I got chance to have a good look at this today as I passed by on an XC Manchester service. It was the first time I'd seen it since work began in earnest and I was astonished by the scale of it. I had imagined something akin to the Shaftholme Flyover but this is an immense undertaking, it's a major piece of new railway construction with very extensive earthworks.
Does anyone know what the distance will be from end to end and what the estimated or final cost will be?
It is billed by NR as 6 miles of new railway.
In essence, there is a new double track railway from Little Bridgeford to Yarnfield flying over the WCML just north of norton bridge. It throws off a single line at Searchlight Lane to form the new slow line to Crewe. The existing slow line to Crewe connects into the New Up Stone at Little Bridgeford.
Down Slow to Down Stone and Up Stone to Up Slow turnouts will bye 100mph unless I am very much mistaken.
Meanwhile, the existing route from Yarnfield to Norton Bridge becomes a 40mph single track with single lead junctions at either end.
It is indeed a lot of heavy engineering to achieve a stated benefit of 2 extra paths per hour for passenger trains and one per hour for freight.
I can't help but think that there must be a potential for more new paths if the 3/h passenger trains between Crewe and Birmingham used the Slow line (being upgraded for 100mph). Does anyone have a feeling for what effect this would have on timings?
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Extra trains to the NorthWest would be welcome - but are there any spare trains to run such services with? I didn't think there were.
Through trains from Euston to Blackpool would require the additional paths and completion of the flyover should roughly coincide with electrification to Blackpool, but that would require additional electric trains.