An east to north curve from the Marston Vale over land taken up by low cost industrial units (so no NIMBY issue) to MKC plus an extra track (for which there is room) would largely provide this.
I agree... but I suggested such a curve myself on here a few years ago and everyone jumped down my throat screaming
"You can't knock those units down!!!" - and I'd even figured it out so you'd only have to knock one or two down anyway. I didn't feel like starting it again...
Wrong document. Those are the strategic objectives from 2020.
The current project objectives (including as to freight provision) are set out in Appendices A and B of the 2021 Technical Report.
Isn't that half the point of this thread? We keep getting plans which include obviously sensible and beneficial things and then next moment other plans supersede them which don't have those things. Stuff like that has been going on ever since the project was first raised, and it's a good bit of the reason why it's taken such a silly amount of time for anything to happen. Now we find we can't even rely on a plan from 2020 still being followed, even though it's basically yesterday.
A good deal of the problem with shortage of capacity on the railways in general is down to features which improve capacity and flexibility being constantly pared back until there's only the bare minimum required to operate the very specific service pattern which applies right now - as long as no units fail and no staff fall ill and all other interoperating services run perfectly to time, etc. etc. Then when the need arises to increase the level of service somewhere, there's no longer any way to fit it in, and reinstating the lost capacity always becomes a saga and a half and may not happen at all, even though it doesn't require anything actually
new as opposed to just replacing what always used to be there anyway.
Now we have a new route being created but with the same principles being applied despite the internal contradiction involved. Only the effect on the future state is that much more severe, because de-restricting it can't be done by reinstating removed bits, it means building the extra bits from scratch at vastly greater hassle than building them from the start at the same time as all the rest of it. And the service pattern to which it is being more and more tightly optimised doesn't even exist: the pattern is nothing but speculative proposals, and they keep on changing as people speculate something different.
Sooner or later if the thing is to be built at all it will be necessary to freeze this constant change to be able to tell the contractors "here are the plans, build this". As things are, this will mean freezing on one specific bit of speculation and building a line that can handle that and only that. But there is no reason to believe that a speculative idea which is thought to be realistic at the time of freezing will continue to be thought realistic as time goes on, any more than the ones that have come and gone already have; and there is even less reason to believe that whatever correspondence the speculation does have with actual reality will continue to hold.
If the speculation turns out to have been wrong, or if it was near enough right to begin with but becomes inappropriate as other circumstances change, then we will be stuck. A line designed to be useful only in one specific way is unlikely to be
entirely useless for anything else, but it almost certainly will be a lot less useful than one which is designed to allow for things not turning out as expected and other things turning out differently in future.
Instead of designing down to a bare minimum which isn't even currently represented in reality by anything, we should be recognising that such a route has a multitude of potential uses which we can't predict, and current uses beyond the narrow limits of one speculative service pattern; we should be taking note of other bits of railway that have become useful or potentially useful in ways not considered when they were built, and what factors have allowed them to thus become useful or constrained their usefulness to remain potential or underexploited - such as junctions pointing the right/wrong way, good/poor possibilities for passenger interchange, presence/ease of electrification, etc - and taking the opportunity presented by the large scale of the basic construction project to anticipate these potential future needs without the massive additional hassle and disruption of patching more bits in later.
Something like an east-to-north curve at Bedford is a piddling bit extra on the scale of building a whole new line all the way to Cambridge, and it does not matter if someone advocating it hasn't got 50 million quid to pay some bunch of fat-arsed "consultants" to dream up a fantasy service that would make intensive use of it from the moment it's built (and then change their minds next year). It would have at least some immediate usefulness even if only for diversions, if it exists other minor uses will be found that wouldn't have been thought of otherwise, and if it isn't there it's as likely as not that its absence
will become a serious impediment under some currently unforeseen circumstance, whereas its presence never can be.
But in any event that traffic doesn't exist. There are no trains from Felixstowe to Daventry. The boxes are on the A14.
So the traffic
does exist, it's just using the wrong mode. This indicates that means to facilitate it using the railway instead
should be provided, not that they needn't be considered.