Ore to Ashford is the one remaining Southern passenger line east of the Waterloo to Weymouth line that I would electrify with 25kV.There's still places where 3rd rail is needed. Ore - Ashford for one, maybe also Appledore - Lydd too, allowing the reintroduction of passenger services to Lydd.
Plenty of 25kV at Ashford so you could string wires most of the way without needing any substations or feeder points.
Then switch to third rail at somewhere like Doleham so you are spared the effort of getting the knitting through the tunnel near Ore and spared having to AC immunise all the signalling in the Hastings area.
And if electrified, however done, the service would likely comprise Javelins or similar coming from St Pancras over HS1s 25kV.
Would make more sense to electrify Reading , Basingstoke, Salisbury (including the laverstock loop) Redbridge with 25kV and send all rather than some of the freightliners that way with through roads at Andover to allow passenger services to pass them.At the end of the day it is politically impossible to convert DC to AC until a huge chunk of diesel is done first. Then obvious candidates like Southampton- Basingstoke get converted then all the rest. Will not happen in my lifetime.
Increasing NHS cancer funding etc tends to give greater social benefits than replacing non life expired bridges so tends to win the funding battle.The bridge replacements that have been required because of electrification have been of considerable benefit to both road and railway users. We should be treating them not as an inconvenient cost associated with electrification, but a separate infrastructure enhancement in their own right.
We've put in new bridges which, for the first time, have had pavements, street lights and safe walking routes enabled, we've taken away weight limits letting refuse collection and delivery vehicles more easily get to households, and we've doubled carriageway widths, eliminating traffic light control across bridges. We've done all that whilst adding parapets and barriers that meet current Highways England guidance and minimise the risk of vehicular incursion onto the railway below, no risk of cement mixers falling on Mark 3 EMUs for our newly wired routes...
There is also the slight issue of immunising all the signalling which would be a barrel of laughs on the Southern, especially as you would have to immunise for both ac and dc to cover the changeover period.
Quite. BR didn't let the perfect be theIt wasn't cheap electrification it was designed to be cost efficient with a trade off to be as resilient as funds would afford.
The alternative was a slow progressive decline to eventual closure but what we delivered were routes that were rejuvenated through the sparks effect.
enemy of the good.
If the Uckfield line trains carried on to Lewes and then ran on quite slowly to Seaford and back on the third rail (1930s infrastructure so plenty of capacity unlike the value engineered South Croydon to EG 1980s stuff), then battery operating the Uckfield line would be easier. I doubt either will happen though given that the government has discovered third rail is cheaper than 25kV and has asked RSSB to find a safe way of doing third rail infils like Uckfield without HMRI having kittens.It could conceivably be 30 seconds a stop.
You couldn’t. That’s not the point. The point is that by accelerating off the juice you are not calling on the battery.
There aren’t any. But they have been looked into, at least twice, and Vivarail have developed the concept. But if we waited before having proven technology in service before adopting it, we’d still be walking everywhere barefoot.
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