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Transpennine Route Upgrade and Electrification updates
- Thread starter GRALISTAIR
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The alignment is chosen to allow for practical construction, avoid existing buildings and allow a good speed on the fast lines. The flyover is in what is today the angle between the Leeds and Wakefield lines. The new fast lines approaching from the Huddersfield direction are to the south of the existing lines, then go over the flyover, then run on the SE side of the existing line on new bridges over the Calder & Hebble navigation and River Calder, then rejoin the existing Leeds line near the tip mentioned in some recent posts.
The flyover carries the Huddersfield-Leeds fast lines over the line to/from Wakefield and the slow line from Leeds. It thus brings the fast lines into the middle between the slow lines before the NE end of the scheme.
Jozhua
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Here's a nice speed chart I found after digging through documents on Network Rail about this. Blue is current and Orange is after TRU.
jonesy3001
Established Member
Are they still doing works on the stalybridge lines, seems to be rail replacement buses overnight according to realtimes.
sjm77
Member
I have seen this before but not sure how accurate it still is. For example the recent Stalybrige remodelling does not allow for the 70/80mph running that the chart shows
Has the planned (above) profile changed. I thought the speed on the new alignment was going to be 110mph, I’m sure Don Coffey said it was going to be 110mph on one of his in-cab video.
edit:- Just rechecked, and he does suggest that the new fast lines from Huddersfield to (near) Dewsbury will be 110mph.
Jamesrob637
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That's gonna feel scary, doing those at over the ton. I hope Manchester to Leeds can be brought down to 30-35min after all of this, especially if stopping only in HUD.
I think you’re right, it looks like an early “potential“ benefit diagram, which has seen subsequent changes since first published. It would be interesting to see an newer version.
quantinghome
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It will be 40 minutes at best.
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
Yes. I don't want to take the thread off topic but only new build is likely to be able to get closer to 30 minutes and that isn't going to happen in my lifetime.
Jamesrob637
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40 is still good though.
Seeing a newer version might be depressing.
The Government's TPU Cost and Performance Efficiency challenge Panel, tasked with finding 15% savings. has suggested the dropping of the sixth path and third track between Huddersfield and Marsden. They have queried that apart from the top 5 linespeed improvements, the remainder only save 65 seconds but cost £500million. An easy way to save half a billion?
jonesy3001
Established Member
Confirmation of the works on the miles platting to stalybridge section on LinkedIn.
www.linkedin.com
TRU West Alliance on LinkedIn: Major Milestone Alert The West Alliance W1 Team successfully energised…
Major Milestone Alert The West Alliance W1 Team successfully energised between Miles Platting and Stalybridge during a 12 hour possession starting on New Years…
TRU promised 35 minutes after upgrades in track alignments, electrification and increased lie speeds.
A Don Coffey video showed that 45 minutes is possible now albeit non-stop.
£Billions spent on a new, straighter alignment to save 5 minutes on journey time is a complete waste.
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YorksLad12
Established Member
Even if it separates stopping and non-stopping services? And allows more services to run than at present, reliably?
Yes, we are talking of £billions saved by not building NPR.
Quad tracking between Dewsbury and Huddersfield is for separation of stopping and non-stopping services. There are three stations on this section where non-stopping trains can overtake.
fishwomp
Member
I read that in Modern Railways this month. There wasn't much detail quoted from the report, but it seemed to ask some good questions. Anyone found the document? One of the things it said was how much demand there was for shorter distance travel to adjacent centres (centre to centre, or local stop to centre) whereas the focus of the upgrade was more skewed to high speed alignments which is better for express long distance.
Of that 65 seconds, you could save 20 seconds at every station by removing the current "check the platform is still there" theatre.. that'd be cheaper and more benefit.
61653 HTAFC
Veteran Member
There's also conflicts removed at Bradley Junction as the curve from Brighouse will only connect to the slow lines, and removal of the awkward arrangement of the three track section between Mirfield East and Thornhill LNW junctions. At present cross-Pennine services are severely hindered by freight trains using the bidirectional centre road to access the lines towards Healey Mills.
I think this is actually saying that the ACPO only applies to TPE trains.
jonesy3001
Established Member
Yes it does, northern from may after the testing later this month.
jonesy3001
Established Member
Might go to 323/331 operation when the wigan to bolton via westhoughton line is electrified and terminate at north western.
769s will probably still do the changeover either at bolton or one of the stations down the line.
61653 HTAFC
Veteran Member
I'd have thought the change-over issue at Stalybridge would be irrelevant for Northern anyway, as they no longer operate any services beyond Stalybridge. For 769s it just means remaining in electric mode beyond Victoria rather than switching to Diesel there.
Or am I missing something else being discussed?
Or am I missing something else being discussed?
Phillipimo
Member
Tweet about New Years work at Mirfield to realign track through platform 2.
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Jozhua
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It would be silly to reduce the trackage from 4 to 3. The quad tracking is primarily about capacity, not journey times. Having express trains be able to pass locals for such a distance will be hugely beneficial for journey times, capacity and reliability!
My hope is this nonsense will be shot down, especially given detailed design and planning permission seemingly has been done for the project?
My hope is this nonsense will be shot down, especially given detailed design and planning permission seemingly has been done for the project?
fishwomp
Member
It's a little worse than that in the panel's report! The proposal from the report (per Modern Railways article) is to reduce the 3 track plan to no extra track - between Huddersfield and Marsden.
The initial three track logic was that the third line is a crawler (it's uphill for the 7 miles on ~1 in 100) for freight - crossing over from slow to fast in / near Huddersfield station.
The new logic in the report is that the freight may need to slow or stop to wait for the overtaking passenger train. Doing that in 'Huddersfield station area' (per modern railways, although I think it might be more the rejoining at Marsden that is the problem rather than the crossing over), means doing so on an incline (at either place) and being slow.
So, the idea is, put a crossover near Mirfield, on the flat, between slow and fast - so if the freight is held, it'll be able to accelerate out of that faster - and basically by keeping moving it won't get under the feet.
Seems a bad idea to me because all freight comes via the Wakefield line - which is planned to go under the flyover at Ravensthorpe. Putting a crossover just east of the flyover means you don't need to cross the eastbound fast so that's the most sensible place in the area compared to further west. However, that is going to impact the width of the railway at that point (road overbridge, cutting) but more critically add 6 miles of freight using the fast line (100mph at that point) - which can't be good.
OTOH, make the freight use the wires and the acceleration question is less an issue.
edwin_m
Veteran Member
Crossing over at the bottom of the incline (Huddersfield) means the freight can't take a run at the incline and will probably be slower all the way up. Doing so at Marsden, it will decelerate rapidly as it is still climbing, and after crossing over it will soon enter the level section through Standege tunnel where it can pick up speed relatively soon. So I'd say Huddersfield is the larger problem.
Agreed - seems to me it's not been fully thought through. It's also fairly steep ascending most of the way from Mirfield to Huddersfield where the freight would be trying to use the "fast" line. The ideal situation would be a fast crossover just west of Huddersfield station and speeds to allow freight to get through the station and join the two-track section with the minimum of braking. But there are probably all sorts of reasons that won't work.
It might even be cheaper to buy a batch of electric locos and hand them over to freight operators on the condition they use them for all trains on this route.
61653 HTAFC
Veteran Member
Which "freight" is being discussed here? At the moment barely any freight uses the lines through Huddersfield, as almost all of it runs via Brighouse and the Calder Valley anyway.
Yes, I wondered about that. Some of the Drax empties come that way, back to Liverpool but I can't think of anything else regular, east to west.