Hmm, I'll click on this thread and see whether people are discussing a new fast alignment from Exeter to Newton Abbot, which could provide a much faster service (currently around twenty five minutes to do a distance that's around seventeen minutes as the crow flies)...
...or will people be discussing through services from Waterloo to Okehampton like they had back in the Good Old Days...
...I wonder
Which is why I think that there should be an exercise done to see if running Waterloo to Plymouth via Okehampton would likely attract more passengers. As although, in theory, journey times from some places could be longer
"in theory"?
Journey times from Waterloo/ Exeter to Plymouth
would be longer via Okehampton than via Dawlish.
Looking at the times...
Current Exeter - Plymouth services take fifty-something minutes for fifty-something rail miles (about forty five miles by road) . Not exactly "fast" for that distance, but let's call it 55 minutes as a benchmark.
Exeter St Davids to Okehampton is about 45 minutes (looking at proposed timings for the recent HST charter plus the Summer Sunday service).
Bere Alston to Plymouth is about 25 minutes.
So even if you build "HS4" through the undulating Devon landscape and get from Okehampton to Bere Alston in the blink of an eye, you're going to be taking well over an hour from Exeter to Plymouth via the "scenic" route.
Realistically, you're probably talking closer to an hour and a half that way (given that it'll probably take over twenty minutes to cover twenty something miles).
Any time saving from somewhere in the South East to Exeter will be cancelled out by the longer journey via Okehampton.
there are a lot of places (including some quite large places like Southampton and Portsmouth) where journey times would be faster
It'd still be faster to change at Exeter (for a current InterCity service via Dawlish).
If there's a market from Portsmouth/ Southampton to Devon then that should stand/fall on its own feet though - I'm not against that (I just don't agree that it adds anything to your Okehampton idea).
We used to have such services (in the Wessex Trains days) IIRC.
Even from parts of London it would be quicker to use the SWT route (the fastest journeys from Clapham to Exeter are within a couple of minutes depending on which route you go
It'd still be slower going via Okehampton though
It would also mean that travel between other local stations would be easy and so it could attract more people who want to travel between say Honiton and Okehampton or Tavistock and Cranbrook
What demand is there to get from Honiton to Okehampton or from Tavistock to Cranbook? Look at the local commercial bus services (or lack of).
I still say that hypothetical through services to/from the Waterloo line are a total red herring. First they do nothing to help maintain services to Torbay. Secondly, a modern DMU or IEP operated service can reverse direction at Exeter St Davids in little more than the duration of a long station stop, so that rules out any operational NEED to run through the station and then via Central.
Nostalgia and history seem to be steering the proposals as usual, while doing nothing whatsoever to fix the issues of the seawall...
Agreed
The idea that we can give up on maintaining a resilient service to Torbay... but that we need to spend tens of millions of pounds to avoid the need for hypothetical Waterloo - Plymouth services to need to reverse at Exeter...
The WoE main line from Waterloo passes through a number of reasonably large centres in its own right. Running through to Plymouth would improve journey opportunities from these areas to the West of England.
I've no problem with direct services from Plymouth to places like Yeovil/ Basingstoke.
There's no reason why you need a new line through Okehampton to justify reintroducing SWT services to Exeter though.
Some people seem to think that a reopened line through Okehampton would be some sort of an existential threat to the existing route through Newton Abbot
Who are you quoting?
The population of Newton Abbot and Torbay justify a reliable service to the nearest cities. A fast new alignment from Exeter to Newton Abbot provides that (and a much faster service plus more capacity). Patching up Dawlish provides that. A route through Okehampton doesn't solve that.