Bournemouth and Solent get a raw deal?

[RichW1]

With all the modification work around Reading, it seems a bit odd trains still have to reverse at Reading? This is surely still a painful conflicting movement is it not? Bourbemouth and those on the south coast there surely deserve a better north/south timing. The speed is already slow, so this doesn't help at all.

I would have thought a low level or flyover station would have been built or have I missed something yet unbuilt there?

We don't seem very ambitious at times. If it takes 5 hours to go 200 miles, why aim for anything faster if people already put up with it right? It's rather annoying. Reminds me of the Paddington to Hereford and also Cheltenham Spa route - that's an Inter-village!! It was a local service west of Oxford and Swindon respectively, I lost the will to live - could have walked quicker! Intercity - clue's in the name. They surely have other trains for these villages.

 

[yorksrob]

Interchange with East West services are as important as serving the town itself, so any North-South platform would have to be very close to Reading General station, which itself is in the best location for the town centre.

To put such a North-South route there would involve the approaches going through the middle of the urban area which would be unlikely.

 

[edwin_m]

The trains to and from Bournemouth go under the fast lines at the flyover just to the west. So it may be a slightly longer stop for a reversal, but in is only a potential conflict with slower passenger and freight trains. And if they used the other curve to avoid Reading, there would still be the same amount of conflict as both join the Relief lines via flat junctions.

 

[Harbornite]

It could be worse. This region is well served by SWT and I don't think the XC Reading reversals are a big deal.

 

[Bald Rick]

There is grade separation that would enable a direct Basingstoke to Didcot service, by omitting Reading. But Reading is a large regional centre, and pretty much every train stops there. Indeed IIRC there are more commuters to Reading than from Reading to London.

 

[greaterwest]

With all the modification work around Reading, it seems a bit odd trains still have to reverse at Reading? This is surely still a painful conflicting movement is it not? Bourbemouth and those on the south coast there surely deserve a better north/south timing. The speed is already slow, so this doesn't help at all.

How is it a painful/conflicting movement? XC use platform 3 for reversals, well out of the way rather than platforms 7, 8 or 9.

 

[MarkyT]

The trains to and from Bournemouth go under the fast lines at the flyover just to the west. So it may be a slightly longer stop for a reversal, but in is only a potential conflict with slower passenger and freight trains. And if they used the other curve to avoid Reading, there would still be the same amount of conflict as both join the Relief lines via flat junctions.

XC Bournemouth trains can reverse in any platfrom on the Relief side (#12-#15) or in #3 or #7 on the 'Down Westbury' side, in either direction, avoiding up and down Main tracks and platforms entirely, or the trains can join or leave the mains for a higher speed Didcot journey with minimal conflict using the various grade separations. The main platforms (#8-#11) can all be used for XCs reversing as well if necessary.

Reading, as a major town in it's own right and as an interchange for large parts of the south east including two of it's major airports, is a major traffic generator for the route, at least as important as the south coast towns and cities themselves, and reversing at Reading is not a major problem today with modern rolling stock, unlike the old days of cl.47s running round rakes of MK2s and blocking old platforms #8 and #9 for ten minutes or more, thus leaving only 3 other through platforms available for all other Main and Relief line traffic in both directions for the duration. The important aspirations for XC at Reading were more platforms and less interaction with other services. The rebuild has delivered that very successfully.

 

[mr_jrt]

As mentioned, Reading is a major destination, and you would probably want to serve it. What does surprise me though is that freight still runs that that way - you would think you would want to use the existing line capacity between Didcot and Reading for more passenger services. If only there was a direct freight rail link that bypassed the GWML....say from Didcot to Southampton via Newbury, maybe?

 

[swt_passenger]

How is it a painful/conflicting movement? XC use platform 3 for reversals, well out of the way rather than platforms 7, 8 or 9.

As MarkyT has pointed out they use a variety of platforms to reverse, that has always been the plan as seen in the RTT on a day by day basis. They could not use P3 for all reversals anyway, as there is often more than one train doing it at the same time. It is a pretty regular occurrence to have XC in P3 and P7 together. I regular catch XC trains to the south coast in P8, and it isn't that unusual to arrive from the south coast into a relief side platform via the feeder lines.

 

[Richard_B]

Like most XC services they appear not to be terribly fast because of all the stopping they do.
Looking at today's XC service that arrives in Bournemouth at 1213, it has come from didcot because of the works at Oxford in a scheduled time of 1Hr 48.
(Google maps gives a driving time of 1hr30.) The train is stopped at stations for 19.5 mins in this journey, the Lions share coming from Reading, with 11 minutes.

Let's try and speed it up..

I haven't looked but presume that most -if not all- of the linespeed for the journey isn't 125. The train does about 4 stops an hour with 14 minutes between them. With acceleration and braking youd get just under half an hour at top speed per hour of travelling. So raising the linespeed 15mph for the whole length - presuming it can be done - gets 5mins off.

This leaves the only other option as skipping stations. Reading is the biggest station on the journey it would be madness to skip it. The smallest are Brockenhurst at ~1.1 M journeys a year and Airport Parkway at 1.6M a year. I have heard previously that skipping a stop saves 5mins for a Pendolino from 125... so cutting 2 stops might give you 8 minutes.

Finally, I guess reversal doesn't have to take 11 minutes but is given that so the XC hits its path on the way out even if it is a little late arriving. Let's assume we can redo the timetable and cut out the buffer time abit and call it 8 minutes at Reading.

3+8+5 is 16 minutes. it's now roughly comparable to car time taken. But to get there weve had to shake the magic money tree for 100miles of upgrades that aren't priority, obliterate the timetable at Reading and anger 2 sets of passengers for cutting their service.

Not convinced that it makes the journey any fairer or better for passengers nesr the solent

 

[BestWestern]

I'll be the luddite and say it then; screw the Reading malarkey, just get shot of the Voyagers and put a proper train back on it!

 

[swt_passenger]

AIUI anything to do with raising line speed between Basingstoke and Bournemouth just means XC run into the back of an SWT or freight service sooner. As it is down direction XCs follow just behind the Portsmouth and Poole stopping services from Basingstoke, the latter being 2 hourly for the Southampton XC terminators.

Then to cap it all the option of running the other XC Reading terminator down to Southampton has been explained to be impossible for capacity reasons on the route; so a speed up of anything seems highly unlikely.

There have been minor timetable tweaks since Reading remodelling was finished, but they've chosen to increase dwell time at certain stations including Reading. For example the Southampton call in the Man Picc service now gets a 3 or 4 minute dwell and departs at xx16 or xx17 rather than xx15.

 

[Townsend Hook]

Incidentally the raison d'être of Reading West way back in 1906 was to allow cross country services to avoid reversing at Reading General..

 

[XDM]

Reading is an essential stop for all the reasons given above. But what is needed is an infrastructure improvement that would revolutionise south west trains time tabling as well as speeding up Bournemouth Reading cross country. A flyover at Basingstoke is essential.
The land is there. The drawings are probably there from Southern days. NR have finally got some expertise at building them( & cancelling them,re EGIP),ie Hitchin,Norton Bridge,Reading. Freight trains would no longer sit north of Basingstoke waiting to get a path across & blocking a speeded up XC. Every train would benefit. The only organisation that won't do it is a failed one like NR. Further east Woking junction also needs a flyover. It has the land & I have seen the Southern master plan for a double track flyover. It too is essential. Get on with it NR. Prove you are no longer failed!
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
The much trumpeted junction renewal at Basingstoke which raised Reading line speeds towards Bournemouth from 15 to a grand 25 mph has been a pitiful failure. It took months of weekend closures. For a few weeks after completion the up fast towards Woking was back to its normal 90mph. Since then,for two years it's been a TSR of 50 & sometimes 40 mph. A Network Rail that cherished railways would have done the job properly,with 40 mph across the junction to get those heavy container trains briskly out if the way,or better still the flyover.

 

[HSTEd]

And where does the money for that come from?

 

[MarkyT]

The much trumpeted junction renewal at Basingstoke which raised Reading line speeds towards Bournemouth from 15 to a grand 25 mph has been a pitiful failure.

No it was a successful junction and signalling renewal with a few small upgrades thrown in. It maintained most existing functionality with a little speed improvement and some additional layout flexibility. Something had to be done due to age and condition of assets. While it would have been nice to bundle in a few more enhancements those had not been identified and developed sufficiently at the early planning stages and no money had been budgeted by appropriate sponsors. Having a good baseline of new infrastructure in good condition now however makes future upgrades a lot easier and reduces risk in carrying them out, but such changes will be expensive nevertheless.

For a few weeks after completion the up fast towards Woking was back to its normal 90mph. Since then,for two years it's been a TSR of 50 & sometimes 40 mph. A Network Rail that cherished railways would have done the job properly,with 40 mph across the junction to get those heavy container trains briskly out if the way,or better still the flyover.

I don't think the geometry could have been tweaked further to allow 40MPH junction turnouts without significant expensive realignment and structures work. The up fast restriction is unfortunate. If it had been a simple plain track issue I would have thought it would have been fixed sooner so it suggests something more serious, perhaps something collapsed under the formation?

 

[The Ham]

And where does the money for that come from?

A load of extra track access charges once Crossrail 2 is built and Basingstoke is no longer a bottleneck on the network. SWT could also benefit if the Basingstoke stoppers could use the flyover to swap directions (although personally I think that there could be a good case to extend them to Salisbury to allow the DMU services to skip a few more of the smaller stations). Given that SWT is often cited as the biggest payer of premiums to the government then investing so that they can be more profitable would seem like a good idea.

If the trains were a bit faster (see below) and more people wanted to use the train rather than their cars it would mean longer XC trains and once the route is electric all the way from Bournemouth through to Newcastle that would also mean no more Voyagers needed (which would save a load of track maintenance).

Once the conversion to AC happens south of Basingstoke, then there could be a case for some limited line speed improvements (say to 110mph where appropriate so the 450's and 444's could run at the same speed as the similar 350's). Although there would still be freight in the way (although some could be routed via Salisbury) it would reduce some of the issue of SWT's units getting in the way.

 

[MarkyT]

Once the conversion to AC happens south of Basingstoke, then there could be a case for some limited line speed improvements (say to 110mph where appropriate so the 450's and 444's could run at the same speed as the similar 350's). Although there would still be freight in the way (although some could be routed via Salisbury) it would reduce some of the issue of SWT's units getting in the way.

Don't forget freight could benefit greatly from OHLE with much improved starting acceleration, climbing ability and speed maintenance. The latest Wessex Route Study also considers dynamic loops, four miles in length extended from Wallers Ash to Micheldever that would be used by expresses to overtake freight and stopping passenger services.

 

[edwin_m]

There's a Basingstoke flyover proposal in the Wessex Route Study.

 

[AndyW33]

Incidentally the raison d'être of Reading West way back in 1906 was to allow cross country services to avoid reversing at Reading General..

Quite, and I've been on (steam hauled) cross country services back in the 1960s that avoided Reading General and stopped at Reading West instead.
All this did was transfer the pinch point to Basingstoke, where you could easily wait 30 minutes for a path onto the South Western line on a summer Saturday.
On weekdays things tended to run according to the working timetable and a lot of time was saved by avoiding the reversal at Reading General, instead changing locos at Oxford. Come the Class 47s, the loco changes were cut out as well. The reversals started once the frequency was increased from the original two or three inter-regional trains a day.

 

[6Gman]

Not convinced that it makes the journey any fairer or better for passengers nesr the solent

This concept of "fairness" keeps coming up on different threads. In this context what does it mean?

 

[Master29]

Somewhere in the South getting a raw deal. No, I won`t have that.

 

[jimm]

We don't seem very ambitious at times. If it takes 5 hours to go 200 miles, why aim for anything faster if people already put up with it right? It's rather annoying. Reminds me of the Paddington to Hereford and also Cheltenham Spa route - that's an Inter-village!! It was a local service west of Oxford and Swindon respectively, I lost the will to live - could have walked quicker! Intercity - clue's in the name. They surely have other trains for these villages.

Ah, the old chestnut about serving the great metropolises that are Worcester (population 100,000), Hereford (55,000), Gloucester (120,000) and Cheltenham (115,000). If you think there is sufficient traffic between those places and Swindon/Oxford, Reading and London to justify frequent express services, sailing through all the intermediate stations, which would instead be served by other trains, dream on.

There are all of three stops between Swindon and Gloucester. Kemble may be in a village but Cirencester, population 20,000 and still growing, is 10 minutes' away. Last time I looked, Stroud (pop 15,000 and probably the same again within 15 minutes of the station) was a town, so both places justify stops by London trains and no one is going to mess about with a local service all of its very own just for Stonehouse.

If you want to get to Hereford in a hurry, go to Newport and change there. That's basically been the fastest way to do it for 40 years, since the HSTs were introduced.

Do you know anything about the patterns of use on the Cotswold Line?

There is a heavy flow of traffic from stations at the eastern end of the line through Oxford on to Reading and London. Which intermediate station do you think is busiest? Surely Evesham, in a town with a population of 25,000? No, it's Charlbury, a town (Royal charter and all) with a population just under 3,000. In the past decade, traffic at Hanborough - aka Witney and Woodstock Parkway - has gone from 70,000 journeys per year to 243,000 per year. If that rate of growth has been sustained into 2015-16, it will overtake Evesham. Or should we just ignore all those passengers because they use 'village' stations.

Worcester enjoys the frequency of London trains that it does now because of the money earned at stations between Moreton-in-Marsh and Oxford. In a number of cases, services have started life operating only between London and Moreton-in-Marsh, then, having established themselves and shown there is a viable level of traffic, been extended to Worcester.

Even if the infrastructure was improved to permit more trains to run - which isn't likely to be happening any time soon - and you could potentially speed up some Worcester services by skipping certain stops, to be covered by other services, these faster trains would still most likely have to make four or five stops between Oxford and Worcester to pay their way.

As for XC bypassing Reading, nowadays a key business and employment centre and major rail interchange station, you cannot be serious...

 

[43021HST]

Like most XC services they appear not to be terribly fast because of all the stopping they do.
Looking at today's XC service that arrives in Bournemouth at 1213, it has come from didcot because of the works at Oxford in a scheduled time of 1Hr 48.
(Google maps gives a driving time of 1hr30.) The train is stopped at stations for 19.5 mins in this journey, the Lions share coming from Reading, with 11 minutes.

Let's try and speed it up..

I haven't looked but presume that most -if not all- of the linespeed for the journey isn't 125. The train does about 4 stops an hour with 14 minutes between them. With acceleration and braking youd get just under half an hour at top speed per hour of travelling. So raising the linespeed 15mph for the whole length - presuming it can be done - gets 5mins off.

This leaves the only other option as skipping stations. Reading is the biggest station on the journey it would be madness to skip it. The smallest are Brockenhurst at ~1.1 M journeys a year and Airport Parkway at 1.6M a year. I have heard previously that skipping a stop saves 5mins for a Pendolino from 125... so cutting 2 stops might give you 8 minutes.

Finally, I guess reversal doesn't have to take 11 minutes but is given that so the XC hits its path on the way out even if it is a little late arriving. Let's assume we can redo the timetable and cut out the buffer time abit and call it 8 minutes at Reading.

3+8+5 is 16 minutes. it's now roughly comparable to car time taken. But to get there weve had to shake the magic money tree for 100miles of upgrades that aren't priority, obliterate the timetable at Reading and anger 2 sets of passengers for cutting their service.

Not convinced that it makes the journey any fairer or better for passengers nesr the solent

I think you're forgetting the purpose of Cross Country services in general. They're not too be as fast as possible, they're to serve as many population centres as reasonably possible. If you want speed from Bournemouth, catch a Waterloo service.

 

[route:oxford]

Has the XC timetable through Reading been significanly recast since the Voyagers were introduced?

I don't do the Oxford:Reading route quite as often as I used to, but it was always delightful when I felt the sway at Didcot that told me that we were switching to the "fasts".

The journey time would be cut from about 28 to 18 minutes.

 

[jimm]

Has the XC timetable through Reading been significanly recast since the Voyagers were introduced?

I don't do the Oxford:Reading route quite as often as I used to, but it was always delightful when I felt the sway at Didcot that told me that we were switching to the "fasts".

The journey time would be cut from about 28 to 18 minutes.

No significant changes between Oxford and Reading. The principal change on the South Coast 'arm' of XC in recent years was the extension of six of the Reading terminators to run on to Southampton and back in December 2010.

 

[infobleep]

Reading is an essential stop for all the reasons given above. But what is needed is an infrastructure improvement that would revolutionise south west trains time tabling as well as speeding up Bournemouth Reading cross country. A flyover at Basingstoke is essential.
The land is there. The drawings are probably there from Southern days. NR have finally got some expertise at building them( & cancelling them,re EGIP),ie Hitchin,Norton Bridge,Reading. Freight trains would no longer sit north of Basingstoke waiting to get a path across & blocking a speeded up XC. Every train would benefit. The only organisation that won't do it is a failed one like NR. Further east Woking junction also needs a flyover. It has the land & I have seen the Southern master plan for a double track flyover. It too is essential. Get on with it NR. Prove you are no longer failed!
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
The much trumpeted junction renewal at Basingstoke which raised Reading line speeds towards Bournemouth from 15 to a grand 25 mph has been a pitiful failure. It took months of weekend closures. For a few weeks after completion the up fast towards Woking was back to its normal 90mph. Since then,for two years it's been a TSR of 50 & sometimes 40 mph. A Network Rail that cherished railways would have done the job properly,with 40 mph across the junction to get those heavy container trains briskly out if the way,or better still the flyover.

Why did Southern fail to implement the flyovers at Basingstoke and Woking? Were they all talk and no action?

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--- old post above --- --- new post below ---

I think you're forgetting the purpose of Cross Country services in general. They're not too be as fast as possible, they're to serve as many population centres as reasonably possible. If you want speed from Bournemouth, catch a Waterloo service.

And then have fun going on the underground with heavy bags. If only there was a simple cross London connection from Waterloo to Euston that didn't require escalators.

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[swt_passenger]

Why did Southern fail to implement the flyovers at Basingstoke and Woking? Were they all talk and no action?

There was a minor conflict known as WW2...

 

[Firesprite]

Why did Southern fail to implement the flyovers at Basingstoke and Woking? Were they all talk and no action?

--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
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As with the Dawish Cutoff, Both projects were shelved when the Austrian house-painter invaded Poland in 39.

 

[infobleep]

There was a minor conflict known as WW2...

That's just another excuse from a railway company only interested in its profits and not the interests of its passengers! :joking by the way:

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