The North East is far from flat, but this bit, Buchan, is reasonably so.
Im not aware of where the line has been built on as it is in the custody of Aberdeenshire council.
Part of the Boddam route is underneath the A975. Part of the old route through Dyce is underneath an industrial estate. Gardens encroach the line at both Maud and Ellon. At Ellon, the Boddam line is underneath the A948 and Hospital Road, the latter of which has about twelve houses with no other access, and the former goes alongside some quite small gardens. The line is currently a cyclepath, which you'd need to replace like for like. Both terminal station sites have been built over, meaning you'd need new stations.
Many, many individual parcels of land will need purchasing. Every farmer who's farm track runs across the line will need a solution, and every family who goes waking along the old line will need a replacement route. Stations at Maud and Ellon will need space, and probably a car park. It all adds up
Yes, the north east is flat, but you still need to go around hills. That limits you to the old lines generally, deviating here and there. If you pick Boddam, you screw over Fraserburgh unless you want to thread a new line around the outside of Peterhead, and build across undulating terrain to Fraserburgh.
Aberdeen station and particularly the tunnels do need work, but that is a cost that should not fall on this project as it did with the previous study.
Why not. Currently the timetable works with the tunnel. If you add Peterhead and/or Fraserburgh, the timetable doesn't work. Therefore, to run those services, you'd need to sort out the tunnels; the cost of which is by definition part of the cost of reopening.
You could sort out the tunnels beforehand, but that would be a separate project. Unless you want to wait for reopening until the tunnels are sorted out anyway, which may take several decades, you'll need to sort them as part of reopening. No, it's not fair, but that's the way things are.
There absolutely are fright flows to that rail can capture! I sincerely hope you are fully braced of the facts of North East freight before making such a claim!
Can you, in good faith, honestly say that there are freight glows that could be captured by rail. Who are the potential customers, where do the potential flows go to, and what sort of tonnage would be needed to switch to rail before companies start to save money by sending things by train? The only one I can think of would be oil related, and that's not exactly a growth industry at the present moment, let alone the fact that pipelines are far more efficient.
There wouldn't be 6 stations to peterhead, more likely 2 or 3.
Old route;
Kittybrewster (a work in progress, albeit slowly), Dyce, Newmachar, Ellon, Maud, Peterhead/Fraserburgh.
Via Boddam, you lose Maud, but gain Boddam itself.
Either way, five or six station stops.
Holiday traffic is not unlikely, it will be there, the current market is unclear however.
It will be minimal. Peterhead and Fraserburgh are hardly booming tourist towns. If you were to see numbers of holiday trips to places like Whitby and Skegness as opposed to day trips, I can say you wouldn't be relying on this traffic to provide your business case.
Are you saying the line would only serve 60k people? Aberdeen and shire is somewhere around 400k IIRC however I appreciate they won't all get use of this.
All this is commercially sensitive beyond the detail I'm giving, but, let's do some quick sums.
Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Maud and Ellon cumulatively have a population of 50k give or take. That is what's called the static capture, ie. people who live in the same community as a station, who would benefit. There is a decent psychological impact to having a station with the same name as your town, and each of those people can be considered as 1 whole potential passenger; someone who would use the line potentially 1-5 days a week.
Beyond that, you get into the realms of semi-static and fluid captures.
Semi-static is the number of people who could be enticed to use a train, if it was comparable journey times with driving the whole way. This will be a proportion of people who live within about twenty minutes of a station, but lessens as you get further out. 0.5 of a passenger if you live within ten minutes drive, 0.3 if you live between ten and twenty minutes away....
Finally, fluid flows. These are people for whom getting a train would be actually a net negative, but whom have enough money and time to drive to a station anyway. Think retirees driving to the station for a day trip into Aberdeen, or families for whom getting a train is easier than finding parking.
For the final two categories, you really need a healthy distribution of decently sized towns within driving distance. There aren't really. The nearest two are Cruden Bay and Newburgh, and for both, it would still be easier to drive into Aberdeen, as the nearest/easiest station would change from Dyce to Ellon, which is a decent detour. Anyone who drives all the way from either would not be enticed with a station slightly further away.
The route we are proposing uses the Boddam branch which has not been examined.
The Boddam branch is interesting, but as I said above, either you build a new line as far as Fraserburgh or let them go it alone. Neither really improves the bcr....
The business case for Peterhead, along the Boddam branch is, as we type today, unclear. This has not been assessed. We are working to rectify that.
Admittedly, that is true. But I can't really forsee it improving with changing from one old formation to another that was slightly longer and slower.
I am not trying to fight against you. You obviously have a decent amount of enthusiasm for this reopening, and for that I commend you. What I would recommend is trying to ask either myself or Bald Rick, or indeed any of the many people on this forum with experience of feasibility studies, if we have any insights.
You seem to be fighting against experience. Instead of telling us that there would be freight potential, when neither of us have seen any evidence of such, you should try to contact local businesses, and ask if they would switch. I've been undertaking feasibility studies for nigh on twenty years before I retired, and Bald Rick has even more experience than I do on the NR end of the pipeline.
There is an enormous amount of experience here you can draw on, and I'd recommend taking some of our advice to heart. I'd love to see the line open one day, however I find it unlikely that it will. That doesn't mean stop trying, but we're not the ones to convince.
