Very sad.
The frustrations of someone who has
campaigned for almost thirty years for a cause without success. Someone who is undoubtedly well-read on rail matters but plants assumptions and suppositions and expects us to accept them as facts.
An example, off topic but from earlier in the thread. I can only find one source of reference that
Alice in Wonderland was actually written in Ripon, and that's his own. The next closest I can find anywhere is a reference that a number of pages of
Alice Through the Looking Glass - the next book - may been written there. As with many such assertions, it may be true, it may not. But there's no proof. Like BCRs for major projects, it's just supposition.
If you allow yourself to be described as
"a foremost expert on Rail reinstatement", you really should avoid believing your own publicity or you may end up thinking it's ok to call your detractors rude names, doing your cause immense damage in the process, simply because they don't accept your "facts" at face value.
For better or worse, this is a debating chamber, not Hyde Park Corner. It's a shame that deltic08 has thrown teddy out of cot as, hysterics aside, I was finding the exchanges thought provoking and (with some additional research) informative.
I thought at last a well balanced criticism without arrogance from the pack of hyenas but reading down the post I realised I was wrong. Arrogance starting to shine through.
Will you not accept that with living in Ripon myself and with Lewis Carroll, as a young man, and his father living and working in Ripon I may just know a little about the history of Lewis Carroll. Your disappointment on not being able to prove me a liar is blatantly obvious from your tone and I resent the implication. That could be against Forum Rules. This is what disappoints me (I could use a stronger word) with this site and posters like you. I knew Richard Hammond, Richard Whiteley, Lesley Ash, Lee Chapman and Ian Botham when they lived in Ripon. Are you going to contradict me and tell me I am wrong? There is no debate only point scoring therefore posters are few now on this thread not wanting to be in a position where they can be lashed by the likes of AOwen and hyenas but I've not thrown my teddy bear out of the pram just yet. Just regrouping. Would have done had unsubscribing worked the other day when I asked it to. The moment has now passed.
I am delighted that reinstatement has been included in NYCC Strategic Transport Prospectus as that is definite progress but yes disappointment that NYCC cannot see the benefit to North Yorkshire and three settlements in North Yorkshire. There are very valid reasons for bringing start of construction forward to 2020ish. It makes my little committee even more determined to succeed. It would directly connect the largest town and only city in North Yorkshire to the county town and administration centre in less than 30 minutes. A journey that takes 50 minutes by road and 85 minutes by rail. It could be that travel to County Hall for meetings would be cheaper for County Councillors representing Knaresborough, Harrogate and Ripon using a Day Return than £0.41 per mile petrol allowance.
I have never claimed to be an expert on rail matters. Reconstructing pulverised faces of car crash victims and ravages of tumours yes but rail no. Where did that one come from.
They are not my facts. They are the facts of professional studies by Arup and JMP and informal discussion with them of possibilities over a pint. I, and a few like minded people, have voluntarily worked hard to raise funds over a long time by holding coffee mornings, cake stalls, raffles and sponsored events. That cannot be done in a short time frame to raise the amount required so I have been lucky to have had a lot of match funding offers.
Facts from studies others should accept instead of misquoting inaccuracies because they refuse to accept that what I have said could be correct as they do not have the background depth that I have with campaigning for so long. As I have already posted, they will eat their words.
I would like to know from my critics what they have done constructively to further the cause of reinstating railways to settlements without this facility.
I have asked this before but without reply. All hyenas do is attack and try to belittle posters unfortunately.
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However, I judge that the semi-rural examples, earlier quoted, would come far down , way down, the queue behind a huge expansion of tram routes, tram-train routes and extra tracks on existing commuter routes, together with other road based measures to provide better integration with those extra routes.
The BCR method would need to be redesigned in such circumstances to take account of such benefits - and that's not even putting any prices on environmental and health benefits.
What is your experience and qualification to make this judgement and where is your evidence?
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Unless those ten million people are going to move into the region between Ripon and Northallerton - that section of railway is not going to become economic to reopen.
Strange you should mention that and something I forgot to mention previously to support my case for reinstatement. There is a new town planned on a site about 5 miles north of Ripon on the old railway route to Northallerton. Approximately 25,000 inhabitants with room for expansion. Does that satisfy you?
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minimalist schemes are good to get a scheme off the ground, but there needs to passive provision for future expansion such as future double tracking or electrification.
Exactly what is planned initially.
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Bus services are not subsidised by bus passes. The passengers making the journeys are subsidised. Many operators find the low payments made under the ENCTS actually make services unviable.
And what is your obsession with hyenas?
So where does the money go if it doesn't go to bus operators?
NYCC spends £4m per annum on bus subsidy and £4m per annum on bus passes. There were 550,000 bus pass concessions on the No. 36 Ripon-Harrogate route in 2013. Without this level of use the No. 36 bus would only be every 30 minutes instead of every 10 minutes so there must be remuneration to the operator whatever it is called. When I did a an undercover survey of the use of this route many times a service contained only bus pass users.
Before any clever Dick posts to say that I don't like bus travel, it was not voluntary and had to be done to gain data for the rail reinstatement campaign.
Bus pass holders would be prepared to use rail off-peak between Leeds and Ripon if they could have a reduction in the rail fare of 30-50%. Very few bus pass holders use the no 36 end to end all the way to Leeds.
Hyenas hunt in packs and make ridiculous noises. Only used hyena to describe certain posters after being called a crayonista, whatever that means, myself many times by other posters.
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The majority of Beeching closures (and one or two such as the GCR which weren't part of Beeching's proposals) were signed off by Castle.
So whatever Marples' motives were in appointing Beeching, he was long gone from influence by the time anything was being implemented - in fact Harold Wilson held a further general election in 1966 so anything post '66 was most certainly on Labour's mandate.
There is no precedent for an incoming government to continue the policies of their predecessor - as I pointed out, Denis Healey cancelled the BAC TSR2 project in 1965. More recently the incoming coalition government in 2010 scrapped the stupid HIPS policy in a matter of months which had been implemented by the Blair government.
Lastly, there's no obligation on the minister to sign off a proposed closure. Indeed it's a matter of public record that Michael Portillo rejected BR's attempt to close the S&C.
So yes, Marples may have started the process, yes his motives may have been questionable, but he didn't implement the process - that was down to successors from the Labour government of 64-70. And they could have walked away from it at any time - yet didn't.
So if you want to apportion blame for the closures, perhaps you should look at who signed them off.
50 years ago we were going to put a man on Mars by the 1980s......
There may be reopenings - but not the ones you keeping going on about - it will be ones to support travel into the major cities - London, Birmingham, Manchester and quick travel between them. Not cross country routes through sparsely populated areas stopping at every hamlet and village.
Interestingly the rail network has been able to accommodate the increased use without large scale new route mileage - alot of it will be about better, more efficient use of the network - improved signalling etc. There is no need to return to the scale of the network of the 1920s or 1950s to achieve capacity improvements of the type which are needed in the medium term.
A population increase to 70m doesn't mean you need to increase the size of the rail network by 20% - you need to increase capacity. A very different thing.
I agree with your comments Muddyfish and Yorksrob.
Castle wouldn't have had to do any signing off in such a big way had Beeching not been appointed by Marples.
It was a choice between Concorde and TSR2 as the Government couldn't afford to develop both and I can tell you that the wrong plane was cancelled. TSR2 was virtually complete years ahead of anything else in the world at that time and the technology was given to the USA at no cost to them when the project was cancelled. It was installed in the Vulcan post 1966 when the role of the Vulcan became obsolete. Concorde was a joint venture with France and didn't fly until five years after TSR2 was scrapped.
You neglect to mention Leeds? Commuting is increasing in distance from a commercial centre. Reinstating the Ripon line may be rural but it does end up in Leeds which has overtaken Manchester in economic growth.
Current routes will not be able to absorb growth ad infinitum by train lengthening, electrification and resignalling without reinstating closed routes. That is logical and cannot being ignored. At current growth rates and long lead times, planning reinstating other routes must start now.
Already in 2014/15, growth in Leeds City Region is 7% on some radial routes in Leeds. That is 2% more than forecast. That would be 70% by the end of CP6. Railhead car parks are already full and bursting so that means reinstate rails to where people are commuting from such as Ripon, Wetherby, Tadcaster, Otley, Addingham to provide additional railheads and car parks. It may also just create a through route that could be used as an alternate route for a route that would be full.
You can only pass so much water down a pipe at any one time when emptying a tank. To increase the flow you increase the pressure, increase the diameter or provide a second pipe.
Most rail routes the pressure is at maximum, physically the pipe cannot be increased in diameter but a second pipe can be installed to another drain for no more than the cost of fitting a larger diameter pipe.
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I also don't know how much relevance you can base present cases on demand/closure reasons from 50 years ago. It should be mentioned once in the history section of the business case for a reopening proposal, then dropped.
There is great bitterness in Ripon over the way this line was closed through deceit when the line should still be open and usable for the last 49 years. It is difficult to just let it go even for people not born at that time..
