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Do the British have an aversion to building new alignments?

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AndrewE

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Soon to be 11 platforms but that is splitting hairs. And you’d be surprised how full they are.
and the other southerly destinations? Are you really saying quadrupling Welwyn and further north isn't worth doing because they can't handle the trains arriving at the London end? (Admittedly Euston does have 6 tracks on the way in because of the DC lines - all terminating, of course - but Kings Cross has both the Thameslink through tracks and Moorgate to mop up what it can't handle.)
 
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Ianno87

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and the other southerly destinations? Are you really saying quadrupling Welwyn and further north isn't worth doing because they can't handle the trains arriving at the London end? (Admittedly Euston does have 6 tracks on the way in because of the DC lines - all terminating, of course - but Kings Cross has both the Thameslink through tracks and Moorgate to mop up what it can't handle.)

Remember also that the Fast Lines are already very full from Finsbury Park to Woolmer Green. The trains that merge then split again at Welwyn only amount to 2tph that would be 'freed up' by 4-tracking the viaduct. The multi-£bns needed would struggle to stack up.
 

AndrewE

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You should disregard deltic08's spin, the line is completely blocked in the Ripon area itself, firstly by the Ripon by-pass and then at the former station site which has a small industrial estate built on it. It would certainly be possible to reinstate from Starbeck to a new station site on the south-eastern edge of Ripon, and I think it is a good idea, but anything else would be far too expensive.
Why worry about "a small industrial estate?" It is almost certain that the buildings will be relatively light construction and relocation to new premises nearby might be a benefit in disguise for the occupants.
Public transport is too important to just give up on improvements for minor reasons like this. How do you define "too expensive?"
 

Shaw S Hunter

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Why worry about "a small industrial estate?" It is almost certain that the buildings will be relatively light construction and relocation to new premises nearby might be a benefit in disguise for the occupants.
Public transport is too important to just give up on improvements for minor reasons like this. How do you define "too expensive?"

Have a look at an aerial view of the area. The only way to rebuild the railway anywhere near its former alignment would be by building it on stilts above the by-pass. Undeniably expensive to build and a permanent nightmare going forward as regards maintenance of both railway and road. Alternatively find a new route for the road. But don't forgot to allow for the necessary flood mitigation measures for the nearby River Ure. Supporters of public transport do themselves no favours in convincing themselves that public transport should be the prime transport option for everyone everywhere. That's fine for heavily urbanised areas, elsewhere it needs a decent volume of passengers to justify the cost: rural North Yorkshire is not such a place.
 

Bald Rick

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and the other southerly destinations? Are you really saying quadrupling Welwyn and further north isn't worth doing because they can't handle the trains arriving at the London end? (Admittedly Euston does have 6 tracks on the way in because of the DC lines - all terminating, of course - but Kings Cross has both the Thameslink through tracks and Moorgate to mop up what it can't handle.)

Moorgate and Thameslink will both be full. Kings X almost full, but then the interaction between service swapping slow to fast and vice versa (to get around the Moorgates) eats paths.

Worth noting that there are the same number of services peak hour services on the ECML at Welwyn North in the 2020 timetable as there are at Milton Keynes today.
 

Bald Rick

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Have a look at an aerial view of the area. The only way to rebuild the railway anywhere near its former alignment would be by building it on stilts above the by-pass. Undeniably expensive to build and a permanent nightmare going forward as regards maintenance of both railway and road. Alternatively find a new route for the road. But don't forgot to allow for the necessary flood mitigation measures for the nearby River Ure. Supporters of public transport do themselves no favours in convincing themselves that public transport should be the prime transport option for everyone everywhere. That's fine for heavily urbanised areas, elsewhere it needs a decent volume of passengers to justify the cost: rural North Yorkshire is not such a place.

To be fair, public transport could be the prime mover in much of market town North Yorkshire. It would certainly be the most efficient. It just wouldn’t be steel wheels on steel rails.
 

Pigeon

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The Victorians built a lot, but a lot of it wasn't particularly fit-for-purpose. Lessons which perhaps haven't been learnt for HS2.

At least they did build it, though, as opposed to spending so long failing to get their act together that the bills for all the hot air start to exceed the original cost estimates for the entire project and we still haven't got any forrader - which is what I was getting at. They were also generally quicker to get the building done in itself, despite the greater scope of their projects in many cases (and in all cases where the modern project is a reopening) and lack of technological assistance.

Agree that a lot of it was "bad railway", but a lot of that was down to actual genuine competition being just as silly as the fake version imposed on privatised successors of former nationalised industries; this produced a highly diverse exhibition of different daftnesses. Another cause of badness was down to technological evolution - what was good at the time it was built became bad in the light of later developments. Also, a wide variety of external constraints existed or were created which imposed badness, or made its appearance inevitable, despite the railways' opposition. And certainly, in all categories, lessons have been imperfectly learned, not learned, forgotten, or deliberately disregarded, and errors repeated, some aspects of HS2 being among the examples.

It seems that most proponents of re-opening old Victorian lines are against HS2 for some reason.

Correlation is not the same as causation :) Also, to describe me as a "proponent of re-opening old Victorian lines", while basically true, gets the wrong angle. For the purposes of this discussion I'm concentrating on connectivity; it's just that the two have considerable overlap, from the number of cases where the connectivity was lost in the first place because a Victorian line closed, and can best be restored by putting it back. I am leaving out of consideration cases like the S&D, which while I would like to see it reopened for sentimental reasons would provide a poor improvement in connectivity compared to alternatives designed for the purpose.

If HS2 followed the Grand Central route then I'm sure people's objections wouldn't be quite so vociferous (though that's obviously a terrible alignment to follow, managing to avoid Birmingham as it does)

(Great Central) No; since avoiding places is one of my objections to it, it would be silly to advocate a terrible alignment. Also, one of the other aspects to which I object has as a consequence, though irrelevant to the objection, that it can't use the GC route. The kind of scheme I would prefer to see might use parts of the GC route, but it wouldn't be HS2.
 

deltic08

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You should disregard deltic08's spin, the line is completely blocked in the Ripon area itself, firstly by the Ripon by-pass and then at the former station site which has a small industrial estate built on it. It would certainly be possible to reinstate from Starbeck to a new station site on the south-eastern edge of Ripon, and I think it is a good idea, but anything else would be far too expensive.

I am afraid you are completely wrong. It isn't spin. I have the advantage of living in Ripon and in possession of an unpublished report on route options in the Ripon area. The bypass isn't a problem and neither is the former station site.
Harrogate Council has given route protection so there will not be any further development of the goods yard which leaves a gap wide enough for a two track railway to the north of Ripon.
The bypass only needs moving 40 feet to the East over a length of about 400 yards where the bypass used the railway trackbed. A new bridge over the River Skell will be needed for the bypass as it used the railway bridge.
This is achievable because the original embankment and river bridge was/is three tracks wide at this point and this was retained for the bypass although the width was far wider than needed for a two-
way road so the verges are wide and there is wide hatching between the two-way lanes.
Hambleton Council has given route protection to the north.
I suggest you look again before making such wild, untrue, unsubstantiated statements.
It hasn't been just crayonista. There have been many studies completed, mostly unpublished recently into many areas of reinstating a railway. Demand Forecasting, Environmental Impact, Route Options and civil engineering consideration, surveying structures, track planning, signalling, electrification, costings etc. Unofficial best cost/benefit ratio at present is 3.6 for the most basic reinstatement.
 

squizzler

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After a couple of days non activity there's lots to catch up on this thread!

Perhaps it would help concentrate the argument to describe what sort of conventional speed new lines you consider necessary in the UK? The only one I can think of is EWR from Bedford to Cambridge where the old alignment is unlikely to be used.

There have been some great suggestions already. I will add a couple through this response!

My first instance was when discussing the upgrade of the Transpennine route, which will apparently take five years and involve considerable passenger disruption. Network Rail compares the extent of these modifications to the Passenger Upgrade of West Coast Mainline. I have heard, maybe partially in jest, that in retrospect it would have been better to have built a new high speed line instead, which with HS2 is being done anyway. So with regard to the Transpennine link, I would have gone for a new route - the Northern Powerhouse Rail.

For example, the Virgin plan (fifteen years ago?) for a Morpeth bypass - straightening out the kink in the ECML (you know things are bad when there's a separate Wiki page for accidents on a particular stretch of line - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_accidents_at_Morpeth) - speeding up long distance journeys, leaving the line through Cramlington to be filled with local services (maybe even a Metro extension) - that would have been a brand new alignment AIUI - seemed a sensible plan to deal with a problem stretch of line - shame it came to nothing.

I recall that period around the millennium where a couple of the prospective franchises showed signs of regarding a new alignment as a natural way to improve their routes: that proposed for the east coast mainline, and I seem to recall a similar proposal was proposed to compliment the GWML (not sure how developed the last one was). These were however replicating (sections of) radial mainlines from London. and I am interested more in links that reconfigure the system away from being so London Centric.

Which leads into this thread discussing possible improvements to the Cotswold route. The existing north cotswold route route is slow and partially single track. A missing link in the network - according to Mark Casson's book cited in the opening post - would link Oxford with Cheltenham to provide links onto South Wales. Within the current network it would avoid the Severn Tunnel bottleneck on the radial route but also in conjunction with East West Rail form another cross country mainline between South Wales and East Anglia.

And of course railways quickly prompted urbanisation which hemmed in those alignments severely limiting opportunities for subsequent improvement. It's all a legacy of the laissez-faire attitude of Parliament throughout the period when we built our railways as compared to a greater tendency in other countries to provide at least a degree of strategic overview of such development.

I wonder to what extent the railway is cursed by development that occurred around stations that have subsequently closed?

Why are they finding it so hard to build a relief to the M4 between Cardiff and Newport, if road schemes are so easy to construct?

Consider the four roads on the GWML between Cardiff and Newport and the number of highway lanes linking the two cities. Given the proximity and topography there are not very many parallel roads but depending on how deep inland you make your slice between the two cities you would cut across roads totalling between 14 - 18 highway lanes.
 

squizzler

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There have been a few posts describing the HS2 contribution to the network which I thought would be better lumped in a separate post. The shape of our railway system is the result of competitive railway developers. I reckon the resulting network topography has forever conditioned us to think of railways as either London radial mainlines or as cross country routes rather than as links in a network that is supposed to efficiently connect any node (i.e. station) with any other. These links will not always divide into radial or cross country routes.

For instance as a motorist in driving from (say) Worcester to Brackley or Towcester in Northants, I would go on the M5, M42, quite a long way on the M40 to Banbury, then A43.In this instance the M40 is designed to act as a cross country as well as a radial route within the trunk road system as a whole.

I think HS2 will have provide useful cross country connectivity (i.e. between Birmingham and the East Midlands) but the choice of running into termini at Birmingham and Manchester will in my view limit the ability of the HS2 to reach its full potential in providing cross country linkages.

However if HS2 replaces the mainlines for intercity traffic from London to the North and Scotland, this implies the conventional network needs to undergo a massive rebuilding program to reorient it away from through North South traffic and towards regional connectivity. Think of West Germany when the network had to be reorientated in the absence of Berlin. Going again with the highways metaphor, if HS2 (and subsequent) is the motorway, what we need now is the programme of dual carriageways that feed the motorways and provide more local connectivity.

In no particular order, some more posts on the subject of HS2 that caught my eye...

It seems that most proponents of re-opening old Victorian lines are against HS2 for some reason.

If HS2 followed the Grand Central route then I'm sure people's objections wouldn't be quite so vociferous (though that's obviously a terrible alignment to follow, managing to avoid Birmingham as it does)

Probably true. However I am disappointed the rolling road proposal for that alignment did not come to fruition, because whilst being a line re-opening, that seemed nonetheless a hard headed commercially driven proposal rather than a bunch of puffer nutters trying to recreate the past!

Also, the Victorians built lots, but at that time they also had an economy that was growing at massive rates, while they were able to plunder the natural resources of a quarter of the world then under British military domination, and by using cheap foreign (mostly Irish) labour whose health and safety was not even a consideration.

Even then, the Victorians still managed to build lines that weren't straight, lines that duplicated other lines, lines through rural areas which were pointless when built and even more pointless when they were closed 100 years later, lines that didn't connect with each other, London termini located too far from the City, etc.

The Victorians built a lot, but a lot of it wasn't particularly fit-for-purpose. Lessons which perhaps haven't been learnt for HS2.

That the Victorian network is sub-optimal is a proven fact! Nonetheless many people think of the closed lines as like railway nostalgia books on their library bookshelf, there to be opened at will! As regards HS2, unfit for purpose is hardly something that can be levelled at the alignments themselves, being in many people's view much faster than needed! The termini are a bad idea IMO, but, looking at the bright side, this is presumably this is easier to fix than the alignments through the landscape, so on balance I still support the route.

At least they did build it, though, as opposed to spending so long failing to get their act together that the bills for all the hot air start to exceed the original cost estimates for the entire project and we still haven't got any forrader - which is what I was getting at. They were also generally quicker to get the building done in itself, despite the greater scope of their projects in many cases (and in all cases where the modern project is a reopening) and lack of technological assistance.

Agree that a lot of it was "bad railway", but a lot of that was down to actual genuine competition being just as silly as the fake version imposed on privatised successors of former nationalised industries; this produced a highly diverse exhibition of different daftnesses. Another cause of badness was down to technological evolution - what was good at the time it was built became bad in the light of later developments. Also, a wide variety of external constraints existed or were created which imposed badness, or made its appearance inevitable, despite the railways' opposition. And certainly, in all categories, lessons have been imperfectly learned, not learned, forgotten, or deliberately disregarded, and errors repeated, some aspects of HS2 being among the examples.

Correlation is not the same as causation :) Also, to describe me as a "proponent of re-opening old Victorian lines", while basically true, gets the wrong angle. For the purposes of this discussion I'm concentrating on connectivity; it's just that the two have considerable overlap, from the number of cases where the connectivity was lost in the first place because a Victorian line closed, and can best be restored by putting it back. I am leaving out of consideration cases like the S&D, which while I would like to see it reopened for sentimental reasons would provide a poor improvement in connectivity compared to alternatives designed for the purpose.

(Great Central) No; since avoiding places is one of my objections to it, it would be silly to advocate a terrible alignment. Also, one of the other aspects to which I object has as a consequence, though irrelevant to the objection, that it can't use the GC route. The kind of scheme I would prefer to see might use parts of the GC route, but it wouldn't be HS2.

An excellent post which neatly summarises many of the reasons for the Victorian network's failings. Like me you seem to be engaged in holistic thinking more about the performance of the network as a system. We think that railway building can add new connections whereas some who look at parts of the existing network in isolation might simply duplicate existing route to remove pinch points or speed restrictions.

The Swiss way is to start with the desired timetable, work out what the implications of that are for the network, do the necessary work, and then introduce the timetable—the Taktfahrplan, of course. The last really big review was Bahn-2000, and there's a superb book all about it: Mehr Zug für die Schweiz - Die Bahn-2000-Story, Christian Kräuchli & Ueli Stöckli, AS Verlag 2004 (including a large folding sheet giving the whole of that Taktfahrplan).

We too need to build our railways around the timetabling requirements. One interpretation of the Thameslink and Northern debacles is that parts of the network are too complicated to plan stable timetables, at least of the frequencies that we expect today!
 
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yorksrob

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I am afraid you are completely wrong. It isn't spin. I have the advantage of living in Ripon and in possession of an unpublished report on route options in the Ripon area. The bypass isn't a problem and neither is the former station site.
Harrogate Council has given route protection so there will not be any further development of the goods yard which leaves a gap wide enough for a two track railway to the north of Ripon.
The bypass only needs moving 40 feet to the East over a length of about 400 yards where the bypass used the railway trackbed. A new bridge over the River Skell will be needed for the bypass as it used the railway bridge.
This is achievable because the original embankment and river bridge was/is three tracks wide at this point and this was retained for the bypass although the width was far wider than needed for a two-
way road so the verges are wide and there is wide hatching between the two-way lanes.
Hambleton Council has given route protection to the north.
I suggest you look again before making such wild, untrue, unsubstantiated statements.
It hasn't been just crayonista. There have been many studies completed, mostly unpublished recently into many areas of reinstating a railway. Demand Forecasting, Environmental Impact, Route Options and civil engineering consideration, surveying structures, track planning, signalling, electrification, costings etc. Unofficial best cost/benefit ratio at present is 3.6 for the most basic reinstatement.

Excellent post. There are many routes where rail reinstatements have been shown to have the potential to be of great benefit to those areas. Tavistock and Wisbech spring to mind as other examples. Scotland and Wales have shown that this is more than possible. It's only loony London that would rather spend all of the nations capital on mega-projects.
 

Adlington

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It this context the blog posting by George Bathurst, Director and Founder, Windsor Link Railway, makes an interesting reading.
The British railway network is littered with bad planning decisions. For all the vim and technical precocity of the Victorian era's market-led approach to railway construction, Britain's rail network has remained a series of unconnected lines and branches leaving a legacy unbefitting of a modern state. Yet while some lines have since been refined with 'missing links', for instance the Ordsall Chord in Manchester, others have been ignored, allowing this legacy to exacerbate the modern strains on the national rail network.
 

HSTEd

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I thinka real problem is that so little money gets spent on infrastructure in the UK, new alignments are almost always rejected for cost reasons.
 

deltic08

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Have a look at an aerial view of the area. The only way to rebuild the railway anywhere near its former alignment would be by building it on stilts above the by-pass. Undeniably expensive to build and a permanent nightmare going forward as regards maintenance of both railway and road. Alternatively find a new route for the road. But don't forgot to allow for the necessary flood mitigation measures for the nearby River Ure. Supporters of public transport do themselves no favours in convincing themselves that public transport should be the prime transport option for everyone everywhere. That's fine for heavily urbanised areas, elsewhere it needs a decent volume of passengers to justify the cost: rural North Yorkshire is not such a place.
Again you are so wide of the mark its not worth replying.
 

deltic08

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Why worry about "a small industrial estate?" It is almost certain that the buildings will be relatively light construction and relocation to new premises nearby might be a benefit in disguise for the occupants.
Public transport is too important to just give up on improvements for minor reasons like this. How do you define "too expensive?"
Spot on.
 

DelW

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There were originally two parts to the project. The re-alignment of the most severe curve in the station itself is going ahead, but the section further north (to get rid of the dogleg over the former Joint line) has been deleted from the work.
Ah, thanks, I hadn't realised that there was to have been another stage further north. Interestingly (to me anyway), looking at old maps of the more northerly area, rebuilding the Midland main line on a more westerly route would actually seem to be reverting to the original alignment. The 1885 6" map available on the NLS site shows that there was originally a flat junction, with the Midland line diverging to the west of the LNWR. By 1885 the flyover had been built, with track shown over it but not yet connected at each end. By the 1900 map, the shared section is four-tracked, the MML passes over the bridge, and the lines to the west of the flyover have been reduced to sidings disconnected at their southern end.
 

Clip

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At least they did build it, though, as opposed to spending so long failing to get their act together that the bills for all the hot air start to exceed the original cost estimates for the entire project and we still haven't got any forrader - which is what I was getting at. They were also generally quicker to get the building done in itself, despite the greater scope of their projects in many cases (and in all cases where the modern project is a reopening) and lack of technological assistance.

To be fair though they didnt have the internet and all sort of different groups up and down the country getting out and about and hampering them - from memory most were signed off by government without much opposition - thats the problem with today as MPs seek to appease their constituents to keep them in a job

I am afraid you are completely wrong. It isn't spin. I have the advantage of living in Ripon and in possession of an unpublished report on route options in the Ripon area. The bypass isn't a problem and neither is the former station site.
Harrogate Council has given route protection so there will not be any further development of the goods yard which leaves a gap wide enough for a two track railway to the north of Ripon.
The bypass only needs moving 40 feet to the East over a length of about 400 yards where the bypass used the railway trackbed. A new bridge over the River Skell will be needed for the bypass as it used the railway bridge.
This is achievable because the original embankment and river bridge was/is three tracks wide at this point and this was retained for the bypass although the width was far wider than needed for a two-
way road so the verges are wide and there is wide hatching between the two-way lanes.
Hambleton Council has given route protection to the north.
I suggest you look again before making such wild, untrue, unsubstantiated statements.
It hasn't been just crayonista. There have been many studies completed, mostly unpublished recently into many areas of reinstating a railway. Demand Forecasting, Environmental Impact, Route Options and civil engineering consideration, surveying structures, track planning, signalling, electrification, costings etc. Unofficial best cost/benefit ratio at present is 3.6 for the most basic reinstatement.


Is there a reason why you have such reports and why they have not been published then? If the BCR is that high then i would imagine the people compiling these reports would be publishing them in every newspaper in the county and also in Rail magazines and journals showing how good it is and get more backing. But they dont. Now why is that?
 

quantinghome

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I like it, I like it!
They are building 10,000 houses in East Leeds either side of the Cross Gates-Wetherby trackbed. Are they allowing room for future proofing and reopening? Are they hell. They are going to build over it. 10,000 houses is going be a sizeable town in its own right and big enough to have a station and short spur opening onto the Leeds-York/Selby line. In fact it will be big enough for two stations and bigger than Wetherby or Selby!
Leeds City Council have told me they plan to move commuters in the peaks by bus into an already gridlocked city centre. That is 300 double decker movements in the peaks.
A train could move 1000 commuters in 9 minutes into the heart of the city from here every 10 minutes.

You are aware of the new station proposed at Thorpe Park? This is a perfectly reasonable location to service the new East Leeds Extension. Perhaps a station at Barwick Road would be slightly more optimal for the housing developments, but that would be at the expense of serving the expanded Thorpe Park business and retail park. The main problem with any reopening of the Cross Gates-Wetherby trackbed is the junction needed at Cross Gates on the (extremely busy) Leeds-York line. A flat junction may not be viable as it creates conflicting moves and reduces the main line capacity; there also looks to be insufficient space for a grade-separated junction.
 

deltic08

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Having checked online, the continuous motorway was only completed (as far as Gateshead) six months ago (by upgrading the existing A-road) - the fact that London to Gateshead has only just become a continuous motorway in 2018, and Newcastle to Edinburgh still relies on long stretches of single carriageway A-road, is worth remembering when we see people claim that new roads are ten-a-penny - if they were then North East England motoristis wouldn't be reliant upon such poor infrastructure (whilst the region has had 125mph electrified trains on the ECML for some time now).

Grass is always greener.


Really?

Your road atlas showed a continuous motorway from London to Newcastle in 1970? (rather than the piecemeal combination of A-road and Motorway that has only allowed London - Gateshead to be done all on motorway in March 2018)

I wish I had a 1970s map that predicted the future!

You are changing the goal posts to suite your argument.

The subject was Toon to Scotch Corner and that has been motorway since 1970. All the words about the state of the road system south of Scotch Corner since 1970 is irrelevant to this argument.
 

DarloRich

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There we see an example of something we certainly do have an aversion to - dealing with what are really rather trivial difficulties.

Bridge missing? Sure, it's a shame, but... just build one then. It's not that hard. When the Victorians built the original line, they had to build all the bridges, not just the odd one or two - and it was a lot more difficult for them, doing it all by hand without the advantages of things like reinforced concrete or massive powered lifting equipment. And many of the bridges that do still exist are likely to need complete rebuilding anyway because they've spent so long without maintenance that they're too far gone to be repaired; one which is missing altogether is actually easier to deal with than this, since you don't have to clear the old one out of the way first...

More generally, we have an aversion to getting stuck in to any kind of practical activity; we far prefer sitting around talking about it to actually doing it. This would be understandable, if not sensible, if the people doing the talking were the same ones who were going to have to do the shovelling, but they're not. If the Victorians were doing HS2 (not that I agree with it, but that's irrelevant), it would be up and running by now. The saga of East West Rail is even worse - on the western half at least, at the time the idea first sprung up we could have just re-started running trains over track that was already there; instead we have sat around procrastinating for so long that it now costs hundreds of millions just to get back to where we were before all the yapping started.

I don't think there's much case that we have an aversion specifically to new alignments. It's just that it can look that way, partly because there is so often an old alignment on any given proposed route, and partly because we're so bad at doing anything and that is most obvious where there wasn't anything before.

I like it, I like it!
They are building 10,000 houses in East Leeds either side of the Cross Gates-Wetherby trackbed. Are they allowing room for future proofing and reopening? Are they hell. They are going to build over it. 10,000 houses is going be a sizeable town in its own right and big enough to have a station and short spur opening onto the Leeds-York/Selby line. In fact it will be big enough for two stations and bigger than Wetherby or Selby!
Leeds City Council have told me they plan to move commuters in the peaks by bus into an already gridlocked city centre. That is 300 double decker movements in the peaks.
A train could move 1000 commuters in 9 minutes into the heart of the city from here every 10 minutes.

Why worry about "a small industrial estate?" It is almost certain that the buildings will be relatively light construction and relocation to new premises nearby might be a benefit in disguise for the occupants.
Public transport is too important to just give up on improvements for minor reasons like this. How do you define "too expensive?"

I am afraid it is now time for me to enter like the spectre at the feast and rattle my chains. How do you propose to pay for all of this? That is the problem. Money is always the problem. I real know that isnt of interest to posters here who seem to live in some Field of Dreams/Captian Picard fantasy world but to those of us in the real world it is fundamental.

The government wont release funds for these ideas. You can whine about that all you like and say they should. Perhaps they should but they wont. If they wont then the line wont get built. Whining and moaning wont change that. Your next idea will be an S106 agreement with the developers. Fine. Look at Wixams. Hmmm. Not so fine. Perhaps the local councils could contribute. Oh no. They are skint and are not suicidal enough to raise council tax to fund investment of this type when they cant even fix potholes. Again, perhaps they should invest but they wont.

Perhaps a developer could be persuaded to take the cost of developing a new line entirely on their own risk. This is certainly one the NR CP6 ideas. Perhaps it will work. However I doubt they would get a return in anything like a short enough timescale to facilitate commercial borrowing.

Again you are so wide of the mark its not worth replying.

funny how you only like to respond to those who agree with you!

An excellent post which neatly summarises many of the reasons for the Victorian network's failings. Like me you seem to be engaged in holistic thinking more about the performance of the network as a system. We think that railway building can add new connections whereas some who look at parts of the existing network in isolation might simply duplicate existing route to remove pinch points or speed restrictions.

Excellent post. There are many routes where rail reinstatements have been shown to have the potential to be of great benefit to those areas. Tavistock and Wisbech spring to mind as other examples. Scotland and Wales have shown that this is more than possible. It's only loony London that would rather spend all of the nations capital on mega-projects.

Fine - who pays for it? Saying the government should pay is a cop out that is disconnected from the real world. I am sorry to be blunt but that is the overriding issue that you and others seem unable to consider.
 

DarloRich

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Even if we decide that China's is excessive, 4% is probably a reasonable goal and we would have to spend something like £45 billion additionally, each and every year to achieve it.

I am VERY happy to agree that is what should happen. However, it doesn't. That wont change under this administration. Therefore the money we do have has to be spent wisely and very carefully.
 

Senex

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Ah, thanks, I hadn't realised that there was to have been another stage further north. Interestingly (to me anyway), looking at old maps of the more northerly area, rebuilding the Midland main line on a more westerly route would actually seem to be reverting to the original alignment. The 1885 6" map available on the NLS site shows that there was originally a flat junction, with the Midland line diverging to the west of the LNWR. By 1885 the flyover had been built, with track shown over it but not yet connected at each end. By the 1900 map, the shared section is four-tracked, the MML passes over the bridge, and the lines to the west of the flyover have been reduced to sidings disconnected at their southern end.
The Market Harborough works, including the separation of the Midland and LNW routes were still being finished off in 1885, as you've noted from the map. And the old Midland running lines and some other sidings remained accessible from the north only. This is the third time a project to get rid of the flyover alignment and revert to the old Midland route has been de-specced from a project. The first was during the Leicester re-signalling and the second was some fifteen to twenty years ago. Now we have the third. So much for Grayling's announcement that it was only the electrification that was being cancelled and the other route-improvements were all staying! From what has been published it looks as if the approach round the curve to Market Harborough will go to 90 as planned, but that north of the new station there will be the present 85 limit instead of the planned 110.
 

Clip

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Thats quite a bit of cash that but imagine how many drs and nurses we could pay for with that money - and that is the answer as to why we dont spend such a percentage
 

yorksrob

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I am afraid it is now time for me to enter like the spectre at the feast and rattle my chains. How do you propose to pay for all of this? That is the problem. Money is always the problem. I real know that isnt of interest to posters here who seem to live in some Field of Dreams/Captian Picard fantasy world but to those of us in the real world it is fundamental.

The government wont release funds for these ideas. You can whine about that all you like and say they should. Perhaps they should but they wont. If they wont then the line wont get built. Whining and moaning wont change that. Your next idea will be an S106 agreement with the developers. Fine. Look at Wixams. Hmmm. Not so fine. Perhaps the local councils could contribute. Oh no. They are skint and are not suicidal enough to raise council tax to fund investment of this type when they cant even fix potholes. Again, perhaps they should invest but they wont.

Perhaps a developer could be persuaded to take the cost of developing a new line entirely on their own risk. This is certainly one the NR CP6 ideas. Perhaps it will work. However I doubt they would get a return in anything like a short enough timescale to facilitate commercial borrowing.



funny how you only like to respond to those who agree with you!





Fine - who pays for it? Saying the government should pay is a cop out that is disconnected from the real world. I am sorry to be blunt but that is the overriding issue that you and others seem unable to consider.

I don't see why saying that Government should pay for it is a cop out. Government pays for many infrastructure projects with a good BCR, note the slew of road projects in recent years, so there's no reason why it shouldn't pay for rail ones as well.
 

DarloRich

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I don't see why saying that Government should pay for it is a cop out. Government pays for many infrastructure projects with a good BCR, note the slew of road projects in recent years, so there's no reason why it shouldn't pay for rail ones as well.

but they don't want to / are not able to! Therefore what is funding plan b? Saying the government should fund wont get anything built.

( and BTW i agree they should be funding more railway projects)
 

AndrewE

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I didn’t say new alignments. I said “...new chords, flyovers and alignments.”

The ten I thought of on the ECML, and there’s more, were:
Holloway flyover
New chords and grade separation between Finsbury Park and Drayton Park
Welwyn flyover
Hitchin flyover
Offord realignment
Peterborough reliagnment (twice)
Allington Chord (not on ECML, but for the ECML)
Joan Croft flyover and new line
Selby diversion
Penmanshiel
I think the fact that you have had to go back nearly 40 years (Penmanshiel was 1980,) introduce a "new alignment" that had to be built to replace a collapsed tunnel on the ECML (Penmanshiel again) and include 2 or 3 items that were part of the same upgrade - if Offord went with Welwyn and Hitchin (it's so unimportant that I can't find out anything about it) and bring in minor realignments rather proves my point.
We do have very few new alignments on our railway lines, especially when compared with the road network, I think almost everyone could think of more completely new roads near where they live built in the last decade than new railways in the whole country in 20 or 30 years.
 

deltic08

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So you've decided that every place around a threshold that your small town conveniently meets should have rail station?

Despite the three stations you already have within about a dozen miles?

Convenient.:
No not me, the Report published in 2009 "Connecting Communities" where it stated that all settlements over 10,000 population should be rail connected to the nearest county town or city. In the case of Ripon, north to the county town of Northallerton, and south to the city of Leeds via Harrogate. The Commons |Transport Select Committee approved reinstating to Ripon as a way of improving public transport poverty in rural North Yorkshire and TfN have taken this on board.

And no, Harrogate, Thirsk and Northallerton are not convenient as railheads for Ripon unless you own a car and even then the station car parks at Harrogate and Thirsk are full by 0800 weekdays.

Ripon is the largest settlement in North Yorkshire not rail connected, followed by Richmond that was on the end of a branch line. Ripon was on a through line which is more desirable as it connects at both ends and can be used by other traffic.

York-Northallerton is the only part of the whole ECML without a diversion. If it had to close for any reason in an emergency, currently about seven times a year for the last 7 years, then the job stops with all the disruption that that entails. With the Harrogate/Starbeck-Ripon-Northallerton line reinstated, ECML trains can be diverted via Ripon as they used to be.

When DP2 crashed at Thirsk i
I am afraid it is now time for me to enter like the spectre at the feast and rattle my chains. How do you propose to pay for all of this? That is the problem. Money is always the problem. I real know that isnt of interest to posters here who seem to live in some Field of Dreams/Captian Picard fantasy world but to those of us in the real world it is fundamental.

The government wont release funds for these ideas. You can whine about that all you like and say they should. Perhaps they should but they wont. If they wont then the line wont get built. Whining and moaning wont change that. Your next idea will be an S106 agreement with the developers. Fine. Look at Wixams. Hmmm. Not so fine. Perhaps the local councils could contribute. Oh no. They are skint and are not suicidal enough to raise council tax to fund investment of this type when they cant even fix potholes. Again, perhaps they should invest but they wont.

Perhaps a developer could be persuaded to take the cost of developing a new line entirely on their own risk. This is certainly one the NR CP6 ideas. Perhaps it will work. However I doubt they would get a return in anything like a short enough timescale to facilitate commercial borrowing.



funny how you only like to respond to those who agree with you!





Fine - who pays for it? Saying the government should pay is a cop out that is disconnected from the real world. I am sorry to be blunt but that is the overriding issue that you and others seem unable to consider.

n 1967, trains were diverted via Ripon at 40 mph even after the line had closed for 5 months. This signalled a late challenge to the closure of the line by MPs. It could so easily have succeeded but failed because Harrogate would not pay their share of £40,000 annual subsidy as they had been reprieved from closure as many BR employees at York headquarters lived there. Typical of self centred Harrogate..

Try it sometime and see if you find it convenient without a c
No, I respond to everyone. I usually disagree with you for your negativity. Thank heavens everyone is not like you.
This has the wrong quote. I was responding to Darlorich and can't change it. My long reply to tbtc is mixed in. Moderator can you sort please?
 
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tbtc

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Just an idea, but could you just save some hassle and build two new tracks throughout between London and somewhere just south of York? Possibly at a higher speed than the current ECML?

Hey - you could be onto something there :lol:

Give that chap £50bn (and a shovel)!

To be fair, public transport could be the prime mover in much of market town North Yorkshire. It would certainly be the most efficient. It just wouldn’t be steel wheels on steel rails.

True

Correlation is not the same as causation :) Also, to describe me as a "proponent of re-opening old Victorian lines", while basically true, gets the wrong angle. For the purposes of this discussion I'm concentrating on connectivity; it's just that the two have considerable overlap, from the number of cases where the connectivity was lost in the first place because a Victorian line closed, and can best be restored by putting it back. I am leaving out of consideration cases like the S&D, which while I would like to see it reopened for sentimental reasons would provide a poor improvement in connectivity compared to alternatives designed for the purpose

I'm not intending to single you out - just making a broader point about how the people who seem to want to re-open every old line seem less likely to support the current HS2 plans (possibly as it does the ugly thing of linking the biggest cities in the UK on a new alignment rather than linking villages in Cumbria/ North Yorkshire/ Borders/ Devon/ Cornwall/ Lincolnshire etc).

As I say, not a personal dig, just a general point about enthusiasts.

It hasn't been just crayonista. There have been many studies completed, mostly unpublished recently into many areas of reinstating a railway. Demand Forecasting, Environmental Impact, Route Options and civil engineering consideration, surveying structures, track planning, signalling, electrification, costings etc. Unofficial best cost/benefit ratio at present is 3.6 for the most basic reinstatement.

Shame no private companies are biting your hand off, given these reports that come up with such supposedly high figures for rebuilding old lines... funny that.

I recall that period around the millennium where a couple of the prospective franchises showed signs of regarding a new alignment as a natural way to improve their routes: that proposed for the east coast mainline, and I seem to recall a similar proposal was proposed to compliment the GWML (not sure how developed the last one was). These were however replicating (sections of) radial mainlines from London. and I am interested more in links that reconfigure the system away from being so London Centric

Pre-Hatfield, there was a lot of optimism, a lot of "thinking outside the box". I could get quite nostalgic for it!

Consider the four roads on the GWML between Cardiff and Newport and the number of highway lanes linking the two cities. Given the proximity and topography there are not very many parallel roads but depending on how deep inland you make your slice between the two cities you would cut across roads totalling between 14 - 18 highway lanes.

True, but it's a clear bottleneck on the nation's roads, yet nothing seems to be done about it - just picking examples where road building isn't quite as straightforward/ guaranteed as some rail enthusiasts would like to think.

Excellent post. There are many routes where rail reinstatements have been shown to have the potential to be of great benefit to those areas. Tavistock and Wisbech spring to mind as other examples

As usual, your list of priorities are little market towns.

You are aware of the new station proposed at Thorpe Park? This is a perfectly reasonable location to service the new East Leeds Extension. Perhaps a station at Barwick Road would be slightly more optimal for the housing developments, but that would be at the expense of serving the expanded Thorpe Park business and retail park. The main problem with any reopening of the Cross Gates-Wetherby trackbed is the junction needed at Cross Gates on the (extremely busy) Leeds-York line. A flat junction may not be viable as it creates conflicting moves and reduces the main line capacity; there also looks to be insufficient space for a grade-separated junction.

Thorpe Park sounds an excellent place for a station.

Getting my crayons out, I'd suggest it'd have made a great turnback station for the multitude of services from the south/west that terminate in Leeds (but appreciate that there's not the capacity to squeeze much more past Neville Hill).

You are changing the goal posts to suite your argument.

The subject was Toon to Scotch Corner and that has been motorway since 1970. All the words about the state of the road system south of Scotch Corner since 1970 is irrelevant to this argument.

I'm the one changing the goalposts?

In post 18, I mentioned Newcastle's connection to the rest of the country by continuous motorway.

I've since been corrected, in that the missing section in North Yorkshire was completed earlier this year.

But the section of Motorway from the fringes of Gateshead was not continuously connected to the rest of the UK's motorway network until 2018.

The A1 north of the Tyne does down to a single carriageway road.

Yet some rail enthusiasts think that roads are built willy-nilly.

The UK spends roughly 2.2% on infrastructure each year.
Australia manages 4% and China 8.8%

Even if we decide that China's is excessive, 4% is probably a reasonable goal and we would have to spend something like £45 billion additionally, each and every year to achieve it.

Part of the problem is that we are lumbered with our legacy infrastructure that requires high subsidies. The Chinese probably aren't spending the kind of money to keep a parliamentary service open that we are - they have the advantage of starting with a fresh sheet of paper so don't need to maintain old branch lines.

If we were building rail from scratch, we could use our existing budget much more efficiently and spend much more of the existing pot on infrastructure, but every quid spent on subsidising a rural branch line is money that could have been funding a new InterCity railway (that would be expected to run without subsidy).

I don't see why saying that Government should pay for it is a cop out. Government pays for many infrastructure projects with a good BCR, note the slew of road projects in recent years, so there's no reason why it shouldn't pay for rail ones as well.

Which slew of road projects?

Have they built the M62 by-pass so that traffic can get around in Northern England to avoid the worst motorway in the UK?

Have they removed the problems of lorries on the motorway to channel ports?

Have they resolved the jams on the M25?
 

snowball

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I don't see why saying that Government should pay for it is a cop out. Government pays for many infrastructure projects with a good BCR, note the slew of road projects in recent years, so there's no reason why it shouldn't pay for rail ones as well.

It entirely depends on what you're trying to discuss. Is the discussion meant to be about projects that would be nice if more money was available, or is it about what might be just about manageable in current or foreseeable political circumstances? The ultimate source of bad feeling is that some people drag every thread in the direction of the first question and others in the direction of the second.
 
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