Should money spent upgrading main lines be spent on reopening disused rural lines instead?

[deltic08]

£50m has been spent upgrading Market Harborough reverse curves increasing linespeed from 65 to 85mph to save about 20 seconds of running time for non-stop passenger trains and nil for freight trains. That is about £2m per second!
There are closed railways crying out for reinstatement where this money would have more impact. For an example as I have study figures at hand, reinstating a line between Harrogate and Ripon, 10 miles by rail, 11 miles by road, at £100m would reduce journey time by 20 minutes not 20 seconds. That is £83,300 per second! Reinstating from Ripon to Northallerton, 15 miles by rail, 4 miles longer by road , would reduce journey time by 45 minutes from Ripon, that is £55,800 per second and a saving of 55 minutes for Harrogate passengers using a through train to the North and Scotland instead of travelling via York and a change of trains there.
Footfall from Harrogate to the north and south is low for a settlement of 100,000 because of this inconvenience of having to change at York or Leeds. Footfall is similar to Ilkley, a town of only 12,000 residents. Through trains would increase usage at Harrogate as we shall see when seven through trains to Kings Cross are introduced in December 2019 that could have been extended north through Ripon if the line was there.

 

[Starmill]

I would point out that the money spent in the case of Market Harborough has achieved rather a lot more than 'saving 20 seconds' for passing trains. Market Harborough station is now fully accessible, which previously it was not, and both platforms will be more than 260 metres long on completion of work - eliminating the need for passengers to use only part of the train to board or alight at Market Harborough. The station now has straight platforms, reducing the step for passengers and thus the risk of accidents. According to Network Rail, the speed has been increased from 60 to 85 miles/hour (not 65), and that this is predicted to save 30 seconds for passing trains (not 20). I do not know if the new layout will permit trains which are calling at Market Harborough to approach or leave the station more quickly than previously or not - perhaps someone would like to comment?

Admittedly, it does seem that the main reason for the works was to eliminate the curve, and that the rebuild of the station was a coincidental benefit. However, 30 seconds is rather more significant than it might seem when combined with permissible speed increases elsewhere on the route, new tracks and faster electric rolling stock. Overall, I think it probably is reasonable however to question the value for money achieved by this £53 million project - but only in the sense that all rail projects seem to cost too much.

 

[HSTEd]

A lot more passengers will use the Market Harborough curve than will ever use a railway to a small town like Ripon.

And who would want to travel from Ripon to the equally small town of Northallerton?

And doubt you would get a railway all the way through for £100m or anything close to it, the alignment through Ripon has been pretty completely obliterated by development.

EDIT:

And if you really wanted direct trains with no reversals from Harrogate to points north, you would just build a cutoff near Poppleton to allow trains to head north from the Harrogate loop line. It would cost a fraction as much.

 

[Clip]

I thought you had been a bit quiet about ripon reopening lately but will you always use an upgrade somewhere else to try and justify your ripon scheme as some sort of rational thinking ?

 

[class26]

£50m has been spent upgrading Market Harborough reverse curves increasing linespeed from 65 to 85mph to save about 20 seconds of running time for non-stop passenger trains and nil for freight trains. That is about £2m per second!
There are closed railways crying out for reinstatement where this money would have more impact. For an example as I have study figures at hand, reinstating a line between Harrogate and Ripon, 10 miles by rail, 11 miles by road, at £100m would reduce journey time by 20 minutes not 20 seconds. That is £83,300 per second! Reinstating from Ripon to Northallerton, 15 miles by rail, 4 miles longer by road , would reduce journey time by 45 minutes from Ripon, that is £55,800 per second and a saving of 55 minutes for Harrogate passengers using a through train to the North and Scotland instead of travelling via York and a change of trains there.
Footfall from Harrogate to the north and south is low for a settlement of 100,000 because of this inconvenience of having to change at York or Leeds. Footfall is similar to Ilkley, a town of only 12,000 residents. Through trains would increase usage at Harrogate as we shall see when seven through trains to Kings Cross are introduced in December 2019 that could have been extended north through Ripon if the line was there.

It was from 60 mph to 85 mph and it saves 30 seconds not 20 seconds.

Edit - I should have read post no 2 before I posted !

 

[HSTEd]

I thought you had been a bit quiet about ripon reopening lately but will you always use an upgrade somewhere else to try and justify your ripon scheme as some sort of rational thinking ?

I don't think a reopening to Ripon from the south is necessarily a bad idea.
The formation seems almost entirely intact until immediately south of Ripon, and it's short enough that a half hourly service which would run nonstop might get away without a passing loop.

But north of that, no chance.

 

[cactustwirly]

£50m has been spent upgrading Market Harborough reverse curves increasing linespeed from 65 to 85mph to save about 20 seconds of running time for non-stop passenger trains and nil for freight trains. That is about £2m per second!
There are closed railways crying out for reinstatement where this money would have more impact. For an example as I have study figures at hand, reinstating a line between Harrogate and Ripon, 10 miles by rail, 11 miles by road, at £100m would reduce journey time by 20 minutes not 20 seconds. That is £83,300 per second! Reinstating from Ripon to Northallerton, 15 miles by rail, 4 miles longer by road , would reduce journey time by 45 minutes from Ripon, that is £55,800 per second and a saving of 55 minutes for Harrogate passengers using a through train to the North and Scotland instead of travelling via York and a change of trains there.
Footfall from Harrogate to the north and south is low for a settlement of 100,000 because of this inconvenience of having to change at York or Leeds. Footfall is similar to Ilkley, a town of only 12,000 residents. Through trains would increase usage at Harrogate as we shall see when seven through trains to Kings Cross are introduced in December 2019 that could have been extended north through Ripon if the line was there.

The MML is a busy line, and the increase in speed helps to speed up journey times, also increases the capacity as trains no longer need to brake and accelerate through Market Harborough, which saves more than 30 seconds.

 

[Clip]

I don't think a reopening to Ripon from the south is necessarily a bad idea.
The formation seems almost entirely intact until immediately south of Ripon, and it's short enough that a half hourly service which would run nonstop might get away without a passing loop.

But north of that, no chance.

Oh I don’t think reopening any line is,in itself, a bad idea. But cherry picking other schemes and constantly banging on about it being better used in Ripon is just tedious.

There’s probably a hundred places where the money could be of benefit but trying to compare work on a main artery in England to some small town is just laughable

 

[yorksrob]

Excellent though the project at Market Harborough has been, I think that the OP definitely has a point about the blind spot this country has with rail reopenings.

I've been using the line through Market Harborough fairly regularly for the past ten years, occasionally for the ten before that. Will the time saving affect my propensity to use the line ? Probably not.

The longer platforms are nice to haves, but how many passengers were actually prevented from using the train by having to walk down it ? Not many I suspect.

I suspect that @deltic08 is probably correct in that you'd get a lot more people off the road, create a lot more public transport opportunities and do more good by getting some of these towns back on the railway network.

Perhaps we should be doing both. Of course, there's no incentive for NR to build new railway lines. It's just an extra maintenance burden to them. That doesn't mean to say it shouldn't be done.

 

[DPWH]

This is I think one of these classic cases where members of the public want investment to reopen lines (hence all the railfuture campaigns), whereas professionals tend to focus on improvements to the existing network as they have much better business cases. The government-accepted measure of a scheme is cost:benefit ratio, not "pounds per second".

 

[HSTEd]

This is I think one of these classic cases where members of the public want investment to reopen lines (hence all the railfuture campaigns), whereas professionals tend to focus on improvements to the existing network as they have much better business cases. The government-accepted measure of a scheme is cost:benefit ratio, not "pounds per second".

I think the political pressures on rail spending by people wanting to see reopenings is enormous and constantly growing.
Giving people a few relatively cheap reopenings won't consume very large amounts of money but will allow this political pressure to be released before resentment with the railway becomes a major issue.

Even if a Ripon-Harrogate scheme costs £40m or £80m or £100m, it's peanuts.
One of those a year won't drastically hurt the railway but it will hurt it's enemies.

 

[Starmill]

Not having to brake and then accelerate again for reasons other than a station call also theoretically saves some energy - in this case in the form of diesel, which is relatively expensive.

 

[Starmill]

The longer platforms are nice to haves, but how many passengers were actually prevented from using the train by having to walk down it ? Not many I suspect.

None hopefully, otherwise EMT were doing something seriously wrong. The improvement comes from a decrease in dwell times, as only opening some of the doors can extend them, and from an increase in safety, as now nobody will be able to open an HST door here onto the ballast.

 

[cactustwirly]

None hopefully, otherwise EMT were doing something seriously wrong. The improvement comes from a decrease in dwell times, as only opening some of the doors can extend them, and from an increase in safety, as now nobody will be able to open an HST door here onto the ballast.

The HST services at Market Harborough always seemed to be well used

 

[yorksrob]

None hopefully, otherwise EMT were doing something seriously wrong. The improvement comes from a decrease in dwell times, as only opening some of the doors can extend them, and from an increase in safety, as now nobody will be able to open an HST door here onto the ballast.

It is an improvement, but in terms of getting people on public transport, the real improvements on the main line come if you have one that's at or close to capacity, and you get to release an additional path or two. Of course you'd usually need a few Market Harborough type projects to release a path.

The new curve at Great Gonerby released a few paths on the ECML on it's own I believe, however I suspect such occasions are rare.

 

[6Gman]

£50m has been spent upgrading Market Harborough reverse curves increasing linespeed from 65 to 85mph to save about 20 seconds of running time for non-stop passenger trains and nil for freight trains. That is about £2m per second!
There are closed railways crying out for reinstatement where this money would have more impact. For an example as I have study figures at hand, reinstating a line between Harrogate and Ripon, 10 miles by rail, 11 miles by road, at £100m would reduce journey time by 20 minutes not 20 seconds. That is £83,300 per second!

But those figures then need to be divided by the number of people who benefit. Which will be much higher in the former over the latter.

 

[yorksrob]

I think the political pressures on rail spending by people wanting to see reopenings is enormous and constantly growing.
Giving people a few relatively cheap reopenings won't consume very large amounts of money but will allow this political pressure to be released before resentment with the railway becomes a major issue.

Even if a Ripon-Harrogate scheme costs £40m or £80m or £100m, it's peanuts.
One of those a year won't drastically hurt the railway but it will hurt it's enemies.

Very true indeed.

 

[tbtc]

I think the political pressures on rail spending by people wanting to see reopenings is enormous and constantly growing.
Giving people a few relatively cheap reopenings won't consume very large amounts of money but will allow this political pressure to be released before resentment with the railway becomes a major issue.

Even if a Ripon-Harrogate scheme costs £40m or £80m or £100m, it's peanuts.
One of those a year won't drastically hurt the railway but it will hurt it's enemies.

So, essentially, we should spend tens of millions of pounds on projects with weak cases just to shut up some local lobbyists (rather than, say, focussing the money on where it has the best case)?

I'd argue that spending tens of millions of pounds on a lightly used line that fails to meet its expected passenger numbers is going to hurt the railway a lot more than ignoring yet another well intentioned petition from the kind of people who will sign any old campaign.

 

[HSTEd]

So, essentially, we should spend tens of millions of pounds on projects with weak cases just to shut up some local lobbyists (rather than, say, focussing the money on where it has the best case)?

Yep, because that is how you divide and conquer the enemies of the railway.

Tens of millions of pounds to break them is nothing in a multi billion pound industry.

I'd argue that spending tens of millions of pounds on a lightly used line that fails to meet its expected passenger numbers is going to hurt the railway a lot more than ignoring yet another well intentioned petition from the kind of people who will sign any old campaign.

That's why you cook the passenger forecasts to be lowballs so they almost always reach their targets. Or set the fares to ridiculously low levels to stimulate demand so that you reach your ridership targets.

Also, when was the last outright disastrous reopening?
Some haven't done as well as projected but apart from something like Sinfin I don't think there have been many catastrophic failures.

 

[yorksrob]

So, essentially, we should spend tens of millions of pounds on projects with weak cases just to shut up some local lobbyists (rather than, say, focussing the money on where it has the best case)?

I'd argue that spending tens of millions of pounds on a lightly used line that fails to meet its expected passenger numbers is going to hurt the railway a lot more than ignoring yet another well intentioned petition from the kind of people who will sign any old campaign.

Going by previous experience, it's far from a foregone conclusion that such a route will fail to meet its passenger numbers.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

This is I think one of these classic cases where members of the public want investment to reopen lines (hence all the railfuture campaigns), whereas professionals tend to focus on improvements to the existing network as they have much better business cases. The government-accepted measure of a scheme is cost:benefit ratio, not "pounds per second".

I'm all for focusing on the improvements that have the best business cases. But I am baffled about how you can build a good business case out of spending £50M essentially to save 30 seconds on the MML trains that don't stop at Market Harborough, and presumably nothing on the trains that do. Maybe there's something I'm missing?

 

[tasky]

I think the political pressures on rail spending by people wanting to see reopenings is enormous and constantly growing.
Giving people a few relatively cheap reopenings won't consume very large amounts of money but will allow this political pressure to be released before resentment with the railway becomes a major issue.

Even if a Ripon-Harrogate scheme costs £40m or £80m or £100m, it's peanuts.
One of those a year won't drastically hurt the railway but it will hurt it's enemies.

I don't think that would be the political effect - calls for reopenings are very localised and a re-opening in one place will probably encourage other people in other places to be louder about it, if anything. Partly because if they're successful, they can be pointed to as an example, and perhaps less virtuously partly because people don't like the idea of money being spent somewhere that isn't where they live (look at the reaction to HS2 building political pressure for NPR, for instance). I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing if dealt with wisely!

 

[HSTEd]

I don't think that would be the political effect - calls for reopenings are very localised and a re-opening in one place will probably encourage other people in other places to be louder about it, if anything. Partly because if they're successful, they can be pointed to as an example, and perhaps less virtuously partly because people don't like the idea of money being spent somewhere that isn't where they live (look at the reaction to HS2 building political pressure for NPR, for instance). I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing if dealt with wisely!

Yes, but if you say you will fund a scheme each and every year, people will react by attacking other reopenings to try and get a place in the "queue".

 

[Starmill]

Some haven't done as well as projected but apart from something like Sinfin I don't think there have been many catastrophic failures.

East Midlands Parkway? Featherstone, Streethouse and Potefract Tanshelf? Edinburgh Gateway? Gorebridge? Aylesbury Vale Parkway? Creswell and Whitwell? The criteria isn't 'catastrophic failure'. There are loads of things which wouldn't be a 'catastrophic failure'. The criteria is - was this the best possible use of the money? @Bald Rick probably has better examples to hand (and I may be unfairly judging some of the above).

Tweedbank is used by 20 times more people than Streethouse in a year. But Streethouse might still have been better value for money.

Equally, some new stations such as Manchester Airport, Ebbw Vale Parkway (and later Ebbw Vale Town) and Meadowhall were master-strokes which are frequently overlooked (or discredited in the case of the former).

 

[hooverboy]

So, essentially, we should spend tens of millions of pounds on projects with weak cases just to shut up some local lobbyists (rather than, say, focussing the money on where it has the best case)?

I'd argue that spending tens of millions of pounds on a lightly used line that fails to meet its expected passenger numbers is going to hurt the railway a lot more than ignoring yet another well intentioned petition from the kind of people who will sign any old campaign.

depends where the line is.
if you took something like grantham-skeggy as an example, if you improved the linespeed and the rolling stock so as to cut down the journey time to perhaps 1 hour for the 55 mile journey(instead of the present 1hr 45m from grantham), I think you would see quite a large rise in footfall from day trippers to the coast, which would benefit ToC's and the local economy of skeg from extra meals/beers/refreshments/fairground rides etc.

(the other bit is down to the local council providing decent enough ammenities and a good selection of events to entice people to travel there),

more people would be prepared to spend 2-3 (total return trip),hours travelling on a visit, but approching half a day.especially with a brood of screaming kids in tow......who want everything NOW, is sometimes problematic!

I would say spending a few quid of firsby curve re-pathing might be money well spent.I don't know quite how long that detour is,but it's low speed,and kind of doubles back on itself-you could probably shave 15mins off the time with a new path.being mostly jointed track a there also impedes linespeed.

 

[yorksrob]

East Midlands Parkway? Featherstone, Streethouse and Potefract Tanshelf? Edinburgh Gateway? Gorebridge? Aylesbury Vale Parkway? Creswell and Whitwell? The criteria isn't 'catastrophic failure'. There are loads of things which wouldn't be a 'catastrophic failure'. The criteria is - was this the best possible use of the money? @Bald Rick probably has better examples to hand (and I may be unfairly judging some of the above).

The Wakey - Pontefract line certainly seems to be considered useful - given it's services have just been extended to Leeds. The ones I've been on (barring some late evening ones) have tended to be busy beyond Kirkgate.

Perhaps the remainder of the list above suggests that we've done the low hanging fruit, in terms of parkway stations on existing lines. Perhaps we need a change of tack - to connecting towns with conventional stations to the network.

 

[Flying Phil]

I'm all for focusing on the improvements that have the best business cases. But I am baffled about how you can build a good business case out of spending £50M essentially to save 30 seconds on the MML trains that don't stop at Market Harborough, and presumably nothing on the trains that do. Maybe there's something I'm missing?

As has been pointed out, not only is there a time saving on every through train, but also a fuel saving for not having to accelerate every through train and a maintenance saving for not having to use the brakes on every through train to slow down to the previous 60mph. Of course those savings would have been even more significant if they had also straightened the Great Bowden curve.......but that had been "Descoped"! (originally the linespeed would have gone up to a steady 115mph).
Also it is a much safer and accessible station. Additionally, now with the bigger car park...... will generate more revenue.

 

[Starmill]

The new curve at Great Gonerby released a few paths on the ECML on it's own I believe, however I suspect such occasions are rare.

I don't think that Great Gonerby was a curve easing was it? It was simply a project to separate Skegness-bound trains and East Coast Main Line traffic?

 

[yorksrob]

I don't think that Great Gonerby was a curve easing was it? It was simply a project to separate Skegness-bound trains and East Coast Main Line traffic?

Not a curve easing, but a curve building !

 

[Starmill]

I'm all for focusing on the improvements that have the best business cases. But I am baffled about how you can build a good business case out of spending £50M essentially to save 30 seconds on the MML trains that don't stop at Market Harborough, and presumably nothing on the trains that do. Maybe there's something I'm missing?

I suspect that saving 30 seconds is on the high end of what permissible speed increases can yield in most cases. As such, it probably is value-for-money on a route where there are frequent intercity trains.