is a nation state you know?
And it has to be competitive otherwise it is a waste of valuable resources.
If it doesn't have to be competitive then what argumenst have you got against an extension of HS2 to Wick or Thurso?
Assuming the 140mph running via York doesn't happen ever you mean?
And how many trains are they planning on running non stop to Harrogate? As far as I know there is only the ICEC trains that do that currently and paths on the Harrogate line are far more likely to be eaten up by the high intensity service that is often proposed for along there.
Yes, the railway has slown down since then since there tend to be more things in the way.
EDIT:
And to clarify for anyone interested - I am broadly in favour of a reopening to Ripon.... if that reopening consists of a sensibly specced single track scheme. Indeed it might be possible to achieve half hourly services without any passing places at all.
Only one signalled position and that would be at the entrance.
Although that would be extremly tight on the timetable and a single dynamic loop would be infinitely more reliable.
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At the risk of being late for a very important meeting as mentioned previously I have explained to a previous poster.
I do not provide links as I know not how. I notice other posters rarely do. I am not known by family and friends or my constituents as one who spreads misinformation. I am very rarely wrong. That sounds very arrogant I know but true. In my job I had to be 100% sure of myself in making the right decision. Lives were at stake.
I actually asked Mr Parry-Jones, who was almost within touching distance, what was his estimated growth in CP5 as growth in CP4 in the Leeds City region had been 10% per annum average. This was specifically to find out was to be done on the Leeds-York line already mentioned by Phil Verster in the Yorkshire Post the previous year that it was a problem that substantial amounts of money would have to be spent on here and between Hare Park and Doncaster to sort.
His unequivocal answer was 3% for the UK but 5% for Leeds City region.
This reinforced my campaign to reinstate Harrogate-Northallerton and where reinstating Harrogate-Wetherby-Tadcaster-Church Fenton with reinstated chord ay South Elmsall with quad track from there to Doncaster for freight diversion off the ECML and stopping passenger trains was born.
Quad track would allow freight to have a dedicated route along the west side of Doncaster station, over Bessecarr Flyover and on to Lincoln without conflicting with the ECML south of Newcastle. This would also answer Phil Versters problem with Leeds-Doncaster stoppers delaying Leeds-KX trains by stopping at Bentley. 10 minutes could be shaved off Leeds-Doncaster if the stoppers weren't on the same line south of South Elmsall.
Having spoken to my consultants just yesterday we have almost decided to look only at Harrogate-Northallerton as that is most important to me and Ripon especially as the study may be funded by the people of Ripon. Wetherby and Tadcaster Town Councils have declined to part fund. So has Harrogate.
I questioned 5% per annum again and was told that this is all that was expected and that is all that would be planned for during CP5.
Actual usage in the 2014/15 ORR report for this line is 7% after a bit of calculation. I haven't had time to do the usage figure for the other radial routes from Leeds but the Aire valley services at a glance could be more than 7%. Leeds has gone up 2 million to a touch under 30 million. Mental calculation makes that a touch under 7%
Network Rail is wrong for the year 2014/15.
I think the post electrification draft timetable I saw in 2012 expected start of electric services in 2019. Of course in 2012 I was hoping Harrogate-Northallerton could reopen soon afterwards. There could still be electrification of York-Leeds by 2019 as it is only 17? miles between Neville Hill and Colton Junction and there is sufficient stock to extend Bradford FS-Leeds services to York. There is obviously slippage due to GWML and the Lancashire triangle as read on this site but 2022 is now the target date for Manchester-Leeds-Selby.
Let me know if I have missed anything.
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I assume you mean it has two lanes in each direction. Dual means separate carriageways for the two directions with a central reserve between them, regardless of the number of lanes on each.
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Quite a dual carriageway can have anything between 1 and 4 lanes.
You are incapable of posting links, something a six year old kid could do, yet you have the nerve to shout (use of capital letters in internet parlance) telling others to do their own research.
As someone with a background in science, you should be aware that scientific papers always quote their sources meticulously, not tell people to do their own research. Of course a lot of people don't provide links, but, just like the poster who insists company cars are a tax perk without presenting any evidence or the scientific paper without proper references they lack any credibility. And I'm afraid that your posts on this board lack credibility, however insufferable your arrogance. If you are campaigning for railway reinstatement, you are not now closed away in your own little world in your operating theater, where you are god. In the real world, the scientific method of review by peers and others takes place even in business and government circles. Every point of your case will be subject to forensic questioning and will have to be persuasive in replying. Not telling your peers and superiors that they are idiots, which appears to be your standard response to reasonable questions on this forum.I've read this grotesque brain dump three times and fail to find any answer to my my first simple question. I repeat, when Network announced this 5% growth estimate did they specifically say that the capacity improvements would only support 5% growth? In the context of the post I obviously was referring specifically to the Leeds-York line. I don't see anything in your post that addresses what the capacity improvements will support, only that you are forecasting growth different from Network Rail's.
It does seem to me that by referring back to 2012 you are indeed on a personal crusade to show that the rail industry were wrong to ignore you in the past. Talk of reinstating Ripon-Northallerton is irrelevant in 2016 in the context of possible delays to capacity improvements between Leeds and York due in 2019. (Even if you are right and the rail industry is wrong!).
Well what a surprise, for all your arrogance you can't even persuade neighbouring towns to contribute to whatever study it is you are planning ( I can't see anything in your post that tells us). :roll: Good luck if you ever go any higher.
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JohnB57
Member
But which one to replace? St. Peter or St. Paul..?
Only joking Mr/Dr. M! No need to break out the beta-blockers on my account...
Online polls are, of course, notoriously inaccurate.
It would be interesting to see a properly conducted poll in the area which offered options for spending that sum of money on:
a) rail reinstatement
b) improvements to the local health service
c) flood defences
I actually think that Harrogate - Ripon - Northallerton would be a very useful link, but where it stands in terms of return on expenditure and by comparison to other potential reopenings I know not.
HSTEd
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A minimum cost scheme might well have a decent BCR, but some sort of excessive double track proposal is going to cost hundreds of millions and never break even.
Can you get travel times down 10-12 minutes one way from Harrogate to Ripon?
Can you get travel times down 10-12 minutes one way from Harrogate to Ripon?
absolutelymilk
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If you mean that you don't know how to insert links properly into your post, then click on the globe with the (what looks like a lock of some sort to me) on it, paste your link and click ok, and then type whatever name you want the link to have (or just leave it displaying as the URL).
If you mean you actually don't know how to copy and paste the URL of a page then it should be pretty easy to find on Google.
HarleyDavidson
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The GWR service on NDL is a joke, unreliable and useless.
It's OK if you want to do a journey Guildford - Wokingham, you get an hourly service most of the day, slightly more frequent during peaks, but still the service is unreliable and a lot of staff who live along it and could use it, have abandoned it, because the service is so poor.
As for the smaller stations Guildford - Redhill, that's a complete waste of time, Shalford gets an hourly service to placate the "Bramley Mafia" more of whom I'll mention later. But if you want to go from Chilworth to Gomshall or Gomshall to Dorking West, you can't because if it stops at one, it omits the next!
And as for running 3 trains an hour EW over it, that's going to be completely farcical as GWR can't do the existing timetable reliably and punctually now, so what chances are there with 3 trains an hour? I'd say a big fat ZERO!
As for the NDL being electrified, that will happen a few days before the line shuts up shop, we've been waiting over 40 years for it to happen, some idiot from Shalford Parish Council objected to it saying that "Electric trains are far noisier and more polluting than the diesel ones", that's when they had the Tadpole units on there and BR replaced them with WR 117's aka 3 WRECK or smoke bombs as they were known.
The line needs a significant amount of work on the bridges and it needs resignalling as the last one, other than the recontrol of Shalford was the rationalisation of it in the late 70's/early 80's which saw the closure of Ash/Chilworth/Gomshall boxes and resulted in very long signal sections both sides of Guildford.
The link that needs to be reinstated is the Guildford - Horsham line, with the possibility of >3,000 homes being built around Cranleigh alone, that will bring traffic chaos to the A281 into Guildford and a journey from Cranleigh to/from Guildford in peak time can take you over an hour, whereas a train could do it in not much more than 15-20' and the extension onwards to Horsham would most certainly reduce the bad accident rate of the A281 through Alfold, Rudgwick & Broadbridge Heath, as well as the traffic levels going South to Horsham, it also opens up the possibility of a through service to Crawley (employment hotspot), Gatwick (Circular service via Redhill) & to the South Coast.
What's stopping is is the "Bramley Mafia", a bunch of residents at Linnersh Wood, who's so called "plush properties" back onto the railway formation at Bramley. And then there's the local councillors at Waverley who know that if the line comes back it represents a threat to the service at Farncombe & Godalming, where a significant number of the Tory Hoi-polloi from Bramley go to get their trains to London, open the Cranleigh line back up and the passenger levels at those two will drop quite significantly, so it would allow a reduction in service!
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muddythefish
On Moderation
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I go through Catthorpe regularly (I have to because there is no equivalent railway line) and I have rarely been held up for more than 5 minutes. I know because I've timed it.
Perhaps you'd like to apologise before making presumptive statements.
You should take your own advice (see above)
Your replies usually include some childish insult because you don't like people who hold opposite views to your own. I'm not familiar with the exact phrase but aren't your sort called internet warriors or trolls?
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Agreed. Take note of your own behaviour.
There are currently 2tph over both sections, one semi fast and one slow, that does mean that some of the minor stations are not well served.
A lot of the reliability issues are related to the tight timetabling of the services due to the lack of DMU's, as such once electrification of the GWML starts to free up them the new 3tph timetable should be better than the existing situation.
NR's region report for this line disagrees with you, it implied that it was a good candidate for electrification (although I agree that it may not be overly easy). It may also mean that (due to better acceleration) that the skip stop pattern is reduced while still maintaining journey times.
Fortunately, within the general population electrification is now generally seen as a good thing. As such local people are less inclined to object. Also, 40 years does tend to remove or curtaile some objectors.
The problem with the Cranleigh line is more where the service would run to. There's no space to run more services to London, so the best that could be hoped for is (once the junction at Woking is grade separated) is for an extension of the Woking stoppers to provide a direct service. This would mean that most people would change at Woking for a fast service anyway, but would require the Cranleigh line to be electrified.
Before Woking is sorted then a shuttle (DMU) to Woking is probably the best option, with works to enable it to use platform 6 without stopping trains from platform 5 heading towards Brookwood. However that may cause problems if Woking is sorted but Cranleigh isn't electrified by then.
I think that one other option which could be possible would be to run it to Reading as the 4th train per hour over that section, or while the NDL and Cranleigh lines remain diesel lines to undertake platform lengthening for the Northern section and do portion working (5 or 6 coach train Reading to Guildford, splitting at Guildford to serve Gatwick and Cranleigh).
As there will not be through trains to London, it may not impact the existing stations as much as you fear. However, even if people abandon these stations for the new line, the number of parking spaces at the stations (circa 200 total) would imply that it you may see a drop of about 50,000 when station usage is circa 2,000,000 (2.5%) if everyone who drove there stopped using those stations. Given that people can park elsewhere and that there would still be people who would still need to drive to the stations I would be suprised if such a drop came about.
However, given that during recent years Godalming has seen a drop of 270,000 before recovering 85,000 without a drop in services I doubt that you would need to fear it happening if the Cranleigh line were to reopen.
Also, if less people from Bramley drive to other stations it frees up car parking for other users, in doing so some of the loss in established passengers is offset by new passengers.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
I would argue that a lot of new lines (at least in the south) would mostly only be justified by them increasing passengers longer distances and/or into London.
As such, until the likes of Crossrail allow the potential for additional services that many reopenings will need to talk a bit of a back seat.
Therefore, like EWR, any new lines should focus on providing new journey opportunities which either currently require going into and then back out of London or which link two nearby lines which would provide useful links locally (especially if these lines predominantly head to different locations).
The Benefits Case figures on the Highways Agency website show the largest benefits being towards time savings of over 5 minutes. So I respectfully suggest your "personal experience" is not typical.
The figures are on the HA's website.
Nothing to apologise for - your personal experience is not typical of the BCR which the project has.
Evidence? Where have I used "childish insults" ? Provide the links.
You, on the other hand, have incorrectly stated I "drive a BWM", I "have an expense account", I "want to drive at high speed regardless of others" - none of which are correct.
I've posted almost 1000 times over an 8 year period on these boards. You are the only poster who has questioned my behaviour in that time. I've never been 'warned' or 'censored' by the mods.
I've had lengthy exchanges with many posters, some of whom I've fundamentally disagreed with who have never called out my behaviour as wrong or unreasonable. Yet you seem to expect everyone to view the world as you do, and anyone who doesn't is either attacking you or trolling you.
Lastly - I notice you've still not provided facts to among other things your suggestion for a Bournemouth to Bath line. I've called out why I don't think it's viable (£ 1,000m cost, no major towns en-route, questionable demand) whereas you've just said "it should be done".
deltic
Established Member
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Without wishing to get drawn into a personal dispute one should be careful in interpreting the benefit figures by time of delay. For this scheme as you rightly say the biggest benefits arise from reducing journey time delays by more than 5 minutes but that does not mean that such long delays are more common than shorter delays.
Looking at the numbers and making assumptions on average delay in each time block I would suggest that if you do experience a delay (and a high proportion of journeys will not) then your chance of that delay being 0-2 mins is 57%, 2-5 mins 17% and over 5 minutes 26%. Hence it is also right to say that the majority of even delayed journeys are delayed by less than 5 minutes.
tbtc
Veteran Member
Most of these proposals seem to involve grandiose stuff about the bigger picture and strategic importance on a national scale, but its maybe worth noting that the two much hyped successes since privatisation (Alloa and Ebbw Vale) were simple short spurs off main lines.
Ebbw Vale wasnt built on the proviso of a diversionary route between Cardiff and Hereford. Theres no pretence that ScotRail will be running Glasgow Aberdeen services through Alloa and Fife instead of Perth. They are just simple branches, termini. Ebbw Vale doesnt provide resilience, it simply provides a direct link from a town to the nearest large city, a reasonable distance for commuters.
Im all in favour of new lines (whether they happen to follow a line on a 1960s map or not). If I were looking at the success of Ebbw Vale then Id be considering similar shortish branches required to allow places like Portishead/ Tavistock/ Ashington/ Washington a heavy rail link to the nearest large city. Thats the kind of market that rail works best at.
Whilst I dont know Middlewich in Cheshire, it fits the mould well (commuter belt town close enough to a large city to justify a branch). No deluded stuff about it being a useful diversionary line when the WCML is closed or requirements for it to be a 125mph alignment, just a common or garden line in the Manchester travel to work area.
In comparison, Okehampton to Tavistock/ Workington to Penrith/ Bakewell to Matlock/ Ripon to Northallerton/ Carmarthen to Aberystwyth/ Skipton to Colne etc have relatively flimsy cases (however scenic some of them may be). Thats why their proponents always have to throw in some optimistic blue sky thinking about resilience and strategy to distract from the weakness of the central case.
If that isnt enough, chuck in something sensationalist about the unfairness of the closure, talk about how the passenger estimates will have gone up since the last survey was carried out five years ago to give the impression that the BCR will have improved (whilst carefully ignoring the fact that the costs for Network Rail to do anything seem to have gone up slightly in the intervening period too)...
...you know how it works!
(interesting that places like Washington dont seem to be mentioned on these kind of threads who wants to do something as functional as connect a large town to the nearest big city when there are daydreams to be dreamed about quaint little branches through relatively empty parts of the country like Dartmoor/ Lake District/ Peak District/ west Wales?)
If you want to improve service from the East Midlands to Greater Manchester (beyond the current hourly service from Nottingham/ Chesterfield to Stockport/ Manchester which reverses at Sheffield) then the simple option is to run via the chord at Dore (rather than building a railway to a slow alignment through Bakewell).
If you want to increase capacity between Sheffield and Manchester then the Hope Valley line currently sees two or three DMUs per hour which are two/ three/ four coaches long theres plenty of scope to increase the length of these without needing to build a new route (that wouldnt serve Sheffield Midland station).
Since the only intermediate stop on most Hope Valley services is Stockport (which can obviously accommodate eleven coach 390s), there are no infrastructure enhancements required to extend every fast service from Sheffield to Manchester to six coaches.
Maybe, when the freight dwindles away further, therell be more paths through the Hope Valley too?
Woodhead is a solution in need of a problem. Itd serve Sheffield Victoria (rather than Midland, so wouldnt connect to other services), itd serve nowhere large in between, itd get stuck behind the frequently stopping services from Manchester to Hadfield.
The trouble is that on here, people dont want to talk about straightforward enhancements (like putting extra coaches onto existing services), theres an obsession with how can we attempt to justify re-opening some old line.
I like the idea, Im just not sure where the major demand is going to be. Whilst roads can cater for thousands of different journeys (a hundred cars passing under a motorway bridge may all have different start points and destinations), heavy rail needs volume to work.
A lot of that road traffic may be pretty local (since roads like the M60 are essentially a by-pass to avoid places like central Stockport), or may be long distance (which may be hard for rail to compete on, I dont know.
Londons Overgound works because the predominantly zone two/ zone three kind of places that it serves are busy enough centres in their own right (Stratford, Camden etc) and theres enough demand to get to them (rather than just into the city centre). I agree that itd be fascinating to know how many of those people are doing longer distance journeys versus local hops.
If Metrolink havent attempted new orbital links like Bury Bolton or Manchester Airport Stockport then Im not convinced that theres going to be enough of a market for heavy rail.
Currently the frequency of services in the South East that dont serve London (i.e. Zone 1-6) are fairly poor. Maybe if EW proves a big market exists from Oxford to Milton Keynes therell be more scope to make a case for other orbital arrangements.
Agreed
100%.
Theres enough of a network to be concentrating on, theres plenty more passengers we could attract on high volume flows suited to mass transportation like rail without worrying about every quaint rural backwater that lost a service fifty years ago.
Good points.
IF theres to be a relief route for the ECML then Id focus resources north of Darlington (rather than the already generally flat/ straight/ four track/ 125mph line south of Darlington). You could save some time if you avoided the existing curves in County Durham, you could serve Washington, you could free up space on the existing line to give Chester le Street a regular service...
If a relief route south of Darlington is required then why not build a High Speed alignment broadly parallel to the existing line which could speed up thousands of journeys a day (rather than the itd be handy once in a blue moon diversionary argument for building a new line through Ripon). You could build the alternative route that Virgin were proposing around fifteen years ago to avoid Doncaster (and its flat junctions) giving a faster journey from London to Leeds/ Newcastle/ Edinburgh etc a new alignment through a fairly flat part of the country.
Same goes for a Dawlish Avoiding Line (build your new route to a new alignment to give a faster journey to thousands of passengers a day, rather than building a slow route on a twistier alignment through small places like Okehampton).
But then, Im not hidebound by trying to come up an answer that was on a 1960s map...
I think that the second quote is more pertinent than the first (and even seventeen thousand is more than Ive seen it quoted on some websites)...
Yes, famous people used to live there and there used to be a lot of soldiers there, but these things are pretty irrelevant when assessing the case for a railway in the twenty first century.
The number of people living there is what matters; seventeen thousand isnt a huge number.
Youve taken a line that has a potentially good case (a place on the outskirts of the Leeds travel to work commuter belt) but youve weakened the argument by throwing in a lot of wibble (to use a term popular on this forum) forget about Wilfred Owen/ aspirations for TPE services/ Dr Beeching/ Lewis Carroll/ ECML diversions/ Hornblowers, direct services to Edinburgh or Liverpool / historic populations of barracks or a station at Lightwater Valley...
...focus on the straightforward (Ripon has a good commercial bus service to Harrogate/ Leeds which shows that theres demand... Harrogate has similar demographics/ tourists and will get four trains an hour to Leeds before long... therell be regular services from Leeds to Harrogate that terminate there so that theres a practical service to run through to Ripon without needing more paths at any bottlenecks...).
It ought to be a simple enough case to make, but youve made it quite convoluted by adding a load of smoke and mirrors.
A very good representative sample because it tells you what you want to believe?
Under five hundred people bothered to respond... thats enough to fill one three coach train a day... is that your most compelling evidence?
If we based everything on local newspaper opinion polls, petitions and heavily loaded surveys, wed never get anything done. They should really be scrapped for giving false hope to naive people.
Agreed its quite entertaining to see some of the desperate excuses on here... such creativity and optimism (without having to worry about pesky facts).
True.
Generally massively overstated by enthusiasts, rather than being seen as a marginal little bonus that is never going to be enough to tip the scales.
With four trains an hour from Leeds to Harrogate in the new Northern franchise (but only one continuing all the way to York), theres certainly scope for a branch to Ripon.
Its roughly thirty miles from Leeds, so should be decent enough commuter distance (albeit with a population of roughly fifteen thousand).
The trouble is that the idea of a spur from Harrogate to Leeds gets dressed up with a load of irrelevance (conspiracy stuff about Beeching) and crayonista aspiration (oh, its going to be a 125mph electrified railway from Harrogate to Northallerton, with regular services to Edinburgh/ Liverpool/ London? :roll
...
Trying to give the impression that itd be better for long distance services to run via Ripon instead of York (despite Yorks significantly larger population/ connections etc) doesnt help either. I think itd have a better case if we focussed on the actual day-to-day aspects.
Same goes for alternatives to Dawlish. The simple idea of a short branch to Tavistock (which had five commercial buses per hour to Plymouth last time I checked i.e. a decent market) seems perfectly sensible. However, enthusiasts cant accept something so straightforward so it gets dressed up as WE COULD REINTRODUCE DIRECT SERVICES FROM WATERLOO TO PLYMOUTH VIA OKEHAMPTON LIKE THE GOOD OLD DAYS (as well as the typically overstated diversionary benefits).
See also the SELRAP claims about running fast trains from Hull to Liverpool via Skipton and Colne... which is my favourite bit of delusion!
This needs repeating.
If the direct service from Birmingham/ Leicester to Peterborough/ Cambridge/ Stansted can only justify a two/three coach DMU once an hour then Northampton to Peterborough is going to be a fraction of that (i.e. not worth building).
Agreed. I think that the Airport to Airport argument is massively overegged by enthusiasts (better not call them Spotters...
) e.g. the suggestion of using Crossrail for Heathrow to Stansted.
National Express run a number of coaches between Airports (e.g. I travelled on one of their services from Sheffield to East Midlands Airport a couple of years ago the coach was continuing beyond EMA to serve both Heathrow and Gatwick) but thats because NatEx have segmented the market they know that a coach from Yorkshire to (just) Heathrow wont be profitable so tag it on to serve other Airports too they know that the leisure market is more bothered about a direct service to an Airport than a fast service to an Airport.
The only direct train services I can think of between two Airports are the Thameslink one from Gatwick to Luton and the XC one from Birmingham to Southampton(?).
Any chance you could set up a thread entitled Why I Have A Chip On My Shoulder About Company Cars so that you dont feel the need to try the same old arguments on unrelated threads?
Presumably you arent both talking about every reopening - I rarely see enthusiasts boasting about figures for Cardiff Airport or Larkhall...
...whilst I dont have figures for each new route, I certainly remember that the Newcraighall branch underperformed against expected passenger numbers as I had family living locally...
...let me guess, youre only talking about the two outliers of Alloa and Ebbw Vale?
Both of those were massively underestimated for specific reasons that I presume you both know about?
Or are you just deciding that BCRs are useless because they dont give you the answer that you want?
(nice weasel words about being vital to communities, since the vitality is something unquantifiable that you can always chuck in if the passenger numbers dont stack up)
I do so love it when people get accused of being anti-rail just because they dont share the same happy clapper enthusiasm that all of the Crayonistas have...
Sorry if some of us temper our enthusiasm with inconvenient things like facts and costs
If there was such a big conspiracy with Marples then why did Labour not promise to re-open a few lines? Not every alignment had been put permanently out of use by the time they came to power in 1964. The previous incoming Labour Government had achieved huge things in only five years, so surely the mid 60s one could have reinstated some railway lines?
Oh, wait, they actually closed more (under Castle), which suggests that the closures were more than just a collusion between two blokes (however simple a story that is to believe).
Yes, let us examine the reality. The original estimated passenger figures included services to Newport...
...in fact, they only included services to Newport. The fact that Cardiff (big city, capital, WAG etc) is more popular than Newport shouldnt be surprising.
Yes, but dont upset the revisionists with facts.
Figures for Ebbw Vale were based on a service to just Newport.
A combination of the steel works closing (meaning thousands of people now had to travel out of Ebbw Vale for work) and running the direct service to Cardiff instead meant that the passenger numbers were significantly higher.
That doesnt call BCRs into question, it just means that we need to be careful what questions we ask BCRs to assess. Hardly surprising that Cardiff was a much more popular destination than Newport. Also, the BCR presumably wouldnt have assumed the closure of the Steelworks (and the knock on increase in commuting from Ebbw Vale from people who suddenly needed to leave the town to find employment).
Could Harrogate to Ripon sustain a half hourly service with a single track branch? It probably doesnt need anything spectacular.
A DMU is only more efficient than private transport above a certain number of passengers (I think Bald Rick suggested it was around a hundred?). In which case should we start cutting lightly loaded train services?
If there are fewer than fifty people on board a DMU then would it not make more sense to provide a bus/ coach instead? That is, if you are focussing on reducing the emissions (rather than grasping for more excuses to reopen old railway lines through relatively empty parts of the country)?
Ebbw Vale wasnt built on the proviso of a diversionary route between Cardiff and Hereford. Theres no pretence that ScotRail will be running Glasgow Aberdeen services through Alloa and Fife instead of Perth. They are just simple branches, termini. Ebbw Vale doesnt provide resilience, it simply provides a direct link from a town to the nearest large city, a reasonable distance for commuters.
Im all in favour of new lines (whether they happen to follow a line on a 1960s map or not). If I were looking at the success of Ebbw Vale then Id be considering similar shortish branches required to allow places like Portishead/ Tavistock/ Ashington/ Washington a heavy rail link to the nearest large city. Thats the kind of market that rail works best at.
Whilst I dont know Middlewich in Cheshire, it fits the mould well (commuter belt town close enough to a large city to justify a branch). No deluded stuff about it being a useful diversionary line when the WCML is closed or requirements for it to be a 125mph alignment, just a common or garden line in the Manchester travel to work area.
In comparison, Okehampton to Tavistock/ Workington to Penrith/ Bakewell to Matlock/ Ripon to Northallerton/ Carmarthen to Aberystwyth/ Skipton to Colne etc have relatively flimsy cases (however scenic some of them may be). Thats why their proponents always have to throw in some optimistic blue sky thinking about resilience and strategy to distract from the weakness of the central case.
If that isnt enough, chuck in something sensationalist about the unfairness of the closure, talk about how the passenger estimates will have gone up since the last survey was carried out five years ago to give the impression that the BCR will have improved (whilst carefully ignoring the fact that the costs for Network Rail to do anything seem to have gone up slightly in the intervening period too)...
...you know how it works!
(interesting that places like Washington dont seem to be mentioned on these kind of threads who wants to do something as functional as connect a large town to the nearest big city when there are daydreams to be dreamed about quaint little branches through relatively empty parts of the country like Dartmoor/ Lake District/ Peak District/ west Wales?)
If you want to improve service from the East Midlands to Greater Manchester (beyond the current hourly service from Nottingham/ Chesterfield to Stockport/ Manchester which reverses at Sheffield) then the simple option is to run via the chord at Dore (rather than building a railway to a slow alignment through Bakewell).
If you want to increase capacity between Sheffield and Manchester then the Hope Valley line currently sees two or three DMUs per hour which are two/ three/ four coaches long theres plenty of scope to increase the length of these without needing to build a new route (that wouldnt serve Sheffield Midland station).
Since the only intermediate stop on most Hope Valley services is Stockport (which can obviously accommodate eleven coach 390s), there are no infrastructure enhancements required to extend every fast service from Sheffield to Manchester to six coaches.
Maybe, when the freight dwindles away further, therell be more paths through the Hope Valley too?
Woodhead is a solution in need of a problem. Itd serve Sheffield Victoria (rather than Midland, so wouldnt connect to other services), itd serve nowhere large in between, itd get stuck behind the frequently stopping services from Manchester to Hadfield.
The trouble is that on here, people dont want to talk about straightforward enhancements (like putting extra coaches onto existing services), theres an obsession with how can we attempt to justify re-opening some old line.
I like the idea, Im just not sure where the major demand is going to be. Whilst roads can cater for thousands of different journeys (a hundred cars passing under a motorway bridge may all have different start points and destinations), heavy rail needs volume to work.
A lot of that road traffic may be pretty local (since roads like the M60 are essentially a by-pass to avoid places like central Stockport), or may be long distance (which may be hard for rail to compete on, I dont know.
Londons Overgound works because the predominantly zone two/ zone three kind of places that it serves are busy enough centres in their own right (Stratford, Camden etc) and theres enough demand to get to them (rather than just into the city centre). I agree that itd be fascinating to know how many of those people are doing longer distance journeys versus local hops.
If Metrolink havent attempted new orbital links like Bury Bolton or Manchester Airport Stockport then Im not convinced that theres going to be enough of a market for heavy rail.
Currently the frequency of services in the South East that dont serve London (i.e. Zone 1-6) are fairly poor. Maybe if EW proves a big market exists from Oxford to Milton Keynes therell be more scope to make a case for other orbital arrangements.
Agreed
100%.
Theres enough of a network to be concentrating on, theres plenty more passengers we could attract on high volume flows suited to mass transportation like rail without worrying about every quaint rural backwater that lost a service fifty years ago.
Good points.
IF theres to be a relief route for the ECML then Id focus resources north of Darlington (rather than the already generally flat/ straight/ four track/ 125mph line south of Darlington). You could save some time if you avoided the existing curves in County Durham, you could serve Washington, you could free up space on the existing line to give Chester le Street a regular service...
If a relief route south of Darlington is required then why not build a High Speed alignment broadly parallel to the existing line which could speed up thousands of journeys a day (rather than the itd be handy once in a blue moon diversionary argument for building a new line through Ripon). You could build the alternative route that Virgin were proposing around fifteen years ago to avoid Doncaster (and its flat junctions) giving a faster journey from London to Leeds/ Newcastle/ Edinburgh etc a new alignment through a fairly flat part of the country.
Same goes for a Dawlish Avoiding Line (build your new route to a new alignment to give a faster journey to thousands of passengers a day, rather than building a slow route on a twistier alignment through small places like Okehampton).
But then, Im not hidebound by trying to come up an answer that was on a 1960s map...
I think that the second quote is more pertinent than the first (and even seventeen thousand is more than Ive seen it quoted on some websites)...
Yes, famous people used to live there and there used to be a lot of soldiers there, but these things are pretty irrelevant when assessing the case for a railway in the twenty first century.
The number of people living there is what matters; seventeen thousand isnt a huge number.
Youve taken a line that has a potentially good case (a place on the outskirts of the Leeds travel to work commuter belt) but youve weakened the argument by throwing in a lot of wibble (to use a term popular on this forum) forget about Wilfred Owen/ aspirations for TPE services/ Dr Beeching/ Lewis Carroll/ ECML diversions/ Hornblowers, direct services to Edinburgh or Liverpool / historic populations of barracks or a station at Lightwater Valley...
...focus on the straightforward (Ripon has a good commercial bus service to Harrogate/ Leeds which shows that theres demand... Harrogate has similar demographics/ tourists and will get four trains an hour to Leeds before long... therell be regular services from Leeds to Harrogate that terminate there so that theres a practical service to run through to Ripon without needing more paths at any bottlenecks...).
It ought to be a simple enough case to make, but youve made it quite convoluted by adding a load of smoke and mirrors.
A very good representative sample because it tells you what you want to believe?
Under five hundred people bothered to respond... thats enough to fill one three coach train a day... is that your most compelling evidence?
If we based everything on local newspaper opinion polls, petitions and heavily loaded surveys, wed never get anything done. They should really be scrapped for giving false hope to naive people.
Agreed its quite entertaining to see some of the desperate excuses on here... such creativity and optimism (without having to worry about pesky facts).
True.
Generally massively overstated by enthusiasts, rather than being seen as a marginal little bonus that is never going to be enough to tip the scales.
With four trains an hour from Leeds to Harrogate in the new Northern franchise (but only one continuing all the way to York), theres certainly scope for a branch to Ripon.
Its roughly thirty miles from Leeds, so should be decent enough commuter distance (albeit with a population of roughly fifteen thousand).
The trouble is that the idea of a spur from Harrogate to Leeds gets dressed up with a load of irrelevance (conspiracy stuff about Beeching) and crayonista aspiration (oh, its going to be a 125mph electrified railway from Harrogate to Northallerton, with regular services to Edinburgh/ Liverpool/ London? :roll
...Trying to give the impression that itd be better for long distance services to run via Ripon instead of York (despite Yorks significantly larger population/ connections etc) doesnt help either. I think itd have a better case if we focussed on the actual day-to-day aspects.
Same goes for alternatives to Dawlish. The simple idea of a short branch to Tavistock (which had five commercial buses per hour to Plymouth last time I checked i.e. a decent market) seems perfectly sensible. However, enthusiasts cant accept something so straightforward so it gets dressed up as WE COULD REINTRODUCE DIRECT SERVICES FROM WATERLOO TO PLYMOUTH VIA OKEHAMPTON LIKE THE GOOD OLD DAYS (as well as the typically overstated diversionary benefits).
See also the SELRAP claims about running fast trains from Hull to Liverpool via Skipton and Colne... which is my favourite bit of delusion!
This needs repeating.
If the direct service from Birmingham/ Leicester to Peterborough/ Cambridge/ Stansted can only justify a two/three coach DMU once an hour then Northampton to Peterborough is going to be a fraction of that (i.e. not worth building).
Agreed. I think that the Airport to Airport argument is massively overegged by enthusiasts (better not call them Spotters...
) e.g. the suggestion of using Crossrail for Heathrow to Stansted.National Express run a number of coaches between Airports (e.g. I travelled on one of their services from Sheffield to East Midlands Airport a couple of years ago the coach was continuing beyond EMA to serve both Heathrow and Gatwick) but thats because NatEx have segmented the market they know that a coach from Yorkshire to (just) Heathrow wont be profitable so tag it on to serve other Airports too they know that the leisure market is more bothered about a direct service to an Airport than a fast service to an Airport.
The only direct train services I can think of between two Airports are the Thameslink one from Gatwick to Luton and the XC one from Birmingham to Southampton(?).
Any chance you could set up a thread entitled Why I Have A Chip On My Shoulder About Company Cars so that you dont feel the need to try the same old arguments on unrelated threads?
Presumably you arent both talking about every reopening - I rarely see enthusiasts boasting about figures for Cardiff Airport or Larkhall...
...whilst I dont have figures for each new route, I certainly remember that the Newcraighall branch underperformed against expected passenger numbers as I had family living locally...
...let me guess, youre only talking about the two outliers of Alloa and Ebbw Vale?
Both of those were massively underestimated for specific reasons that I presume you both know about?
Or are you just deciding that BCRs are useless because they dont give you the answer that you want?
(nice weasel words about being vital to communities, since the vitality is something unquantifiable that you can always chuck in if the passenger numbers dont stack up)
I do so love it when people get accused of being anti-rail just because they dont share the same happy clapper enthusiasm that all of the Crayonistas have...
Sorry if some of us temper our enthusiasm with inconvenient things like facts and costs
If there was such a big conspiracy with Marples then why did Labour not promise to re-open a few lines? Not every alignment had been put permanently out of use by the time they came to power in 1964. The previous incoming Labour Government had achieved huge things in only five years, so surely the mid 60s one could have reinstated some railway lines?
Oh, wait, they actually closed more (under Castle), which suggests that the closures were more than just a collusion between two blokes (however simple a story that is to believe).
Yes, let us examine the reality. The original estimated passenger figures included services to Newport...
...in fact, they only included services to Newport. The fact that Cardiff (big city, capital, WAG etc) is more popular than Newport shouldnt be surprising.
Yes, but dont upset the revisionists with facts.
Figures for Ebbw Vale were based on a service to just Newport.
A combination of the steel works closing (meaning thousands of people now had to travel out of Ebbw Vale for work) and running the direct service to Cardiff instead meant that the passenger numbers were significantly higher.
That doesnt call BCRs into question, it just means that we need to be careful what questions we ask BCRs to assess. Hardly surprising that Cardiff was a much more popular destination than Newport. Also, the BCR presumably wouldnt have assumed the closure of the Steelworks (and the knock on increase in commuting from Ebbw Vale from people who suddenly needed to leave the town to find employment).
Could Harrogate to Ripon sustain a half hourly service with a single track branch? It probably doesnt need anything spectacular.
A DMU is only more efficient than private transport above a certain number of passengers (I think Bald Rick suggested it was around a hundred?). In which case should we start cutting lightly loaded train services?
If there are fewer than fifty people on board a DMU then would it not make more sense to provide a bus/ coach instead? That is, if you are focussing on reducing the emissions (rather than grasping for more excuses to reopen old railway lines through relatively empty parts of the country)?
@tbtc
Washington was dealt with in detail, either earlier in the thread, or in a very similar parallel thread about reopenings. I don't know what mods did with that one. Some very interesting and excellent suggestions were made. If you use the search function, they should come up.
Just one other thing; you wanted to be quite condemnatory about the amateur points and hyperbole of other posters (and you are correct there, sadly), so I hope you won't mind me pointing out that your answer to the quote of the story about Marples and his wife was an irrelevant whataboutery concerning the fact that Labour was as bad if not worse at closing lines, about which you are of course correct. The point did not address the quote you extracted, which was only about Marples' dubious behaviour.
Washington was dealt with in detail, either earlier in the thread, or in a very similar parallel thread about reopenings. I don't know what mods did with that one. Some very interesting and excellent suggestions were made. If you use the search function, they should come up.
Just one other thing; you wanted to be quite condemnatory about the amateur points and hyperbole of other posters (and you are correct there, sadly), so I hope you won't mind me pointing out that your answer to the quote of the story about Marples and his wife was an irrelevant whataboutery concerning the fact that Labour was as bad if not worse at closing lines, about which you are of course correct. The point did not address the quote you extracted, which was only about Marples' dubious behaviour.
HarleyDavidson
Established Member
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- 2,544
Wow! Is that a record length post?
Altnabreac
Established Member
I agree with a lot of your post especially the bit about concentrating on small scale reopenings that link decent sized towns with good commuter markets. That certainly sounds similar to my Golden Rules...
The Larkhall re-opening you mention above is an interesting case. It was by no means an unsuccessful scheme. Traffic figures have exceeded expectations reasonably well overall (but not by orders of magnitude) and within that there have been some stations with underestimates (Merryton), others with overestimates (Larkhall) and a third where the numbers initally underperformed but then picked up strongly (Chatelherault).
I can thoroughly recommend reading the Project Appraisal Report published earlier this year:
http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk...ion - Final Report - Final PDF - May 2015.pdf
It shows the inherent difficulty in forecasting demand and how initial estimates based on existing travel data can be undermined (both positively and negatively) by relatively small changes in things like new housing demand, availability and ease of parking, abstraction from existing rail stations etc.
Chatelherault demonstrates this exact issue with initial underperformance owing to lack of new housing followed by subsequent overperformance as more houses were built.
Re-opening new lines will never be an exact science. But fundamentally you need to have a clear idea of what demand you are trying to meet. Ripon - Leeds is probably a decent market. I give it a score of around 4 out of 6.
- 17,000 is not bad but higher is better, especially as no intermediate population or stations.
- Probably looking at 50-55 mins to Leeds with some demand to Harrogate as well.
- Fair amount of trackbed available but at least 2 diversions needed en route, city centre station difficult to arrange and probably 5-10 new structures needed assuming that no level crossings will be permitted.:cry:
- With a 4tph Leeds - Harrogate service coming this looks possible.
- No - Ripon already a prosperous little city.:cry:
- Some - New housing growth is planned but questions over scale and there doesn't seem to be a willingness by NYCC to leverage developer contributions to the capital costs. May help demand though.
I suspect the issue holding Ripon back is going to be the high capital costs. Arup in 2006 were quoting £46m for a BCR of 1.3 but I don't think that included any optimism bias. It also had some optimistic assumptions about level crossings, land acquisition, acommodation crossings etc. Add in construction inflation as well and you end up with more like ATOCs £100M in 2009 for a BCR of 0.6.
Deltic08 prefers to quote a BCR of 4.3 (exc capital costs) and potential capital costs of £36M but frankly I think £80m would be a bargain price for this scheme and I just don't see it ticking enough central government boxes to achieve that level of funding. NYCC don't have the money and are unlikely even to fund another study at present based on their latest minutes.
It's a sad truth that if the line were open to Ripon as a branch from Harrogate it would probably perform reasonable well. Getting it to re-open however is tricky at present, though a worthwhile aim to campaign for. North of Ripon is pie in the sky with no sort of viable business case whatsoever.
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Same goes for a Dawlish Avoiding Line (build your new route to a new alignment to give a faster journey to thousands of passengers a day, rather than building a slow route on a twistier alignment through small places like Okehampton).
But then, Im not hidebound by trying to come up an answer that was on a 1960s map...
Although the problem with the DAL, is that, other than speeding things up a little it doesn't really provided much other benefits. As although it provides capacity, it can't be used because of bottlenecks elsewhere.
The main passenger (long distance) passenger flow on the Okehampton route ( assuming a Waterloo to Plymouth service) would likely be from places like Southampton, Salisbury, Portsmouth (possible Woking, but that maybe borderline depending on change times). The fact that it runs from Waterloo would just be due to convenience of routing. By providing more services it would attract more people to use trains between Exeter and Plymouth as well as making it possible to get to Exeter/Plymouth a lot more easily than it currently is from the wrong branch line.
I can see that the DAL would be useful, but at this time there isn't the numbers of long distance services (nor the capacity elsewhere to provide them) to justify it, as it would be possibly better to spend the money improving journey times elsewhere to achieve the same reduction.
Also the AT300's will reduce journey times by the same amount anyway so Plymouth should get some sub 3 hour journeys.
I don't think tbtc was being unreasonable in what he put - let's take another look:
If there was such a big conspiracy with Marples then why did Labour not promise to re-open a few lines? Not every alignment had been put permanently out of use by the time they came to power in 1964. The previous incoming Labour Government had achieved huge things in only five years, so surely the mid 60s one could have reinstated some railway lines?
This is perfectly fair. IF, and it's a big IF, the whole Marples forced the closures conspiracy is true, then let's look at some other facts:
- Beeching's appointment to BR wasn't until 1961.
- Beeching's report wasn't published until March 1963
- On 16th October 1964 Labour won the General Election.
- Beeching's second report was published in February 1965.
Now, if there is doubt about the integrity of Beeching's report (allegedly driven by Marples) then it is perfectly reasonable to ask why Labour didn't immediately shelve it when they came to power some 19 months later. Furthermore they allowed his second report to be published and then rejected its findings - they could have done exactly the same with the first report.
Oh, wait, they actually closed more (under Castle), which suggests that the closures were more than just a collusion between two blokes (however simple a story that is to believe).
And Mrs Castle wasn't Harold Wilson's first Transport Secretary - the first was Tom Fraser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Fraser who "Throughout his tenure as Minister, he authorised the closure 1,071 miles of railway lines, following the recommendations from the Beeching Report. However, he went further, and authorised the closure of lines that Beeching had considered worthy of retention"
So whilst it may be convenient to claim it was all down to Marples, the fact is more closures took place long after he'd ceased to be Transport Secretary and indeed closures took place which weren't even mooted in Beeching's report.
Incoming governments have, at various times, cancelled or dropped previous government's 'pet' projects. The Wilson government of 64-70 did - a good example being the cancellation of the BAC TSR2 project by Denis Healey - which happened in April 1965. If Beeching's report was so flawed and only done to enrich Marples, then why did it not get canned? It's a legitimate question.
HarleyDavidson
Established Member
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- Messages
- 2,544
The problem I have with BCR is that it's for now, it doesn't consider the future and what the expansion plans are for formerly rail connected towns & villages.
Whilst in the short term, it may not be cost effective to reopen a line, but what's to say that in 5, 10 or more years time, more housing developments may have been planned and built and they may well consider the railway formation a perfect thing to build on.
That almost certainly kills a reopening off, yet with all of that extra housing & development comes the inevitable extra traffic, accidents and pollution.
Housing and any other large scale development must only be allowed to take place when the transport infrastructure is in place, not before, otherwise you could lose the ability to provide a good quality and sustainable transport system which reduces the number of cars, accidents and pollution.
The problem is that most councillors are easily influenced by remuneration from the so called influential people set whom a reopening may affect & will block such transport infrastructure improvements for short term political gain and they can't see any further than the end of their noses in most cases. They need to be reminded that we employ them, not the other way round.
This country is terribly short termist, it cannot seem to see or think very far into the future and what the consequences of it maybe. Yet later on when they say about it, the costs will have rocketed and the scheme shelved because of it, yet if they'd done it previously it would have been available for generations to come.
Whilst in the short term, it may not be cost effective to reopen a line, but what's to say that in 5, 10 or more years time, more housing developments may have been planned and built and they may well consider the railway formation a perfect thing to build on.
That almost certainly kills a reopening off, yet with all of that extra housing & development comes the inevitable extra traffic, accidents and pollution.
Housing and any other large scale development must only be allowed to take place when the transport infrastructure is in place, not before, otherwise you could lose the ability to provide a good quality and sustainable transport system which reduces the number of cars, accidents and pollution.
The problem is that most councillors are easily influenced by remuneration from the so called influential people set whom a reopening may affect & will block such transport infrastructure improvements for short term political gain and they can't see any further than the end of their noses in most cases. They need to be reminded that we employ them, not the other way round.
This country is terribly short termist, it cannot seem to see or think very far into the future and what the consequences of it maybe. Yet later on when they say about it, the costs will have rocketed and the scheme shelved because of it, yet if they'd done it previously it would have been available for generations to come.
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This is pretty much what worries me about the Northern Powerhouse situation.
The PTE's have done an excellent job at promoting urban transport over the past forty years, however the towns outside these areas have suffered and the railway has been marginalised. The area seems to suffer from scarce services and over-priced fares. The market between York and Hull is one instance of this.
I hope the Northern Powerhouse starts to address this issue rather than exacerbate it, and I believe modest infrastructure investments sich as the line to Ripon should be a part of this, even if we have to make do with a basic single track branch.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
To be fair, I think the Okehampton route has a much better case for reopening in its entirety. It will directly improve access to Tavistock, Okehampton and Crediton as well as the national park and possibly acting as a railhead for places such as Launceston.
Yes, if possible I feel that completing the line between Harrogate and Northallerton would be preferable, but given the ECML is already quadruple track at this point I feel the case isn't as pressing.
Yes exactly. I'm always amused by the argument that five minutes off of a journey is likely to be worth billions and billions of pounds worth of infrastructure. One wonders what people are going to do in that extra five minutes. Write a mini-novella or design an app perhaps.
In reality those extra five minutes will be of little value to the majority, except perhaps for some with a tight connection.
Linking towns with inadequate public transport to the rail network would be a better use of money.
Thanks for that, with the content of which, I totally agree. However, you missed the point of my post to @tbtc. He only quoted...... no, please go back to @tbtc's bit where he quoted the other poster, and you will see what I mean.
If not, too bad I suppose.
Could it be that Fraser just wasn't a very able transport minister.
tbtc is right to point out that more lines were closed under the Labour Government, but still manages to miss the point.
Do you not think that allowing subsidy for socially valuable routes and urban railways is a substantial reversal of the Beeching-Marples philosophy ?
As apologists for the Beeching era are correct to point out, hindsight is a wonderful thing. We can't expect people to have known the future, but I do think we can expect people to have taken due care and attention and considered things in a pragmatic way. There are indeed many routes that Castle closed and shouldn't have, however at least she introduced the legislation that allowed the network we know and love today, to survive. (most of the train journeys I make every day wouldn't be possible without those pieces of legislation).
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