squizzler
Established Member
With the railway continuing to grow - outside the London commuter services - and the network running out of space for more services, one way of achieving more capacity is to build new routes or realign existing railways. The benefits of a new alignment is to break out of the straitjacket of victorian infrastructure in terms of loading gauge and curvature limitations. We also suffer from linkages in sub-optimal places, as demonstrated in Mark casson’s book “[The World’s first Railway System]” ; a problem that a programme of newbuild can slowly address over time. With the UK’s crowded network, building new has the benefit of avoiding disruption that is unavoidable when making interventions on legacy routes.
Like with new trains, the massive upfront costs might be amortised over time by reduced running costs (particularly as many of our legacy lines are maintenance intensive), and more income from a commercially competitive product attracting (and with the capacity to serve) more customers. In Switzerland, for instance, improvements to railway alignment for shorter journeys is usually driven by the needs of the Taktfahrplan timetable.
It's just that, whilst Britain’s railway has thankfully long since moved on from the days of retrenchment and "rationalisation", we don't yet seem comfortable in publicly discussing new railway construction that falls between two extremes of either ultra high speed or of re-opening old lines. The language used is itself telling. Speculate on a better alignment on this forum and you are infantilised as a "crayonista". When the railway itself builds a better alignment it is not called an "improvement", as a straightened road would be, but a word loaded with negative connotations: a "deviation".
So is the UK really adverse to a long term improvement of our railway’s topography as is done with highways, or can it just seem that way?
Whilst a fan of high speed rail, I feel HS2 in particular goes out its way (literally) to avoid setting a precedent for improved alignments for the ordinary railway. It achieves this with a self contained topography (terminal stations at London, Birmingham and Manchester) and extremely high speed which makes it irrelevant as a model for general purpose line improvements.
Like with new trains, the massive upfront costs might be amortised over time by reduced running costs (particularly as many of our legacy lines are maintenance intensive), and more income from a commercially competitive product attracting (and with the capacity to serve) more customers. In Switzerland, for instance, improvements to railway alignment for shorter journeys is usually driven by the needs of the Taktfahrplan timetable.
It's just that, whilst Britain’s railway has thankfully long since moved on from the days of retrenchment and "rationalisation", we don't yet seem comfortable in publicly discussing new railway construction that falls between two extremes of either ultra high speed or of re-opening old lines. The language used is itself telling. Speculate on a better alignment on this forum and you are infantilised as a "crayonista". When the railway itself builds a better alignment it is not called an "improvement", as a straightened road would be, but a word loaded with negative connotations: a "deviation".
So is the UK really adverse to a long term improvement of our railway’s topography as is done with highways, or can it just seem that way?
Whilst a fan of high speed rail, I feel HS2 in particular goes out its way (literally) to avoid setting a precedent for improved alignments for the ordinary railway. It achieves this with a self contained topography (terminal stations at London, Birmingham and Manchester) and extremely high speed which makes it irrelevant as a model for general purpose line improvements.