It doesn't have to close more regularly than any other part of the country. The vast majority of other routes have an alternative. The railways between Sheffield, Barnsley, Wakefield etc are a dense network of lines where you can generally get where you need to be by another route
For me, resilience means that Cornwall and the West Country would almost always be accessible by train, in the same way that Exeter is pretty much always accessible (with the exception of the very short period of time when a landslip at Crediton closed both of the routes). A Dawlish avoiding line simply wouldn't provide that sort of resilience
Why is nobody complaining that Cornwall only has one link to Devon? Or is it okay for there to be only one route from Cornwall to Devon, but Plymouth needs more than one route to Exeter?
Yeah, five minutes each time. Big deal.
A faster route avoiding Dawlish would mean a saving of roughly an hour a week for commuters - quite a difference.
At the moment the twisty route means that rail struggles to compete with car - even National Express can do the journey between the cities in around an hour by coach (faster than any via Okehampton would manage) - a "DAL" would be a big help for rail.
Buses only go so far at indicating whether a rail service is viable
It's not an exact science, and I'm not pretending that it is, but it's a reasonable benchmark to use. If we look at the markets unserved by daily trains we have:
- Tavistock to Plymouth - five buses an hour
- Tavistock to Okehampton - a council subsidised service every couple of hours
- Okehampton to Exeter - Almost hourly service (but also carrying passengers from Launceston/ Bude etc to Exeter)
- Tavistock to Exeter - ???
That suggests that there's scope for a regular train from Tavistock to Plymouth, but not for "667 passengers a day from Okehampton to Plymouth".
We seem to be going round in circles here - surely the point is that if it is thought that the sea-wall route will eventually become impassable, a replacement route will be needed, even though the old route will be kept for as long as practicable. The new route will have to be from Exeter to Newton Abbot, so a reopened Okehampton line would be irrelevant.
Agreed
If people are throwing money around to avoid places that regularly cause problems, why not Cowley Bridge Junction?
The line follows the route of the Culm and the Exe for rather a long distance, which is surely part of why it's so vulnerable to flooding
True, but this thread seems to be more about justifying rebuilding a Victorian line than trying to solve the problems of 2014.
Agreed that there seems to have been more/ regular damage in the Cowley Bridge area over the years.
A DAL would improve the resilience of the railway for Cornwall, Plymouth, Totnes etc as well as Torbay and Newton Abbot. Therefore it is preferable to the Okehampton route.
A DAL would give a faster everyday journey, it would bypass the "weakest link" of the current line, it would benefit the more populated side of Devon, its the way forward.
Torbay area mp's are unlikely to be convinced
If I lived on the busy line to Torbay, I'd be a bit miffed at the way that so many people seem happy for Paignton services to be reliant upon only one line, whilst its apparently imperative for Plymouth to have a second route to Exeter.
there are considerable potential benefits to Plymouth in particular, so it's establishment needs to be worked on as well as Cornwall
A bigger benefit to Cornwall would be a faster everyday journey to/from Exeter/ London/ Birmingham (etc) - a "DAL" has much better benefits to Cornwall than an Okehampton route would have.
The sum of 300-500 million projected over 25 or 30 years for the reinstatement of a railway line that should never have closed in the first place is peanuts compared to some other projected projects
Whether it should have closed or not in the first place isn't relevant - got to deal with where things currently are.
The fact that £500m is "peanuts" compared to some bigger schemes isn't relevant either - there are always other things that we could spend £500m on. And, if we can get a large amount of the benefits by a seven-ish mile single track line from Bere Alston to Tavistock then that leaves a lot of change to spend on other routes in the south west (redoubling more of the Salisbury - Exeter route? electrifying the B&H? a line to Portishead?)
According to JR Consulting
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rc...4GgAg&usg=AFQjCNHa0-AvlvrKAbKe4pSeVAOjAqp3LA
"the former Southern Railway line via North Dartmoor has some long stretches where top line speed could be improved" - so if it were to become an alternative we can safely assume they would be!
Throw enough money at any scheme and you can improve the speeds. But I think that an Okehampton route will have an Exeter - Plymouth journey time of closer to 1h30, slower than a replacement coach service, slower than National Express.
Tavistock will end up as a town of 13000-14000 people by the time projected developments are finished in 2026
There are a number of places with populations of over 13,000 today without a railway station, ignoring population growth in a dozen years.
We cannot provide a link from everywhere to everywhere
Apart from Manchester Airport?
.....I nearly missed it, hidden as it was at the end of one of the longest multi-reply postings that I have seen for some time.
