Recent content by Clarence Yard

That failed because the Mayor of London pulled the TfL funding mainly because he felt the benefits lay outside of London and his voters. HCC would never have had the finances to replace the amount needed. WBC even less. Redevelopment of the Watford Met Station site was in the business plan, to...

That’s the whole point of the tunnel and HEx. It’s on the RAB for the airport so they get their money through the fees from the airlines. What they get from punters using the service is very much secondary.

No, the PMO Steering Group meet monthly and all aspects are gone into. For each timetable period there is a dashboard by operator with all the key NR and Operator elements listed, specific reports on major recasts and forward looks on such matters as cascades. They usually look two timetables...

Quite simply, timetabling only, based on series of assumptions and constraints. An ESG should report about two years from a timetable introduction (in tune with how Part J works) and from about a year out you are only fettling a known outcome because all the Rights issues should have been...

Timetabling the ECML is all about hitting various locations at precisely the right time. You have various crossing moves that you have to time before or after, various connections to make and various slower trains you have to share your lines with. The more infrastructure you have at your...

There is unlikely to be a new franchise in 2027.

The service is not designed for the benefit of rail users more widely. It is designed to get people into Paddington and disperse from there, not necessarily by public transport for some of its more significant users. The most bizarre pick up I ever saw was when the gold leaf Hummer was about a...

And that is where it can go badly wrong. Those issues should never be part of an ESG remit. There are other groups that should consider them. Considering those issues at an ESG turns the ESG process into a bureaucratic nightmare where too many NR departments get involved and think they can...

We have discussed this many times before. The value of this service to Heathrow Airport Limited is not just as a passenger service - it is an airport facility which can be charged to airlines. The chances that these paths could just be taken off them are nil. HAL are serious players who operate...

It wasn’t four tracking all the way but re-instating on the up allows for more overtaking moves, which unlocks presentation times at Peterborough. Welwyn viaduct will always prove a constraint but the less points where the presentation time has to be fixed, the better. Where the DfT (and NR)...

Exactly this. LSL presumably had a contingent right under STP to operate in those paths. As soon as Avanti could operate the paths under their existing fixed rights, the LSL right would automatically fall away. The whole thing would have been handled by NR in the normal way.

Actually, I do. One of the key constraints on the ECML is the ability to present at various junctions at the right time. So you need infrastructure in the right place to allow you to do so. Even infrastructure miles away from the crucial interface. Huntingdon to Peterborough unlocks so much on...

The postponement shouldn’t be announced by the DfT during an election period but there is no reason for NR not to announce it because officially, as the Infrastructure Manager, it is actually their shout.

Empty trains don’t retain the paths if they run as a class 5 and without an exemption, he shouldn’t be running as a class 1 or 2. He just has to run one passenger train before December to retain the paths. It could be any stock with any loco.

By the time the work has been done, the DfT had blocked off the paths from Peterborough with the TL timetable and the Lincoln via Newark service was on the cards. The HT plan (actually done by GB Railways) was to go Grimsby, Market Rasen, Lincoln, Sleaford, Donington, Spalding, Peterborough...