When will the rebuilding of these lines start or do they have to go through a couple more rounds first?
Be ideal if the fleetwood line, the Buxton to matlock and the reopening of woodhead route be in the next, but that would be a long shot
If any of the new stations schemes have a decent business case, and if the timetable can be worked to get trains to stop there, then 3-5 years at best.
For new lines involving existing freight only lines that are in use or have been very recently, then a similar timescale.
For new lines that entail any form of new construction, 6-8 years at best.
My thoughts/opinions/questions:
1) The Abbey line - Surely there is a case for reopening back to Hatfield, avoiding the need to travel into London and back out again to get to Hatfield?
No case at all. It was only ever a single track, many of the bridges have gone, and notably there’s several housing estates, the Galleria, and the A1 on the formation. Besides, there’s 6 buses an hour that actually take you where people want to get to (St Albans City Centre, and not half a mile south of it 50 metres down hill), or its 25 minutes on a bike.
Skipton to Colne is already been through a feasibility study and has proved feasible and commercially viable and is now developing further and comes under accelerating existing proposals
The back of an envelope initial work showed that it is possible to build in engineering terms. I don’t think anyone doubted that. Not this wasn’t a full blown feasibility study - that would be several million for a project of this size. Note that no costing exercise seems to have been done, or if it has, it’s being kept quiet. Not surprising, as it will be north of £300m.
But no one has ever demonstrated that it would be commercially viable, and nor will they be able to. It patently wouldn’t; a significant majority of lines in the country are not commercially viable, and they have the distinct advantage of already being built. They will also struggle to demonstrate that it will be socio-economically viable including all wider economic benefits.
But not to DfT's satisfaction or agreement yet; (now very unlikely now the the allowable benefits for transformational schemes was recently reduced). Sorry, but Skipton - Colne is a poor answer in search of a problem.
Spot on.