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
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 There have been many studies completed, mostly unpublished recently into many areas of reinstating a railway.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?