If you look for details of the scheme it’s for a direct service to Cambridge and science park, not a little shuttle to March. That would make Wisbech a place that people who wouldn’t now consider it could live in.
This is the problem - people are talking about the cost of a modest branchline/shuttle but with the benefits of through services to Cambridge - either we limit ambitions to the "cheap" shuttle (if £200m can be considered cheap for linking a relatively small place!) and accept that this would mean any longer distance passengers would have to change (which means less of an advantage over a connecting bus service) or we cost in the full factors required to sort out Ely and include the cost of electrification etc (which would bump the price up a bit...). If there's not enough capacity to deal with the (franchise commitment?) hourly Ipswich - Peterborough service (or to divert lots of freight away from the GEML/NLL) then we'd better get the chequebook out.
Off the top of my head: Levenmouth. Grangemouth. St. Andrews. Newcastle-Ashington. Poulton-Fleetwood. Leicester-Burton. Three Bridges-East Grinstead. Wolverhampton-Walsall. Camp Hill Line. Brockenhurst-Wimborne Blackpool South-Central. Rochdale-Bury. Cambridge-Haverhill-Sudbury. Stansted-Braintree.
That's 14 possible reopenings just off the top of my head. Some of those are pretty iffy and have major obstacles in their way. But even so, I'd say everyone of those is potentially better than Wisbech-March (either in the sense of being more useful, or in the sense of probably being cheaper).
In no particular order, my view of the most beneficial new conventional lines for passenger services:
EWR Western section
Portishead
Abertillery
Skelmersdale
Ollerton
Bescot - Wolverhampton
Camp Hill
Ashington / Blyth
Okehampton (from Exeter)
Isle of Grain
The above two lists seem to be sensible/ modest/ simple schemes that would generally focus on providing a clear link from a town to the nearest big city (rather than running through National Parks or being "useful" a couple of times a year as a diversionary route). Funny that...
The last few posts illustrate just why the Government needs to put its money where its mouth is and commit that 5 billion fund to reopenings.
You know it makes sense.
Only if you accept that re-opening abandoned lines has a terrible business case and you therefore need to ring-fence funding to ensure that some of it will have to be spent on your favourite projects, I guess
Your point about the 'thin spread' of the five billion for buses and cycleways is valid to an extent. But whilst this would be somewhat more thinly spread across the country than a smorgasbord of railway reopenings, one must recognise that those will in tern will be much more thinly spread than projects such as HS2, crossrail etc. Infact, a sensible Gmt would suggest a spread of reopenings around the country.
It is preposterous to have a Government policy that supports only very small and very big public transport projects with nothing inbetween
We do spend money on "in between" projects - just not your favourite kind of "in between" projects.
Unless you can give us two levels of project that there are no other ones between? I'm fairly sure that there are a few projects cheaper than HS2 but more expensive than repainting a lamppost.
What you say makes good sense (of course!, most of what you say does...) - provided that the total costs and benefits are fully taken into account, over the lifetime of a transport investment. Many people would infinitely
prefer a rail solution to a bus. Which matters for at least two reasons:
- People will leave their car in the garage to take a train, but would not do so to take a bus.
- A community that has a rail service is much more attractive to new and/or inward investment than one that does not. A town without a rail service looks and feels more abandoned than one that does not. That, at heart, is why Wisbech might want a rail solution
I appreciate that people would generally prefer a train to a tram and would generally prefer a tram to a bus - but that comes at a huge cost difference - I'd rather take a train to work than the bus but heavy rail isn't always feasible - if you've got an average load that could be accommodated by a minibus then you'd probably find that a DMU would be
worse for the environment than everyone driving a modern car.
IMHO, saying that "people prefer a train to a bus" is a bit like saying that "passengers prefer a direct service rather than having to change" - both are true in theory but both come at a "cost"
Good point. The bus industry needs to improve its PR as a fast, reliable and environmentally friendly form of transport
Or, rather, the bus industry needs legislation to give people the kind of guarantees that the rail industry has - if bus routes were fixed for minimum periods (rather than being able to change them several times a year) then people could rely on them a lot more.
But at the moment, no operator will want to *guarantee* an unchanged timetable since that'd make it easy for another company to run a route five minutes ahead of them.
Change the legislation and you'll go a long way to improving the reputation
£200m up-front is a lot of money. But the benefits are likely to accrue and multiply over the 60 year timescale that it would be reasonable to amortise the investment (not simple cost).
I agree about this kind of approach - it's why HS2 sounds incredibly expensive rathe than "one billion pounds a year over the next hundred years" (which sounds less than a hundred billion up front) - same with
@Bald Rick 's point about bridges being cheaper than level crossings in the long term) but are you assuming that a Wisbech service would be profitable? Or would you have to include the cost of operational subsidy in this?
