UK Railway Route Atlas
- Thread starter pembrokestephen
- Start date
pembrokestephen
New Member
That'll be my contrarian tendencies coming throughRoadkill said:Good post, pembrokestephen.
I think we disagree slightly over Beeching - you judge him rather more kindly than I do! - but that's a side issue.
I think, in general, you sound more authoritative on the subject than I am. But I do think Beeching got rather more of the blame than was entirely his: he did have a plan which might have worked, despite being evilly draconian and a sign of the times as far as attitudes to rail were concerned, except that there was someone (more than one, really) up the chain of command who was/were clearly made of evil.
pembrokestephen
New Member
Well, yes, I suppose so, except that I think that kind of unscrupulousness is made a great deal easier when you've got private interests mixed up with public infrastructure projects...teuchter said:
davesgcr
Reading books
Oxford - Milton Keynes will probably come back - about several 00 millions worth in all - (that means it has to earn £20m a year to justify it + social benefits) Active work being done as we speak through the East West consortium.
Lots of other options being studied too .......probably mid term options rather than next year. Flows have changed so much that many dead lines could now be potential runners -
One of the issues is that pre Beeching - very little effort was made to improve train services on these lines - so when 1950's car competion came in they were easy targets - e.g. Aberystwyth - Carmarthen had 3 through trains a day in the Victorian pattern.
We need a time machine to influence decision making circa 1954 when the first modernisation plan was launched.
Lots of other options being studied too .......probably mid term options rather than next year. Flows have changed so much that many dead lines could now be potential runners -
One of the issues is that pre Beeching - very little effort was made to improve train services on these lines - so when 1950's car competion came in they were easy targets - e.g. Aberystwyth - Carmarthen had 3 through trains a day in the Victorian pattern.
We need a time machine to influence decision making circa 1954 when the first modernisation plan was launched.
pembrokestephen
New Member
I heard James Lovelock on BBC4 talking about the future of society, and specifically with regard to power.davesgcr said:
His view was that, unless we wanted to go back to oxcart levels of civilisation, we were going to have to accept that the only way to fund our current way of being, power-wise, was to bite the bullet, go nuclear, and work hard on getting fusion power going, by his estimate some time in the next 50 years.
If we were to accept that nuclear power was our best bet, then there really is the option of, as they said in the 1950's, power so plentiful it isn't (theoretically, because I'm sure we will) worth metering, especially if we're not building power stations to make plutonium, with electricity as a little sideline to subsidise that.
Looking to a post-oil future, with - by comparison - cheap electricity, the idea of an electrically-powered public transport infrastructure makes a lot of sense. And, of all of the varieties of electrically-powered infrastructure, rail makes the most sense (with trams for the lower-density inner city stuff, and hydrogen-powered buses doing the rural bits). A sensible government would be planning towards that now, perhaps looking at how the numbers would work in a $300/barrel oil economy. My guess is that those sort of numbers would tilt the balance away from hydrocarbon-based transport and heavily in favour of a massively expanded, and electrified rail network. As a 10 year plan, including building nuclear plants, expansion, electrification, rolling stock acquisition, etc., that'd be prohibitive. As a 50 year plan, it might just work.
No chance of anyone even thinking about it, really, is there?
I mean, they're talking about building a brand new Welsh North-South motorway link. I's crazy.stat said:great map.
why oh why can't they bring back the oxford-cambridge line*it makes no sense, even if you just want to go to a nearby place you have to go down to lond first
*one reason might be because Bedford council just gave planning permission to build on parts of the old line. Funnily enough, Stagecoach have a very large bus depot in Bedford, and now have a monopoly on east-west public transport in the area. Shurely no connection
Most of the old line east of Huntingdon has gone. You can still see parts of some of the bridges if you walk along the River Ouse between Godmanchester and St Ives, while the track still remains in places (e.g., Longstanton). But a lot of it has been built over. There's project underway to build a guided bus route along part of it to relieve some of the traffic from the A14, (possibly one of the busiest roads in the country with commuter traffic into Cambridge and loads of lorries going between Harwich/Felixstowe and the Midlands) but this won't take any lorries off the road.
It would be an ideal route for a railway, even one built along a slightly different route - huge potential for freight traffic (Whitemoor Yard at March has recently reopened to cope with increased freight to/from Felixstowe & Harwich). The funding could probably be found - there are already plans to re-build the A14 along a new route across open countryside south of Huntingdon (through The Offords). Quite why they couldn't rebuild the railway instead isn't immediately obvious to me........
More info here.
davesgcr
Reading books
One option for the next decade is to rebuild capacity wise the Doncaster - Lincoln - Spalding line and rebuild the link to Whitemoor / March - this allows slower freights for Felixstowe to miss the Doncaster - Peterborough section giving more options for faster East Coast main line trains.
(Whitemoor incidentally is a point for gathering up engineers trains - not revenue earning stuff)
In the 19thC ,the railways stripped the country of population - the 20thC restocked them by car. Discuss.
(Whitemoor incidentally is a point for gathering up engineers trains - not revenue earning stuff)
In the 19thC ,the railways stripped the country of population - the 20thC restocked them by car. Discuss.
davesgcr said:
Ah, I stand corrected.
Just found some interesting pictures of Whitemoor on teh internets.
There's an interesting one here, it certainly didn't get there under it's own power.
Chz
Stark Raving Sane
That one was seriously looked at in the past. The passenger numbers just aren't there - they have a hard time filling the coaches at times. More importantly, with the old OxBridge route being fairly twisty and slow, the fast trains in and out of London give a similar journey time to what you'd have had on the old route. Albeit more pricey.
Someone even tried to have an air service between the two for awhile! That didn't work so well either. There just aren't that many people who want to make those journeys. Probably Bedford/Oxford to Milton Keynes would be the only bit worthwhile.
PacificOcean
Unhinged User
Best thing ever!
*wets self*
*wets self*
PacificOcean
Unhinged User
It's amazing how many lines have closed.
There are huge swathes of grey closed lines all over that map.
Norfolk/Suffolk and Wales seem particularly rail-less.
There are huge swathes of grey closed lines all over that map.
Norfolk/Suffolk and Wales seem particularly rail-less.
