I guess the question is whether the idea is “how would you build a heavy rail network from scratch to reflect travel needs in the twenty first century” or “how would you build a country from scratch to reflect people’s idealistic stuff about how they’d like the country to look”.
I’d go with the former, in which case your starting point would be to assess which markets are big enough to justify the kind of large volumes of people suited to heavy rail.
That doesn’t mean insisting everything is profitable but at least trying to focus on markets where hundreds/ thousands of people want to travel.
So, in the absence of any existing railways to use as a benchmark, I’d look at a map of motorways. Look at a map of “trunk roads”. Look at busy coach services (since coaches would presumably have taken a much bigger chunk of long distance travel than they currently have?). Look at frequent inter-urban bus services (as a rule of thumb with real life re-openings, if an inter-urban route can sustain a frequent commercial bus service – like Stirling – Alloa – then there’s scope for a railway).
If places aren’t near a motorway/ trunk road and don’t have a frequent coach service then they probably aren’t going to be busy enough for heavy rail to be justified.
Everything is electrified from day one, obviously. Build trains/ gauges to ensure there’s no need for 3+2 seating.
Come up with a threshold for whether a line will be busy enough to warrant heavy rail. Say a half hourly service with a three coach EMU. If your line won’t justify that then it doesn’t get built. Say at least 250,000 journeys per annum at each station? So each station is big enough to be staffed (and potentially barriered), no need to by on board. DOO for doors (you’d build new stations with straight platforms) but at least one other employee on all trains – more in the case of trains over a certain length (e.g. 200m).
Forget about freight. Or at least forget about mixing it with passenger services. If there’s a business case for dedicated freight lines between ports/ distribution centres/power stations then build it, but I’d be wanting a passenger railway where 100mph+ is standard, and I can’t see any room for slow irregular freight services. And, whilst you can build new passenger lines to attract human beings, if we’ve not had freight trains since the 1960s (?) then presumably the word coped moving its coal/ steel/ cement/ nuclear fuels around by road?
Forget about most suburban train services – give provincial cities budgets for their own light rail networks. You can run Supertram/ Metrolink without operating subsidies, compared to “forty pence per mile” subsidy for heavy rail, so it’s not worth it in a lot of cases.
Parkway stations where lines cross motorways and ring roads.
If you are starting from scratch then there’s obviously no reason why you’d have to follow the routes that we currently have. If we build them to a fast enough alignment (say 125mph minimum ) then one line can link as many intermediate places as two or three existing routes. I’m not saying that everything has to stop everywhere, but if you’re going to start from scratch then you can get a lot more bang for your buck and they’ll still compete with motorway journey times.
So maybe Leeds – Manchester runs through Bradford, Huddersfield AND Oldham. A 125mph train would still do that faster than Leeds – Manchester on the M62.
London –Newcastle could run through Luton, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Barnsley, Wakefield, Leeds, Harrogate, Darlington, Durham, Washington and Gateshead (and still be faster than the M1).
Manchester – Chester could run through the Trafford Centre, Warrington, Liverpool Airport, Liverpool and Birkenhead.
London to Peterborough via Stratford, Stansted and Cambridge. That kind of thing. If you build lines that can run fast enough then you don’t need to travel as the crow flies.
That’d mean some areas would have very little railway. If “Cardiff” had a budget for their own light rail/metro network then the only heavy rail in Wales might be along the south coast to Carmarthen and along the north coast to Bangor (possibly Holyhead). I doubt you’d build anything in Scotland north/west of the Glasgow – Aberdeen line. You’d struggle to justify brand new lines in places like Lincolnshire, the Cumbrian coast and other rural areas.
At the same time, some areas would have much more. I could see significantly more lines around the biggest cities – London would end up resembling Chuggington! But that’d only work in places with high population density. Focus resources on where services will be most used. That means that heavy rail won’t be the answer to everything but it means that heavy rail can focus on what it does best, instead of the messy network that we currently have.
