Anyone know if any work on rebuilding the now-demolished central section of the Bletchley flyover has been (is being) done over the Christmas/New Year holiday? Or are they able to launch the new sections of viaduct over the WCML without an occupation of the main line below?
It is not in progress at the moment and the road has reopened, I walked under there yesterday. Interestingly, because nobody has bothered to change the bus timetables in time, the buses are operating from Bletchley bus station under the bridge, but then turning off, doing a circuit via the railway station and returning to route. It would be nice to see this almost Germanic integration staying, at least until the EWR platform is built, at which point there will be an entrance and exit on the other side directly opposite the bus station itself.
One thing I did notice was that the pillar on the station side of the road has a dirty great crack in it on one side at the bottom of the horizontal support on top - I wonder if they will find that they need to replace those, too?
A direct route without reversal has never been part of the published scheme, as has been explained numerous times within this thread.
Indeed not. It's something that I think would make a lot of sense and wouldn't be that expensive to do, rather than something that's planned.
A lot of EWR seems to be predicated on the idea that there is a considerable demand actually from Oxford-Cambridge, and it only takes a ride on the X5 to see that there really isn't. The X5 is like the Liverpool-Norwich train service - it's convenient for a load of overlapping, more local journeys, almost nobody does the whole thing in one go. The actual travel demand would be better reflected by MKC-Aylesbury, MKC-Oxford (and beyond if appropriate) and MKC-Bedford(-Cambridge) services, which could of course be interworked as appropriate to handle the smaller number of end to end through journeys.