Shapps to reverse Beeching cuts

[70014IronDuke]

Its funded and due in 2021 or 22

Excellent news, thank you.

 

[The Ham]

We hear this every time a new monster comes along. I never believe any of it. England makes it so difficult to get things reopened its tedious.

Even if anything does come of it there will be a few schemes which would ever happen anyway as much of the Beeching cuts were to rural routes which didn't serve much in the way of large settlements.

Even now with a much larger population the numbers likely to use many closed lines are likely to be low.

Basically anywhere with villages which are less than 10,000 people in and chances are nothing will happen. Unless there's several of them and it links between two much larger towns.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

The next "good news" to follow-on from this will be the Canals of the UK will all be totally updated, then the Turnpikes...

 

[Kingham West]

Where is the carefully conducted public opinion survey showing that there is 'zero public support' for the Expressway road exactly? Perhaps you would care to share this with us.

Plenty of people in Oxfordshire are all in favour of anything that can relieve the A34 between Bicester, Oxford and Abingdon, freeing the Oxford western bypass section from trying to be a national trunk road, city bypass and local distributor road all rolled into one - which it fails at day after day after day - and has done for years.

Plenty of people around ever-growing Aylesbury would probably like to see a decent road in any direction from the town apart from the A41 towards London.



Where does your £300m estimate come from for the A417 'missing link' scheme (east of Gloucester, not south), which will remove the serious bottleneck that currently exists for traffic between Gloucester and Cirencester/Swindon and (via the A436 to Andoversford) the northern part of the Cotswolds? This project has been under discussion for more than 20 years, so inflation and which option (of many put forward) is being talked about inevitably affects the numbers. It was never going to be a cheap job, as it is a difficult location (to put it mildly) and is in an AONB.

https://highwaysengland.co.uk/projects/a417-missing-link/



I am no fan of Mr Cameron but he didn't say that. There is a big difference between funding studies and promising to spend a whole lot more on actually building something. From the BBC News website in January 2015.



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-31042325



In what way was it a key pairing? The number of people wanting to get between Milton Keynes and High Wycombe is limited compared with the number who will find an Aylesbury-MK rail service extremely useful. High Wycombe is tied economically to London and the Thames Valley, not to the far north-east corner of Buckinghamshire. Providing a High Wycombe link comes into the nice to have category.

Extending Marylebone-Aylesbury via High Wycombe trains to MK if of course an option, but doing that would inevitably bring with it the risk of importing and exporting delays on both East-West and the Chiltern Line - there aren't many people around who think that GWR's linking of South Coast to Bristol and the Bristol to Worcester/Great Malvern services has been a runaway success, to take one example of this kind of thing.

The cost of the Birdlip Scheme is in the document you put the link to..
It’s presently at £ 560 m , and they have no tenders yet. I have overheard £600m
BCR , less than reopening to Tetbury, I fear .
The Road Lobby, tend to think they have a right to public money ( my money ) , and quite frankly make me sick, with their contempt for taxpayers.

Railways are incredibly good value for money.

The East West Rail report is with the Dft , they have a duty study and respond to the report , this is standard procedure.
They also need to discuss points to the promoter.( network rail)
It is clear Railfuture ( who have lived with this project since 1986 ) , were keen on future proofing ( supporter), this is a cost driver but sensible.
The promotor may have made later reps, re pathing issuesDenbigh Hall N jct to Mk . The objectors were mainly property spivs trying on.
This is a legal process, and comment outside the known facts is sub judiciary.

 

[w1bbl3]

Where is the carefully conducted public opinion survey showing that there is 'zero public support' for the Expressway road exactly? Perhaps you would care to share this with us.

The Oxford mail and various protest groups have run surveys where most popular choice had been do nothing, then again various groups are opposed to EWR as well. TBH any proposal to introduce new transport infrastructure in this country results in protests from some group of interested or uninterested parties, when actually what is needed is quite lot of new road and rail building in addition to enhancements.

In a joined up system Expressway and EWR would be looking for synergies around shared alignments where sensible...

Where does your £300m estimate come from for the A417 'missing link' scheme (east of Gloucester, not south), which will remove the serious bottleneck that currently exists for traffic between Gloucester and Cirencester/Swindon and (via the A436 to Andoversford) the northern part of the Cotswolds? This project has been under discussion for more than 20 years, so inflation and which option (of many put forward) is being talked about inevitably affects the numbers. It was never going to be a cheap job, as it is a difficult location (to put it mildly) and is in an AONB.

https://highwaysengland.co.uk/projects/a417-missing-link/

The previous brown route was estimated at £300m which in the last consultation morphed into option 12 it gained quite a bit of cost in part because a longer route mileage of widening was then proposed and a third crawler lane up the hill. Many, many years ago when the option was the brown route and before that "the loop" it consisted of online widening of the existing A417 to a dual carriageway and a new grade separated junction off to the A436, fairly simple works TBH to uncongest the air balloon roundabout linking up the previously enhanced sections of the A417. The final selected option 30 route is basically a 4 mile long new alignment that will allow NSL running rather than a 40/50 restriction, Birdlip and Cowley become grade separated. The BCR is somewhat poor for the scheme at just over 1 but it IMHO should have been done as part of the 90's brockworth and cirencester schemes. I could see the floated 80's A436 Severn Springs, Kilkenny, A40 realignment possibly coming back as an idea once the A417 missing link is opened.

 

[syorksdeano]

In regards to the Skipton to Colne route, I'm sure I have read somewhere in the last few days thst they now needs to be a study at a village further down the line

 

[Djgr]

I'm pretty sure that Network Rail a few years ago came up with a listing of "Top 10 possible Beeching reopening" and it is a fairly sensible list but remember this is stuff from Boris with his fantasy bridge across the Thames he got UK taxpayers to pay for and his bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland etc.

 

[Kingham West]

The Oxford mail and various protest groups have run surveys where most popular choice had been do nothing, then again various groups are opposed to EWR as well. TBH any proposal to introduce new transport infrastructure in this country results in protests from some group of interested or uninterested parties, when actually what is needed is quite lot of new road and rail building in addition to enhancements.

In a joined up system Expressway and EWR would be looking for synergies around shared alignments where sensible...



The previous brown route was estimated at £300m which in the last consultation morphed into option 12 it gained quite a bit of cost in part because a longer route mileage of widening was then proposed and a third crawler lane up the hill. Many, many years ago when the option was the brown route and before that "the loop" it consisted of online widening of the existing A417 to a dual carriageway and a new grade separated junction off to the A436, fairly simple works TBH to uncongest the air balloon roundabout linking up the previously enhanced sections of the A417. The final selected option 30 route is basically a 4 mile long new alignment that will allow NSL running rather than a 40/50 restriction, Birdlip and Cowley become grade separated. The BCR is somewhat poor for the scheme at just over 1 but it IMHO should have been done as part of the 90's brockworth and cirencester schemes. I could see the floated 80's A436 Severn Springs, Kilkenny, A40 realignment possibly coming back as an idea once the A417 missing link is opened.

This supports my costs, I knew they were not wrong, I am very close to the project.
The BCR as I suspected is noted as 1, in fact it may drop to .8 by completion ( destroying national value!).
The Cirencester Branch reopening I would be 1.5 or more.
These are political decisions, not ones taken by economists who generally understand the maths .

It annoys me intensely Birdlip, has the go ahead , and good rail schemes with more benefit to UKplc, are stuck in the siding .

 

[jimm]

The cost of the Birdlip Scheme is in the document you put the link to..
It’s presently at £ 560 m , and they have no tenders yet. I have overheard £600m
BCR , less than reopening to Tetbury, I fear .
The Road Lobby, tend to think they have a right to public money ( my money ) , and quite frankly make me sick, with their contempt for taxpayers.

Railways are incredibly good value for money.

The East West Rail report is with the Dft , they have a duty study and respond to the report , this is standard procedure.
They also need to discuss points to the promoter.( network rail)
It is clear Railfuture ( who have lived with this project since 1986 ) , were keen on future proofing ( supporter), this is a cost driver but sensible.
The promotor may have made later reps, re pathing issuesDenbigh Hall N jct to Mk . The objectors were mainly property spivs trying on.
This is a legal process, and comment outside the known facts is sub judiciary.

Whatever any estimate or the eventual construction costs may be for the A417 missing link, the point I was making was that this project has been in the works for so long and there have been so many design variations suggested in the 20 years or more that it has been talked about with nothing happening that it is no wonder the estimated cost has escalated.

I've no idea what the Tetbury branch has to do with this - reopening that certainly wouldn't be "incredible value for money". Nor are plenty of other suggested rail projects.

And the promoters of reopening to Cirencester are proposing a small halt in the town centre, with the main station a park-and-ride in the fields opposite the Royal Agricultural University - which is not going to do much to get people out of their cars. So what exactly is the supposed benefit over driving three more miles to Kemble?

http://cirentrain.org.uk

It is obvious to anyone who has ever tried to drive on the A417/A436 through the Air Balloon area in the morning or afternoon rush hour periods for years that something needs to be done - whatever it ends up costing, or the BCR. If Brunel had built the Swindon-Gloucester line through Cirencester (but he didn't for various reasons) and lots of new homes had not been built in recent years in Cirencester, then traffic volumes at the Air Balloon would be lower - but we aren't in that state of nirvana, so huffing and puffing about the supposed evils of the road lobby, or property spivs (who will be providing some of the funding for East West whether they like it or not), is neither here nor there.

I've no idea what all the stuff about East West is meant to refer to anyway - someone else's post? - unless it's a long-winded way of trying to say future-proofing means that there should be through trains between High Wycombe and Milton Keynes, irrespective of the obvious point that reasons for people to want to travel between High Wycombe and Milton Keynes are limited and are not going to change, even if there was a direct train service. And I know how the Transport and Works Act decision-making process works, thanks.

The Oxford mail and various protest groups have run surveys where most popular choice had been do nothing, then again various groups are opposed to EWR as well. TBH any proposal to introduce new transport infrastructure in this country results in protests from some group of interested or uninterested parties, when actually what is needed is quite lot of new road and rail building in addition to enhancements.

An online poll on a media website, or run by a group with an agenda, where there is no real control over who takes part is not much of a guide to anything. Proper opinion polls are - unsurprisingly - not conducted like this.

 

[Indigo Soup]

Even taking the 'announcement' with a fistful of salt....

Why, when the boat is floated for an expansion of the rail network, does it alway have to be 'reopening' or 'reversing Beeching'? Unless it's just upgrading a freight-only line, you're building a new railway which happens to call at some of the same places as one that was closed and lifted fifty years ago. It doesn't make sense to commit to an alignment that was selected on the basis of anaemic locomotive performance 150-odd years ago, with requirements to handle stopping goods traffic to every hamlet en route. Especially when that alignment now has 500 homes, a shopping centre, and a small engineering works built on it.

 

[Djgr]

Even taking the 'announcement' with a fistful of salt....

Why, when the boat is floated for an expansion of the rail network, does it alway have to be 'reopening' or 'reversing Beeching'? Unless it's just upgrading a freight-only line, you're building a new railway which happens to call at some of the same places as one that was closed and lifted fifty years ago. It doesn't make sense to commit to an alignment that was selected on the basis of anaemic locomotive performance 150-odd years ago, with requirements to handle stopping goods traffic to every hamlet en route. Especially when that alignment now has 500 homes, a shopping centre, and a small engineering works built on it.

Indeed in theory but in practice using old alignments has the outside possibility of re-usage with the old bulldozing e.g. Tweedbank whilst new routes from scratch with the exception of the odd new curve generally just ain't going to happen.

 

[A0]

Hmmm... in your enthusiasm to write this reply, you appear to have confused my saying 'This is where you'd probably put the junction, if you wanted to do it' with 'My crayons have proved that this project has a fantastic business case. Shovels out, lads, let's go!'

There is always *a* business case and in fact I do agree - in a BAU world is probably profoundly negative - junctions, tunnel conditions, A14 in the way etc, although my attempt at doing that would be full of guesswork, hearsay and conjecture.
However, this is a long-term proposal, there's considerable uncertainty and a lot can happen. So that is why we always test some what-ifs as part of business case development. I think that if (and it's a pretty big if) there was even a snifter of positive in this one, it would be a scenario where
- Wigston-Syston Capacity Scheme has happened
- MML signalling has been renewed to deliver extra capacity - unless there really never will be any technology to allow Wigston-Harborough to go from 5 --> 7tph
- and...



…this exactly. Which takes us back to the root cause of this particular bout of reopening discussion...



Yes, and the bankruptcy has driven the restructuring into two unitary authorities (West Northants and North Northants UAs).
The regional strategy/urban plan work is now being done, and the proto-West-Northants UA consultation mentioned it, which is what gave Mr Shapps the cheap bit of PR in parliament.

West Northants interest is probably much more about whether it would help allow a significant amount of new developments along the rail corridor (my guesses being Brixworth and/or perhaps a substantial new settlement near the A14) - i.e. it would no longer be going through a lot of nothing, and there would be much more significant passenger numbers than a 'today-based' assessment would tell you.

I think you've misunderstood - I was actually in full agreement with the bullet points you'd made - and was merely adding to the reasons why it really isn't a viable proposal.

 

[yorksrob]

Even taking the 'announcement' with a fistful of salt....

Why, when the boat is floated for an expansion of the rail network, does it alway have to be 'reopening' or 'reversing Beeching'? Unless it's just upgrading a freight-only line, you're building a new railway which happens to call at some of the same places as one that was closed and lifted fifty years ago. It doesn't make sense to commit to an alignment that was selected on the basis of anaemic locomotive performance 150-odd years ago, with requirements to handle stopping goods traffic to every hamlet en route. Especially when that alignment now has 500 homes, a shopping centre, and a small engineering works built on it.

Realistically, most large-ish settlements will have had a railway to them at some stage in the past, which in most cases will have gone to the nearest main line/big settlement, so in most cases this would be the line of least resistance.

 

[option]

Yes, and the bankruptcy has driven the restructuring into two unitary authorities (West Northants and North Northants UAs).
The regional strategy/urban plan work is now being done, and the proto-West-Northants UA consultation mentioned it, which is what gave Mr Shapps the cheap bit of PR in parliament.

West Northants interest is probably much more about whether it would help allow a significant amount of new developments along the rail corridor (my guesses being Brixworth and/or perhaps a substantial new settlement near the A14) - i.e. it would no longer be going through a lot of nothing, and there would be much more significant passenger numbers than a 'today-based' assessment would tell you.

so not a Tory government desperately flinging something out for the local press, to divert attention away from the same parties County Council...


Yet a look on a map shows that the development axis is along the Nene Valley, Northampton-Wellingborough, & southwards towards the M1. There's also new development at Long Buckby & Crick.

 

[option]

Even taking the 'announcement' with a fistful of salt....

Why, when the boat is floated for an expansion of the rail network, does it alway have to be 'reopening' or 'reversing Beeching'? Unless it's just upgrading a freight-only line, you're building a new railway which happens to call at some of the same places as one that was closed and lifted fifty years ago. It doesn't make sense to commit to an alignment that was selected on the basis of anaemic locomotive performance 150-odd years ago, with requirements to handle stopping goods traffic to every hamlet en route. Especially when that alignment now has 500 homes, a shopping centre, and a small engineering works built on it.

Daventry is a good example of that. Parts of the old alignment have had a road built on, but also it would make sense to link it across the WCML to Northampton, which would be an entirely new route.

 

[deltic08]

I'm pretty sure that Network Rail a few years ago came up with a listing of "Top 10 possible Beeching reopening" and it is a fairly sensible list but remember this is stuff from Boris with his fantasy bridge across the Thames he got UK taxpayers to pay for and his bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland etc.

It was an ATOC report 'Connecting Communities'.

 

[Meerkat]

The undo Beeching stuff is really getting dull. If there is money spare let’s throw it at making what we have much better - electrification, cut offs and speed ups, and improving northern commuter networks.

 

[The Ham]

I think there is a very strong case for light-rail-ising branch lines generally where there is no through running or where that through running might have limited value over the benefits light-rail-ising could bring (e.g. with Windermere you could increase frequency more cheaply by giving up just 3tpd to the Airport). Power could either be battery/supercapacitor or DC OHLE, but you could save money by way of allowing cheaper light rail concepts to apply while improving service, e.g. cheaper signalling and passing loops as well as foot crossings and 100% wheelchair accessibility with low floor trams, also making it cheaper to rejig station locations to make them more useful.

I think it's a real shame the St Albans project didn't go ahead to try the concepts out.

Although there could appear to be a good case for light rail it doesn't always follow that it will be.

As an example light rail was considered as an option for the branch to Borden from the Alton/Farnham. However it was found to be more expensive than traditional rail as it would need to have its own depot and other features which a heavy rail system didn't.

 

[thenorthern]

Shapps is trying to get votes for the Conservative Party as he knows there is going to be a General Election soon.

I have lost count of the amount of times I have heard about the government "reversing Beeching Cuts" or having "massive expansion" to the railway network but in reality nothing will happen. Think about it how many lines have been proposed for reopening but nothing has ever materialised.

 

[tbtc]

Even taking the 'announcement' with a fistful of salt....

Why, when the boat is floated for an expansion of the rail network, does it alway have to be 'reopening' or 'reversing Beeching'? Unless it's just upgrading a freight-only line, you're building a new railway which happens to call at some of the same places as one that was closed and lifted fifty years ago. It doesn't make sense to commit to an alignment that was selected on the basis of anaemic locomotive performance 150-odd years ago, with requirements to handle stopping goods traffic to every hamlet en route. Especially when that alignment now has 500 homes, a shopping centre, and a small engineering works built on it.

The undo Beeching stuff is really getting dull. If there is money spare let’s throw it at making what we have much better - electrification, cut offs and speed ups, and improving northern commuter networks.

I agree with the above two posts - perish the thought that we try to solve twenty first century problems - instead our railway ambition must only ever be to re-open something built in Victorian times - we cannot dare think of how best to tackle today's problems, we can only ever use a list of long abandoned lines as our "to do" list. The world has moved on, we now have places like Didcot/ Milton Keynes with significantly more passengers than some more "traditional" cities. Just like the idiom that army generals are always trying to fight the previous war (rather than looking at what the next war will be), enthusiasts are still trying to fight battiest why lost fifty years ago.

The sad thing is that cynical opportunist people like Shapps do this because they know that that's where votes are - both in the general public and in significant numbers of "enthusiasts" - it's not about problem solving, it's about "comfortable" policies for nostalgic people. Hence getting over a hundred posts on here, because unquantified nostalgia never goes out of fashion.

Imagine if our roads were as hidebound by this blinkered thinking... we couldn't consider a motorway or bypass because people would only countenance rebuilding Dere Street to it's ancient Roman path... it's the same simplistic thinking that you get with football fans who can only accept former players as candidates to manage their club.

Can we restart electrification projects and not leave main lines across the country with half assed electrification? Fully electrify the MML to Sheffield, Nottingham and Derby would be a start!

Back on topic though, maybe reopen Ripon to Harrogate and Skipton to Colne.

I was nodding along with the first half of your post - we have a backlog of "committed" projects that we need to tackle before we get the crayons out and start thinking of new projects - upgrading a busy main line would bring many more people than connecting rural villages - I liked your priorities... but then you go on to mention two of the most 'marginal" re-opening ideas and... I'm out!

 

[class26]

Quote

The sad thing is that cynical opportunist people like Shapps do this because they know that that's where votes are - both in the general public and in significant numbers of "enthusiasts" - it's not about problem solving, it's about "comfortable" policies for nostalgic people. Hence getting over a hundred posts on here, because unquantified nostalgia never goes out of fashion.

How do you know he is a cynical opportunist? Give the man time p;lease. if the government get back and if after 5 years nothing has changed then yes, you can call him that but not after about 6 weeks in the job.
Regarding the Railways there`s more weasel words coming out of the labour party . Just look at how many miles labour electrified in their 13 years in power. Not even in double figures I think you will find.

 

[Djgr]

Quote

The sad thing is that cynical opportunist people like Shapps do this because they know that that's where votes are - both in the general public and in significant numbers of "enthusiasts" - it's not about problem solving, it's about "comfortable" policies for nostalgic people. Hence getting over a hundred posts on here, because unquantified nostalgia never goes out of fashion.

How do you know he is a cynical opportunist? Give the man time p;lease. if the government get back and if after 5 years nothing has changed then yes, you can call him that but not after about 6 weeks in the job.
Regarding the Railways there`s more weasel words coming out of the labour party . Just look at how many miles labour electrified in their 13 years in power. Not even in double figures I think you will find.

Trouble is he's part of Team Boris, who has plenty of form for crazy absurd ideas (Garden Bridge) and opportunist unfulfilled soundbites.

 

[tbtc]

Quote

The sad thing is that cynical opportunist people like Shapps do this because they know that that's where votes are - both in the general public and in significant numbers of "enthusiasts" - it's not about problem solving, it's about "comfortable" policies for nostalgic people. Hence getting over a hundred posts on here, because unquantified nostalgia never goes out of fashion.

How do you know he is a cynical opportunist? Give the man time p;lease. if the government get back and if after 5 years nothing has changed then yes, you can call him that but not after about 6 weeks in the job.
Regarding the Railways there`s more weasel words coming out of the labour party . Just look at how many miles labour electrified in their 13 years in power. Not even in double figures I think you will find.

How do I know that Grant Shapps aka Michael Green aka Sebastian Fox is a shameless opportunist? Because I've watched politics over the last decade. This is the guy who pretended to understand working class culture by taking penny off a pint of beer and a round of Bingo, whilst imposing punitive austerity on them, remember.

It's shameless but it's successful - hence getting the Transport job and saying that, of course he wants to remove all of those terrible old diesel trains and also open thousands of lines of new railway... just as long as nobody asks about funding or details or the compromises required... he's never going to last five years in the Transport job... he's just a cynical careerist who knows how to get a nice soundbite into the media but hasn't achieved any of the things that he ever promised.

I'm not sure what the last Labour government had to do with Shapps's weasel words - I seem to remember that they spent most of their railway focus on clearing up the mess of Railtrack, post Hatfield, and the backlog of essential upgrades to ensure a safe railway meant that they didn't get round to focussing on much electrification - I guess that Paddinton to Heathrow alone would be over double figures of electrification wires - but feel free to start a new thread if you want to complain about a Government that came to power over twenty years ago, I guess.

 

[thenorthern]

Just look at how many miles labour electrified in their 13 years in power. Not even in double figures I think you will find.

High Speed 1 is 67 miles, Crewe to Kidsgrove is 8 miles and the South Hylton extention on the Tyne and Wear Metro is 11 miles all done under Tony Blair/Gordon Brown. There were a lot of proposals that never came to fruition under that government however.

I would agree though that Labour hasn't got a clue with the railways and in recent years its about been about nationalisation.

 

[Bevan Price]

I'm pretty sure that Network Rail a few years ago came up with a listing of "Top 10 possible Beeching reopening" and it is a fairly sensible list but remember this is stuff from Boris with his fantasy bridge across the Thames he got UK taxpayers to pay for and his bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland etc.

And don't forget his proposed "Boris Island" airport in the Thames estuary - which could have been a dangerous safety hazard due to the huge numbers of birds found in that area -- or would he have wanted to use the "badger solution" on thousands of birds each year?

 

[Djgr]

High Speed 1 is 67 miles, Crewe to Kidsgrove is 8 miles and the South Hylton extention on the Tyne and Wear Metro is 11 miles all done under Tony Blair/Gordon Brown. There were a lot of proposals that never came to fruition under that government however.

I would agree though that Labour hasn't got a clue with the railways and in recent years its about been about nationalisation.

Being in favour of nationalisation does not mean you do not have a clue about the railways. There are also plenty of people outside the Labour Party who see nationalisation as an essential step if we are ever going to get our railway out of the mess it's in.

 

[Mikey C]

New lines, stations and re-openings will have a bigger effect on more people than just improving/electrifying existing lines. More people will be attracted to the railways (which is the whole point) by a new line or station than by electrifying an existing line, or straightening a curve etc. If they are serious about getting people out of cars and onto the railways, they need new lines/stations.

Not necessarily. Where demand would be there but is being held back by the current awful service, upgrading from an infrequent and horrendously overcrowded 2 car 150 to a regular 4 car modern EMU will do far more to generate passenger growth than reopening closed lines.

Politicians like the headlines of reopening old lines, but for much of the rail network, running longer trains and better frequency is what's needed.

 

[yorkie]

People are welcome to post suggestions for lines that could be reopened, and what strategies to employ, here: https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...ines-would-yoiu-propose-for-reopening.194305/

 

[w1bbl3]

This supports my costs, I knew they were not wrong, I am very close to the project.
The BCR as I suspected is noted as 1, in fact it may drop to .8 by completion ( destroying national value!).
The Cirencester Branch reopening I would be 1.5 or more.
These are political decisions, not ones taken by economists who generally understand the maths .

It annoys me intensely Birdlip, has the go ahead , and good rail schemes with more benefit to UKplc, are stuck in the siding .

I'd be curious how you've arrived at a BCR of 1.5 for Cirencester as certainly the last last Gloucester railway study was very critical of the viability of Cirencester. I quote "Whilst there have been proposals to re-open the former spur to Cirencester, the costs of provision will be prohibitive and the commercial case will be weak (relative to building up traffic at Kemble). There is no possibility that a case for this could ever be successful." https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/media/19463/study-report-may-2015-_-final-version.pdf

Are you proposing a light rail system as per the cirentrain scheme or traditional heavy railway?

A scheme with the potential to benefit wider UKplc would logically be something much grander in scope such as completion of GWML electrification, golden valley electrification or Bristol / Birmingham electrification all which currently have BCR's under 1 or for that matter a nice new railway connecting a few major cities together... but to justify a nice new railway then the older predict and provide style models would likely to needed as justification rather than BCR.

In terms of BCR for transport schemes maths behind the calculations have a few conservative if not fuzy metrics in particular "greenhouse gasses" and "air quality" these assume that the fuel mix over the next 60 years will be broadly the same as today and from around 2025 there will be no improvements / reductions in emissions. Whilst these assumptions are/where on the conservative side of realistic a few years ago today the underlying methodology is flawed by not factoring the level of decarbonisation that will occur in road transport in particular and to lessor extent trains. Also on a enhancement scheme the BCR factors in impacts during construction in the form of delays, increased emissions and reduced air quality, all important matrices but notable that new infrastructure doesn't have to consider such impacts..

In simple terms taking Birdlip as an example if the greenhouse gas and air quality disbenefits where recalculated on the basis of electric transport using the current DfT electric emissions values from 2040, so roughly 45 years of electric vs 15 years of petrol / diesel the monetary effect on the dis-benefit would be enough to take the scheme with a hypothetical BCR of 0.8 to above 1 alone.

 

[The Ham]

Shapps is trying to get votes for the Conservative Party as he knows there is going to be a General Election soon.

I have lost count of the amount of times I have heard about the government "reversing Beeching Cuts" or having "massive expansion" to the railway network but in reality nothing will happen. Think about it how many lines have been proposed for reopening but nothing has ever materialised.

Personally there's a need to get on with projects like HS2 (circa 100 million passengers a year) and Crossrail 2 (an extra 270,000 passengers in the morning weekday peak into London) rather than the vast majority of reopenings which will struggle to achieve 5% of these passenger figures but could well require a much greater proportional cost. Also it's l likely that there'd be a need for such schemes to facilitate the reopenings so that there's capacity on the existing network for the passengers to go beyond the reopened line.

That's not too say that some shouldn't be done, rather we should be focusing on what's needed now, not what happened to exist 100 years ago and was useful at that time.

I think that some who "win" by getting their local reopening built may then be in for a bit of a shock when it then facilitates the building of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of extra houses along the route. (As it will then have sustainable travel and local traffic congestion will have reduced allowing more traffic to be generated from the new development). Needless to say be careful what you wish for.....