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Well that depends on whether the project is managed with a similar degree of skill to HS2 or not, I guess. Not really sure how feasible it is to do that, how would collect that information? And would it truly give the results we would want to justify investment? Well a very large fraction of...

And maintenance staff, it would also cause various problems in platforming. If the train suddenly doubles in length it won't fit everywhere it fits now, in platforms, in sidings etc. And even if CrossCountry traffic doubled it would barely move the needle on rail's modal share! In order for...

He said that because it is in his political interests to say that. But as always, we must remember that he is far from an impartial actor. The British government keeps chasing exports as a means to support oversized and failing industries. They did it for decades with nuclear power and all it...

But those routes don't move a large fraction of the traffic, so doubling traffic there has little impact on the modal share of the railway. CrossCountry handles about 4% of passenger kilometres. You can't realistically double or treble traffic on any of the heavily trafficked main lines without...

The "railways use less oil" argument is becoming less powerful as the fraction of electrically powered vehicles on the road continues to increase. As it is, the railways don't really provide a large fraction of required mobility and thus the oil use by them is already inconsequential. But's...

Well delivery failures in the private sector still get paid for by the taxpayer, albeit indirectly. That just causes leasing (and other) charges to be higher so that the providers can insure against those losses. There is no free lunch. Insuring against a failure, as a private company must do...

Typically private sector capital rates are much higher than the debt on government bonds as the state is almost certainly not going to default. Whatever the Treasury notionally charges other public undertakings through the PWLB (Public Works Loan Board) isn't really important (EDIT: The real...

Taxpayers pay in the end either way, except this way they pay more. All it does is allow the Treasury to hide public borrowing as private borrowing and lie to the public about the state of the public finances. It won't cut down on fragmentation, it will require pretty much the same level of...

I cannot really go into it without derailing the topic. But mostly the problems resulting from benefits and costs of changes being spread across multiple actors, leading to an argument over who pays for everything. Plus the entire Chinese Wall split of infrastructure and operators required to...

Putting up with a crying baby or similar for an hour is rather different than for four hours though.

No, labour promise direct state control of passenger operations. This is not really nationalisation, given that virtually the entirety apparatus of the "private" railway will have to remain intact. It is extraordinarily unlikely that Labour will seek to sweep up the freight operators and the...

Beyond the myriad organisational issues that people have discussed, the UK is trapped by the oldest railway infrastructure. Tunnels, cuttings and the like built by hand have left us with the smallest standard-gauge loading gauge in the world. Indeed Japanese cape gauge railways typically have...

I am no longer convinced that the complication of first class provision on the railway is really justified by the extra income. Personally I wonder if it worsens the issues with the railway by allowing a substantial part of its customer base, an influential portion, to avoid contact with the...

The vast majority of the traffic on the corridor is contained on the corridor itself or gets dumped a single location in the city centre. A very large fraction of the buses on the corridor run to Piccadilly Gardens as it is. The 8x buses, the 111, the 42/43 and 142/143 buses. Beyond that there...

Living near the corridor as I do I have spent an awful lot of time considering this problem. It's not an easy problem to solve, which is why personally I tend towards an urban ropeway solution to the Oxford Road challenge. It's only 800m but there is no easy way through, its very tightly...

That is at the very least debatable. Manchester type tram infrastructure has proven capable of absorbing 30 trams per hour per direction, and using double (or triple) length trams it could swallow up the majority of the Oxford Road traffic comparatively easily. With standing a double tram...

Perhaps you are right, although I am not entirely convinced given how tone deaf many of their publications are. I have amended the previous post to make it somewhat less strident.

Well the RDG's position seems to be that noone needs to be convinced of the value of rail and unconditional public and political support is assured. They brush aside complaints by saying that the complainant is wrong and the Railway is clearly amazing in every respect. That leads to production...

Ultimately because the spectacle of a Eurostar rushing across france at 186mph before trundling through Kent was embarassing for the powers that be. By the time HS1 was greenlit the idea of mass travel across the channel by train was dead. It was dying before Eurostar even started, killed by...

And, in the long term, they may even allow feeder stations to operate in parallel, flattening the load and allowing further increases in utilisation for the overall infrastructure.