When's the Ormskirk line getting 4-tracked and goods sidings added?
I don’t know but it wouldn’t be hard. You can redo Sandhills - Walton Junction without a problem and use the CLC from Aintree to Old Roan. From there the line becomes rural enough that you’ve got undeveloped land on at least one side of it most of the way to Town Green. Reopening all the goods sidings might be an idea though.
That is a good point. Since around the mid 00's, there have been engines that produce cleaner air than what they sucked in, just watch early episodes of CHM Top Gear. There's also the Fiat 500s with free tax that are very clean. One other thing to note is, electric vehicles only start paying for themselves from an environmental point after around 70k miles, as volvo recently admitted.
That was of course before Osbourne’s road tax reform when there were bands A-M, with A being £0 and B being either £20 or £25, before C was somewhere around £100.
That being said, Top Gear did a test in around 2014 and a vanilla Vauxhall Insignia could stop from 113mph in the distance the highway code says it takes from 70mph.
It was 112mph not 113mph, but the same as on the railway the standards have to be based around the worst/oldest vehicles. While the railway cab simply remove them when their performance becomes too much of a constraint, as Thameslink did with 319s, you can’t really ban classic cars from the roads, even if modern cars would allow us all to drive at 112mph, but what would that road speed increase do to the railway?
You can't fully replace HGVs with small vans, not even close. Using the railways to deliver the goods to distribution centres and then using HGVs to get the goods to supermarkets and the like is still a better idea. Electric vans would be better for Amazon deliveries.
That’s not what I’m suggesting and replacing a HGV with several electric vans would actually be even less efficient. I’d rail serve all current road/HGV distribution centres (the network of freight lines this would create is likely to prove useful for rail freight capacity) and replace HGV trailers with containers or special wagons on the railway, with goods taken to the nearest railway station to be unloaded for final delivery in a small electric van. Effectively the roads would only be used for last mile deliveries with goods carried more efficiently by road for virtually the whole journey.
With direct rail delivery to all the houses built on the old goods yards
Yes, but I’ve spotted many old goods yards in use as car parks, even with original cobbles and the new houses built further up. For houses that back directly onto a railway, direct rail delivery at the rear, by leaving parcels behind a fence would use the least energy rather than driving them back from the railway station.
Isn't the braking distances as quoted in the Highway Code still based on a 1960s car with drum brakes?
Yes.