Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Does Britain really need a new high speed railway?


Red
Originally uploaded by iwouldstay.

I have been pondering this further. What actually is the aim and purpose of a long distance high speed rail link? And how might such a link be tied into Britain's sub-standard infrastructure? And what might be/needs to be done to upgrade that?

There are obvious gaps in electrification. London to Bristol and Cardiff/Oxford/Banbury/Birmingham, Bristol to Birmingham, Leeds to Manchester come to mind and there are probably others. And capacity improvements can be achieved by grade separated junctions, signalling schemes, platform lengthening, upgrading of alternative routes. As well as improved design of rolling stock; replacement of slam door stock actually resulted in a loss in seating due to poor design.

Then the Channel Tunnel High Speed line needs to be brought further into the country, as much for freight as passenger services. Since this runs on the east side of England, much of which is flat and relatively undeveloped, it might be possible to construct a new route northwards, perhaps parallel to the East Coat Main line for some of the way.

The problem zone is in the Leeds - Manchester - Dover - Bournemouth "box" where 85% of the population live and generate most of the journeys, too many of which are by car rather than any form of public transport. The comparable area on mainland Europe is not France with its TGV but Belgium, Holland and the Rhine-Ruhr conurbation north of Cologne. The most important routes there are served not by high speed trains but by double-deck regional expresses, which are efficient peoplemovers and run at a top speed of about 160kph. It is just possible that the former Great Central alignment could be used as a spine route for this purpose. If some way of linking it to the Channel Tunnel, this too would be a good thing, primarily as a freight distributor. Which if I recall was the Central Railways plan, which the government knocked on the head.

So that is a programme in itself. As for the 300+ mile journeys which people are tending to make by air, perhaps we should not worry unduly as the numbers involved are relatively small and in any case the problem will solve itself as the cost of air travel rises.

If the aim is to promote regeneration of the north and Scotland, there are other ways of doing it than putting in expensive infrastructure, most importantly, through the tax system which at present fails to take account of geographical disadvantage.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer