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Lots of Scotland already is and manages to survive.
However much some may wish it railway is not an alternative to improving the roads in northern Scotland - and if you are improving the roads anyway you may as well use them for a coach service rather than waste money on a railway that doesn’t really serve the need.
There is logic to that list. Doubly so if the savings were ploughed into advancing projects that will add value to the national economy eg Crossrail 2, HS link across the north. (Yes I know cutting those 5 routes won’t pay for all of that!)
If Dungeness and Hinkley Point B are anything to go by, nuclear flask trains will still be running for a while after the plant closes, given decommissioning is a long job.
Dungeness B is a special case given that the plant is something of a disaster. However, one of the two reactors at Hinkley Point B has already been defueled, so in a couple more years the other will be complete and that will more or less be the end of flask traffic.
Defueling might take a few years for Heysham, but all four reactors will age out quite soon.
In any case, Hinkley Point B doesn't even have a rail connection, so demonstrates that one is not essential for nuclear defueling operations!
But in those cases, it's simply nonsense to have the coach running alongside the train when the train is much better suited to the long distance travel.
A properly integrated system would recognise that, and have longer distances covered by train, and shorter feeder routes covered by bus or coach, meaning resources could be concentrated on making those run reliably and with sufficient capacity. That doesn't mean the closure of every branch line either, mind you, although again you could do some rationalisation - for example, do Parton and Harrington both need railway stations? Both are close enough to bigger stations - with buses available to do pickups between the existing Harrington and Workington, you could get a lot more people onto the now more economical and quicker train as it isn't stopping as often...
Unfortunately, the country runs on a lot of "we do it this way because we've always done it this way" so things will never change.
Well, you won't hear me say this that often, but on these trunk routes, there's plenty of demand. If someone wants to run a coach service offering cheap fares and people want to use it, why not. It's an example of the free market working to everyone's advantage. It might evenhelp to keep railway pricing policy on its toes.
As to Parton and Harrington (I've done that route a few times) I'm not convinced that rationalising the stations would gain you much. infact what you gained from slightly quicker journey times might be outweighed by people being further from their station and having to railhead.
Better to concentrate on the basics - capacity, reliability and fares.
They already exist so the emotional / political impacts would be much worse, ie the feeling of something being taken away. Vs would we build them today (I am sure we would not)
I would challenge that 11m is not going to go so far elsewhere, but on single tracked, rural lines - that money might actually deliver something meaningful. Look at how quickly Okehampton was spun up - more money than here but still a great outcome.
I would also say that these routes are about equity - people across the UK pay taxes towards the rail network and these roles connect remote communities and play an outsized role in many cases, vs a medium sized town or suburbia. Yes it is their choice to live remotely, but they are still a public service, and not everyone drives.
Third thing - for now they are diesels and polluting and slow. With battery stock they may well get far better in terms of the environment, noise and probably speed. And new stock tends to increase demand vs clapped out 150s.
One issue about replacing trains with buses is that it is very easy to withdraw all or part of a bus service - it happens all the time. Far harder to cut train services which are far more heavily regulated.
There is of course no reason why it has to be that way, save that a railway with no trains is facing the axe, whereas a road with no buses isn't going to be closed. However, it has been that way ever since the 1960s if not before.
In 2024 the Dorset towns of Shaftesbury (pop 9000) and Sturminster Newton (pop 4400) had no buses at all on weekends - Mondays to Fridays only. Whilst the money to support Saturday services has now been found for 2025, this meant that anyone in those towns without access to a car at school / college (I'm assuming Dorset Council can at least afford buses for education purposes) or worked a Mon - Fri job was stranded at the weekend if they couldn't pay for a taxi both ways. You'd have to wait for the school holidays or take annual leave to be able to get anywhere.
Buses also have a habit of not running during the evenings or on Sundays. First Group decided they could run the X53 Coastlinx services along the Jurassic coast commercially in 2013 rather than Dorset or Devon Council subsidising them. The evening services quickly disappeared, the service got cut back from Exeter to Axminster (it ran along the coast through Seaton so didn't compete with the train) and then winter Sunday services were abandoned, although a skeleton service has been put back. The frequency has also dropped off so it isn't entirely similar from what was in offer from the 90s before it was expanded by the rural bus grant.
There are things buses do well compared to rural railways - the Bideford - Barnstaple - Ilfracombe service in North Devon is cheap, frequent, serves the town centres (the railway was on the wrong side of the river in Bideford and up a gurt big hill high above the sea in Ilfracombe) and is generally a more comprehensive service than the railway could ever be. It probably helps that North Devon isn't an affluent area so there isn't much snobbery about using the bus.
However, one of the basic problems any attempt to replace railways with buses would face is that it is very easy to take away a bus service and far harder to remove a railway. If legislation made it far harder to remove bus services and created a far more comprehensive regulatory regime then that might make a difference. No government seems to have much interest in this though.
In the Far North Line's case, I'd say definitely not, at least as a whole. Dingwall to Thurso's seven times longer than the West Somerset Railway and without being easily accessible to anywhere of Bristol's size.
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However, one of the basic problems any attempt to replace railways with buses would face is that it is very easy to take away a bus service and far harder to remove a railway. If legislation made it far harder to remove bus services and created a far more comprehensive regulatory regime then that might make a difference. No government seems to have much interest in this though.
The same principle applies to trams vs buses, but the only scarcely-served lines I can think of where that might work are ones like Stockport to Stalybridge rather than the long rural routes.
So Serpell Mk 2 then? Very little (if any) of the network makes a profit if the true costs are accounted for. The elastic is about to snap on what the market will bear in terms of fare rises too. Self driving cars will solve everything wont they? Think of all those valuable Central London station sites that can be flogged off. Oh...
And while we are at it we could close all thousand of miles of country lanes in Devon and Cornwall - little traffic, cost a fortune. If you choose to live in the back of beyond tough t*tty - and don't expect a local GP, cottage hospital, bin collection or a universal postal service.
(For the record I strongly support a comprehensive rail network and want to see it expanded not contracted!)
I would also say that these routes are about equity - people across the UK pay taxes towards the rail network and these roles connect remote communities and play an outsized role in many cases
They don’t really pay an outsize role - you can’t really live in those areas without access to cars.
And equity would be a dodgy argument considering how much providing public services to rural areas costs!
They don’t really pay an outsize role - you can’t really live in those areas without access to cars.
And equity would be a dodgy argument considering how much providing public services to rural areas costs!
Per the poster above yours, where does that end - re services to rural communities. And should we also look to close minor roads too?
We really don't want everyone crammed into the South East, or back to crappy, deserted ex-industrial towns, or bland suburbia. Can you imagine the services, the traffic, the air quality, the rail capacity then? Or how many charming pubs and railway stations we'd lose!
And everyone has different preferences for their lifestyles. And everyone gives and takes differently from the public purse, and does so differently at different stages of their lives - let's not go down that transactional, libertarian rabbit hole...
One issue about replacing trains with buses is that it is very easy to withdraw all or part of a bus service - it happens all the time. Far harder to cut train services which are far more heavily regulated.
There is of course no reason why it has to be that way, save that a railway with no trains is facing the axe, whereas a road with no buses isn't going to be closed. However, it has been that way ever since the 1960s if not before.
In 2024 the Dorset towns of Shaftesbury (pop 9000) and Sturminster Newton (pop 4400) had no buses at all on weekends - Mondays to Fridays only. Whilst the money to support Saturday services has now been found for 2025, this meant that anyone in those towns without access to a car at school / college (I'm assuming Dorset Council can at least afford buses for education purposes) or worked a Mon - Fri job was stranded at the weekend if they couldn't pay for a taxi both ways. You'd have to wait for the school holidays or take annual leave to be able to get anywhere.
Buses also have a habit of not running during the evenings or on Sundays. First Group decided they could run the X53 Coastlinx services along the Jurassic coast commercially in 2013 rather than Dorset or Devon Council subsidising them. The evening services quickly disappeared, the service got cut back from Exeter to Axminster (it ran along the coast through Seaton so didn't compete with the train) and then winter Sunday services were abandoned, although a skeleton service has been put back. The frequency has also dropped off so it isn't entirely similar from what was in offer from the 90s before it was expanded by the rural bus grant.
There are things buses do well compared to rural railways - the Bideford - Barnstaple - Ilfracombe service in North Devon is cheap, frequent, serves the town centres (the railway was on the wrong side of the river in Bideford and up a gurt big hill high above the sea in Ilfracombe) and is generally a more comprehensive service than the railway could ever be. It probably helps that North Devon isn't an affluent area so there isn't much snobbery about using the bus.
However, one of the basic problems any attempt to replace railways with buses would face is that it is very easy to take away a bus service and far harder to remove a railway. If legislation made it far harder to remove bus services and created a far more comprehensive regulatory regime then that might make a difference. No government seems to have much interest in this though.
Of course this also gets back to the integration issue. And the funding issue. And the "not invented here" issue. The structure of public transport in the UK just isn't in a state where replacing rail lines with bus routes can be an overall improvement.
What is the obsession with negativity on this forum? Any proposal for improved services meets with multiple naysayers claiming it's a financial or logistical impossibility - even the most viable ones like direct Oxford - Bristol services that end up being taken forward in reality. Whereas frequent suggestions are made to downgrade and worsen the rail network.
You can bet that if branch lines were closed the meagre savings wouldn't go to rail projects elsewhere, they'd just be eaten up by the Treasury machine and initiate another spiral of decline like we had in the Beeching years. Thankfully today's politicians have more sense and understand this. And yes, lines like the Far North Line may be relatively little used but still form an important part of the wider national network. For a start, the Far North Line is very popular with cyclists, and most of them will have come from a lot further away than Inverness.
Surely the use of "we" on the posting speculations on this thread about the Far North Line should be tempered by the understanding that it is the Sottish Government who will be the one to decide matters.
There are a lot of things that could be cut if it was necessary to reduce costs.
You can debate what the impact on the wider economy would be, but (for example) axing aggregate services would likely allow significant reductions in net subsidy of the railway industry. Expansion of Crossrail services on the GWML alone would likely generate almost as much revenue as the entire freight industry does for Network Rail!
It was a reasonable plan to haul aggregates a hundred plus miles on the railway in the BR era, but that was because of the specific cost structure of the railway industry, as well as comparatively low traffic densities.
I am very skeptical that it is still sensible now, the world has changed.
(And no, the Mendip quarries would not export stone to London by road, it would cost many times what anyone would pay. Either aggregate production would shift closer to London or aggregates would be imported by sea).
We can currently make an argument that the housing crisis is so bad as to prevent people moving to more populated areas.
However, in the absence of that driver, is it really reasonable for people who decide to live in these areas to expect all the conveniences of urban (or near urban) living be provided to them? Paid for by taxpayers elsewhere.
I seem to recall reading that, at the time of the Beeching cuts, some of the closed railways replaced with bus services rather than all public transport being axed entirely. Unfortunately the bus services didn't on the whole last because it turned out that lots of the previous rail passengers weren't willing to swap to the buses. Can anyone confirm if that's the case? If it is true, it's probably relevant to any proposal to replace today's loss-making lines with coach services.
While the Beeching axe went too far, it was also a nonsense to consider a world where EVERY branch line that existed in 1960 stayed open, as if all the money in the railways goes on keeping open marginal lines open, there's nothing left over for essential upgrades, electrification, better services in busy areas, new lines etc. A lot of rural lines were only ever opened for small scale goods traffic, and the lorry and Ford Transit have taken that work away forever.
There's no blank cheque. Every £1 spent on a quiet rural route, is a £1 that can't be spent elsewhere, maybe lengthening Cross-Country trains, or improving commuter services in Leeds or Bristol.
Beeching has made any railway closure politically toxic, hence the nonsense parliamentary services run to prevent formal closure, but in a rational world it's perfectly logical to question any service if an alternative can provide a better service to the public.
For Stranraer to Ayr read Stranraer to Girvan. The line south of Girvan serves no useful purpose. It neither serves the ferries or the settlements in between such as Ballantrae Even the RailSail through ticket sold by Scotrail transfers you on to a coach at Girvan,
I believe that there are still occasional nuclear flask trains on the Far North line.
Network Rail have a duty to maintain every line. It's not up to them to question whether the £11.5 million would be better spent elsewhere
Indeed and £11.5m is absolute peanuts in comparison to say the Lower Thames Crossing Road scheme which is costing £10b - nearly 1000 times as much. Once a railway is in place the costs of maintenance but the cost of building new infrastructure is vast.
Three of those are used by their communities, one of those links to a ferry service and the other hasn't had a proper train service for decades, so we don't know what the demand is.
No railway lines should be closed, any that were really not worth keeping were closed in the 1950s 1960s and 1970s along with some lines that would have been worth keeping. The passenger train services on railway lines such as the Far North line promote tourism as well as providing public transport for people in places served by stations such as Wick and Thurso. The latter also has the ferry to Orkney. Not everyone can drive or have a car and trains provide useful public transport for people who live in small towns served by the railway. In some cases there is also the potential use for rail freight. I doubt if significant amounts of money would be saved by closing any railway lines and the lesson of the cuts in the 1950s 1960s and 1970s is this would probably lead to a drop in the number of passengers on the remaining network.
What could be looked at is whether some of the very lightly used stations should be closed to save money and speed up services a bit. This should continue to be subject to very thorough scrutiny to avoid the risk of stations which continue to be useful being closed just to save money but I do wonder whether some very little used stations should be closed and some pairs of stations close together on some lightly used lines should be merged into a single station.
Given how poor the UK is at building new stations cheaply, how long would it be until maintenance costs of existing stations would be higher than the cost of building new stations?
I'd also be surprised if there's many cases in such rural areas where merging stations would leave settlements with stations now within easy reach of one without a car. I'm not saying that there aren't any cases; Alness and Invergordon stations are three miles / an hour apart by foot and it looks like there's a pathway all the way between them.
No railway lines should be closed, any that were really not worth keeping were closed in the 1950s 1960s and 1970s along with some lines that would have been worth keeping. The passenger train services on railway lines such as the Far North line promote tourism as well as providing public transport for people in places served by stations such as Wick and Thurso. The latter also has the ferry to Orkney. Not everyone can drive or have a car and trains provide useful public transport for people who live in small towns served by the railway. In some cases there is also the potential use for rail freight. I doubt if significant amounts of money would be saved by closing any railway lines and the lesson of the cuts in the 1950s 1960s and 1970s is this would probably lead to a drop in the number of passengers on the remaining network.
What could be looked at is whether some of the very lightly used stations should be closed to save money and speed up services a bit. This should continue to be subject to very thorough scrutiny to avoid the risk of stations which continue to be useful being closed just to save money but I do wonder whether some very little used stations should be closed and some pairs of stations close together on some lightly used lines should be merged into a single station.
That's fine, but it needs to be remembered that some of the lines that survive - the Heart of Wales being a classic - survived not for any merits as a transport corridor, but because of the raw politics of the areas they served - 8 marginal seats in that case.
If we're making the case that rail travel is a good thing and keeping services going is desirable, then there also has to be a counter-factual proposition - what can't happen because of the costs of keeping existing infrastructure going?
So, taking the example of the Stranraer branch, that costs £xm/yr to serve. Traffic is minimal, and the chances of generating more are limited. If that money weren't used to prop up that line, what could it be used for that would have impact?
I do think that in the forthcoming railways bill the government should give its self power to override all the old railway acts so stations can be closed. There shouldn't be any true parliamentary services. The stations that appear on annual least used stations with less than a passenger a week and those are probably enthusiasts should just be shut.
On the other hand we should be opening more stations in towns that don't have them.
Right now, near where I live, the Snake Pass road is spiralling to inevitable closure, and that is hardly lightly used!
The costs of maintenance are just growing to the point that it is not worth it any longer.
Rail is a bulk transport medium, thats what it does, and we must not lose sight of that.
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There are a lot of things that could be cut if it was necessary to reduce costs.
You can debate what the impact on the wider economy would be, but (for example) axing aggregate services would likely allow significant reductions in net subsidy of the railway industry. Expansion of Crossrail services on the GWML alone would likely generate almost as much revenue as the entire freight industry does for Network Rail!
It was a reasonable plan to haul aggregates a hundred plus miles on the railway in the BR era, but that was because of the specific cost structure of the railway industry, as well as comparatively low traffic densities.
I am very skeptical that it is still sensible now, the world has changed.
(And no, the Mendip quarries would not export stone to London by road, it would cost many times what anyone would pay. Either aggregate production would shift closer to London or aggregates would be imported by sea).
We can currently make an argument that the housing crisis is so bad as to prevent people moving to more populated areas.
However, in the absence of that driver, is it really reasonable for people who decide to live in these areas to expect all the conveniences of urban (or near urban) living be provided to them? Paid for by taxpayers elsewhere.
Freight is effectively open access anyway, there is nothing stopping anyone bringing in stone by ship now and putting the quarries out of business, but they aren't. The Mendip timetable has been recast to allow it to grow. We all know you despise freight, but even this one is odd.
I seem to recall reading that, at the time of the Beeching cuts, some of the closed railways replaced with bus services rather than all public transport being axed entirely. Unfortunately the bus services didn't on the whole last because it turned out that lots of the previous rail passengers weren't willing to swap to the buses. Can anyone confirm if that's the case? If it is true, it's probably relevant to any proposal to replace today's loss-making lines with coach services.
Much as I love it one of the classics is the Conwy Valley - I could see a case to truncate it to Betws which would allow a more useful 2-hourly service with bus connections integrated into the Sherpa network south of there. Wales does seem to be more minded to integrate - Scotland much less so.
Barrow Whitehaven is needed for the nuclear facilities right? And Skipton-Carlisle is useful for freight - if you also reopened the Waverley route you could then remove most of the freight from the east and west coast mainlines which would be very helpful.
Thurso-Inverness probably is worthwhile for national security and it could have a sleeper on it if more revenue was desired.
You can doubt if you wish, but the numbers are quite significant in some (but not all) cases. There is wide variation depending on method of operation (trains and signalling), state of the infrastructure, and of course the revenue profile.
In future under GBR, the combined industry accounts will show this somewhat more starkly than the seperate accounts do now. I am aware of two ‘branch lines’ that have done this already, and the numbers were frankly horrifying.
But, the politics are such that closures are very unlikley absent a major economic crisis for the country (it would need a somewhat greater crisis than anything we have seen in the last 50 years).
Correct. The branch lines and stations were closed because very few people used them, so those few passengers migrating to buses added minimal revenue while buses were simultaneously losing existing passengers to the private car.
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