But the railways are a very safe form of transport anyway. No government is going to spend vast sums of money converting already electrified railway lines from 3rd rail to OHLE just to marginally improve rail safety, when we have a massive number of unelectrified railways to deal with first, never mind the NHS, social care, education etc
New third rail is not banned outright, but is subject to a very strong safety case (East London Line being case in point). I dont know the exact process behind the decision making for not replacing existing 3rd rail installations , but I'd be rather surprised if the question of how it was paid for had not come up.
No-one is asking for more than a few minor extensions such as the North Downs Line, Basingstoke to Salisbury and Ashford to Ore.
That is your idea of a 'minor extension'. Judging by the implementation of the ruling so far, it would seem that the ORR doesn't agree that it is minor. The most notable extension of 3rd rail since the ruling was the link from just north of Peckham Queens Road to the flying junction were it joins the main route to Brockley, a distance of about 1.4Km. In addition, the track from the Peckham Junction to the bridges by Millwall Stadium about 65% of the total extension, is elevated on a viaduct, virtualy eradicating access to members of the public, so the ORR probably accepted that as justifying a 'small extension'.
Most of the country falls over when it snows.
When it snows hard enough, everything falls over, whether third rail, OHLE or no electrification, because the snow physically blocks the lines and can damage rolling stock, as happened in 2018.
Were 769s always planned, or were they in part brought about by the incomplete job of electrification? If the Thames branches and Didcot-Oxford had been completed as originally specified, then surely no bi/tri-mode would have been necessary for them, leaving the only focus the North Downs line.
That is a bit of a leap. The 769s seem to work to some extent. The working conditions for traincrew on 769s aren't acceptable in the modern age.
No, it is to keep the Turbos going doing the work they have been doing for the last 30 years.
Reading to Basingstoke wasn't due for electrification. 769s were never intended for Didcot to Oxford.
They wouldn't need to buy new trains for a while. Simply stop scrapping some of the older ones.
Trying to put GWR drivers in the cab of a 455 isn't going to be any easier that getting them to drive a 769.
No ORR\RSSB should be told to stop being obstinate and allow reasonable infill schemes, that being any extension of Merseyrail, Ashford-Ore, Uckfield, North Downs. I would also give consideration to Reading- Basingstoke-Salisbury-Southampton
I know that Wikipedia is not always correct, but if the class 769 units where never intended for Didcot to Oxford, why does the class 769 wikipedia details state the following:
Third rail ices up a lot quicker than OLE or sets of points.
These are not minor extensions. Extending the 3rd rail to North camp and Shalford would be minor extensions.
Reading -Basingtoke should be OLE regardless. The service is operated by GWR from Reading depot, OLE is better and it wouldn't need any additional power feeds. Oh, and the signalling on the line is already 25kv immunised whereas 750v immunisation only goes a short way up the branch at the Basingstoke end.
'Only' minor injuries are still not nice for the poor sound who's got to deal with them, or their friends who saw them get injured. More frequent occurrence of less-but-still serious incidents vs less frequent but very serious is a difficult balancing act though.
It was set out in discussion here - https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...mation-discussion.174866/page-17#post-5027788 - the air conditioning issue, cramped conditions, and drivers seat issues were all cited by posters as objections staff have had, along with the fact that many of the drivers would end up with 769s as their primary workplace. Basically that asking staff to work in a new workplace designed 30-odd years ago is not accepted by those staff.
Electrification (including obsolescent systems like 3rd rail) is a long-term investment, typically 30-40 years before significant refurbishment and towards 120 years for complete replacement. Keeping a largely experimental modification of 30 year old EMUs in service is an altogether different decision, and if the service is important enough to even consider a non-approved electrification model to mitigate reliability or driver compatibility issues with the 769s, then there must be more than enough cash sloshing around to procure a few new battery/ac/DC multiple units from a bona fide manufacturer. That would meet all the issues about diesels and pollution, more 3rd rail, and problems with 30+ year-old rolling stock.
The OLE on large parts of the ECML is a known problem, and the MML isn't much better as both were done rather cheaply using headspans and wide spacing, so it doesn't take much to knock them out. There's currently a refurbishment programme to change headspans for Gantries (not sure on timescales). Meanwhile the third rail in winter has to have nightly departmental trains running anti-icing and de-icing circuits over the entire network to prevent freezing over the top and preventing contact.
I'm not sure this is fair. Even though the electrification infills in the sothern 3rd rail area are small, loads of stock used exclusively on 3rd rail services is already capable of running on OHLE, so it really wouldn't matter if there were a few OHLE islands in southern 3rd rail land
As this line is in between OHLE and 3rd rail territory, it should clearly be electrified with OHLE for the safety and efficiency benefits, even if the SWR service becomes more important. Dual-voltage rolling stock really isn't that expensive, and loads of trains switch between OHLE and 3rd rail multiple times every day.
The answer of course is to upgrade the largely metro systems these vehicles would work on to a modern operating system like Dubai or Singapore that doesn't need a drivers compartment at all.
That was one of the DfT's better decisions to force all mainline stock to either be capable of OLE operation or at least retrofittable for it. It has driven the architecture of the traction power system such that most new trains can be offered for DC, ac or both requirements.
A future with trains that have no drivers isn't going to happen on the unelectrified and barely signalled (ie long blocks) North Downs Line though.
... and a national grid supply.
From the original announcements, Reading to Gatwick and Reading to Oxford. There was talk of them running to London but given their unreliability I doubt GWR want them on the GWML.
That conflicts with this though.
The setup for a 60km long section like Basingstoke to Salisbury would I imagine be covered by no more than two simple grid feeds, especially if it was done at the same time a Reading to Basingstoke where the line passes the Bramley 400kV substation, and one of it's 400kV supergrid lines almost parallels the line to Andover.
If it was that easy it would already have been done. Any change to the actual point of collection, (e.g. side or bottom contact) would cause massive disruption for a number of years. There would be modifications to the shoe lowering mechanism on hundreds of Electrostars and throughout the conversion period, through running would be serverely restricted. It could also cause ballast issues wherever the trains were taken.
The following references are cited as the source for that information:
