Carmarthen to Aberystwyth

[John_Hughes]

Does it even have to be standard gauge, would metre gauge work out any cheaper?

 

Mike.

 

The thought had crossed my mind many times; metre-gauge, light electrification and street running in Aberystwyth and Carmarthen (and possibly Lampeter as well). I think of it as the Swiss Solution.

 

Whatever is finally done, the simple fact is that the present situation is already intolerable. Commuting into Aber from - let's say - Llanilar can take three quarters of an hour in the morning rush, and no new road scheme is ever going to fix that. The continued concentration of main services in Aber, Carmarthen and - increasingly, Swansea - means that anyone without a car and needing to visit the hospital is effectively screwed. I know how often I've been called on to give lifts to friends who otherwise simply can't get to their appointments or to visit friends and relatives.

 

Why should we put up with it? Because of the actions of a deeply corrupt transport minister and his willing sock-puppet a half-century or more ago? B*gger that for a game of soldiers!

[31A]

Descending briefly into madness, would it really need to be heavy rail? They're going in for tram-train in the new Wales franchise, and maybe a tram-train approach would give other options for any places where conventional heavy rail construction would be problematic.

 

I doubt it's ever been done over such distances, but I don't see why it couldn't, if the vehicles had an appropriate interior specification.

 

 

The Karlsruhe tram train network reaches a very long way into the Black Forest; apparently the longest route is a three hour journey:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_Stadtbahn

[Fat Controller]

in south wales a lot of the lines were used to move coal from the mines

Barring the littoral route from Cardiff to Neyland/ Fishguard, you could say that the reason for the existence of railways anywhere between Newport and Kidwelly was directly attributable to King Coal. If a line wasn't serving a colliery directly, then it was providing access to a port, or at least a proposed port. Passenger traffic on many lines wasn't heavy, outside of 'stop fortnight', chapel excursions or 'market days'. The two westernmost lines of the coalfield proper initially didn't even provide passenger coaches, with such passenger trains as ran being unadvertised, using swept-out coal wagons. Passenger stock only arrived after the Board of Trade Inspectors discovered the practice.

Sometimes, even when services were introduced, they didn't last long; one example is the service along the Swansea District Line, opened just prior to WW1; the intermediate stations closed in the 1920s. Should lines be re-opened, then they need to be the ones around Swansea, starting with the former Swansea and Mumbles line, the Swansea Valley line (Pontardawe and beyond) and the southern end of the Vale of Neath and Onllwyn lines.

[corneliuslundie]

Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth is busy most of the day. In fact I was told a couple of years ago that in the summer the train at about 10.40 from Newtown to Shrewsbury, so an hour earlier from Aber, was the busiest on the Arriva Trains Wales system. It had to be strengthened to six cars. i don't know about the coast route, and it has a poorer service as well. Interestingly, the eight something in the evening from Shrewsbury alwasy seems to carry a large number of drunken and scantily dressed young ladies, apparently going for a night out in Welshpool or Newtown - where I can't quite imagine. Shrewsbury is the junction for routes to several parts of England and a very busy station, so much so that the closed platform 3 has had to be brought back into use, even though the access had been closed off when the booking office was resited and rebuilt, so one has to go outside the station to change platforms.

Carmarthen, on the other hand, is on the way to Swansea but an awful long way from any major city. No-one in their right mind is going to go from Aberystwyth to anywhere in England via Carmarthen. And the remaining towns and villages on the route are not going to produce much traffic unless sheep start travelling by train as they are just too small.

The assessment that commissioning the consultancy report was a move to kill the project is probably the correct one. It is a pity such reports waste so much public money when the rural local authorities are already struggling to make ends meet because their budgets have been cut but their responsibilities have been increased.

And if you want to go from Manchester to Milford there are through trains!

By the way, the Welsh Assembly is currently extending the Traws Cymru bus network.

Jonathan

[corneliuslundie]

A separate comment about light rail. It could be a solution for local travel in the Aberystwyth area except for three factors:

1. It has been made so expensive to implement compared with the days when most tram systems were built.

2 The hills are rather steep in many areas around the town. For example, could light rail get up the hill to the hospital and university?

3. Aberystwyth is not very big.

While supermarkets are built on the edges of towns customers are always going to go there by car simply because they don't want to drag their shopping around on public transport. and even if they do want to use public transport and it serves the supermarkets, does it go where they live?

By the way, we are talking about a town with a population of 13,040 within the town's traditional borders or.18,965 including Llanbadarn Fawr, Waunfawr and Comins Coch - and the last is some distance away. That is bigger, just, than Newtown, and far bigger than any other town or village until you get to Carmarthen going south or England going east, and about the same size as Bangor going north.

Jonathan

[wombatofludham]

Much as it grieves me to say it, a properly funded and planned Traws Cymru bus link between Carmarthen and Aberystwyth would be more useful.  Before the rabid rail at any cost types start piling in, look at the success of the T3 Wrexham to Barmouth service.  That began as Crosville's D94 rail replacement bus between Ruabon and Barmouth, for which it bought a small batch of coach seated short Bristol REs seating 43.  It ran at the same irregular frequency as the trains.  Today the T3 has been extended to Wrexham, is roughly hourly between Barmouth and Dolgellau, and two hourly to Wrexham, is run with alternate large capacity single deck and double deck vehicles, and runs seven days a week.  That route has developed beyond all recognition from the orifinal rail replacement service, and on a route that uses some really quite substandard roads as well.

Whilst the T2 Aberystwyth to Bangor service has suffered some decline, partly due to contractor issues, partly due to it having to make additional stops to make up for other service cutbacks, even it is more frequent today than the original Crosville 701 which it partly replaced.

The T3 should be used as a template for a good quality Traws Cymru limited stop bus between Aberystwyth and Carmarthen, with some of the money saved being used to provide a Lincolnshire style connecting minibus or demand responsive shared taxi type network of feeders to neighbouring villages so as not to add time to the end-to-end journey by diverting off the main road to serve every fencepost en-route.  It's not rocket science, it's been done before in the UK, and with modern communications technology connections can be guaranteed and people kept up to date, which would give customers confidence their connection will be there.

[Northmoor]

Whatever is finally done, the simple fact is that the present situation is already intolerable. Commuting into Aber from - let's say - Llanilar can take three quarters of an hour in the morning rush, and no new road scheme is ever going to fix that. The continued concentration of main services in Aber, Carmarthen and - increasingly, Swansea - means that anyone without a car and needing to visit the hospital is effectively screwed. I know how often I've been called on to give lifts to friends who otherwise simply can't get to their appointments or to visit friends and relatives.

Sorry but if it takes you 45 minutes to get from Llanilar to Aber there is something seriously wrong with the road system.

 

This can be addressed by spending £20Bn on a railway to address 20% of the problem, or perhaps £20M on some sensible road improvements and traffic management, to address 80% of the problem.

 

Your taxes, your vote, your choice.

[corneliuslundie]

Still on the Traws Cymru theme, the T4 is two hourly from Newtown to Cardiff via Llandrindod. Builth, Brecon and Merthyr. it runs two hourly and takes about 3 hours and 40 minutes, even with a few detours via villages - which never seem to generate any traffic. How long would the journey to Brecon have taken on the train? In 1921 it was about 2 hours and 30 minutes from Moat Lane - connection from Newtown.

The new T12 runs through from Machynlleth to Wrexham, combining the former Lloyds X85 from Machynlleth to Newtown and the Tanat Valley X71 - the latter effectively the rail replacement - from Newtown to Oswestry. Again roughly two hourly. Unfortunately it has been very poorly marketed - it is still after several months not on the Traws Cymru website and it is run jointly by the two companies, so Powys has seen fit to list the services run by each company separately.

Since the T12 replaces services which were long standing one would have expected it to be well used, but it is not, at least at the west end of the route.

And to encourage anyone from England to visit, the Traws Cymru services are free again at weekends for the winter. Last winter duplicates were being run from Cardiff to Brecon to cope with demand.

I have just been rereading the book on the Hereford, Hay & Brecon line and even by the mid 1950s passenger traffic had almost disappeared, single figures of passengers on most trains.

So I concur with the suggestion by wombatofludham for a better bus network with local links provided by the most economical means. You could fund a comprehensive Welsh bus network for the cost of the proposed railway line, and still have plenty left over.

But there is still the Maggie Thatcher thinking about - though I am not sure if she actually said it - that if you need to take a bus you are a failure.

Jonathan

[Christopher125]

Given that HS2 is allegedly having the brakes put on to fund the Crossrail shortfall, I would agree that proposals like this one are unfortunately a waste of good paper (or cyberspace) whatever the merits of the case.

Surely it's Crossrail 2 having the brakes put on (not that it was making much progress) - London's community infrastructure levy will continue to fund Crossrail 1, rather than switch to funding the new line as expected.

Edited December 18, 2018 by Christopher125

[John_Hughes]

Sorry but if it takes you 45 minutes to get from Llanilar to Aber there is something seriously wrong with the road system.

 

This can be addressed by spending £20Bn on a railway to address 20% of the problem, or perhaps £20M on some sensible road improvements and traffic management, to address 80% of the problem.

 

Your taxes, your vote, your choice.

 

Something seriously wrong with the road system? Yes, absolutely, mostly caused by the presence of those pesky hills and rivers. If only we could bulldoze the former and put the latter underground then the whole problem could be easily resolved.

 

My vote, my choice? It wasn't my choice to close that line, nor any other; that was down to pure governmental corruption. And it's not my choice to spend untold billions on easing traffic congestion in London either with a whole series of prestige projects that will benefit most of the UK not at all, and none of which will ever turn an operating profit. But does anyone ever complain about how those will be a lasting drain on the UK Treasury? No, they don't.

[rodent279]

Depends where the trains are going. If a Swansea to Aberystwyth service is desired then it would have to be standard. If Carmarthen is good enough then a narrow gauge option may have merit.

I've always wondered why we haven't done more NG in the UK, a la BOB etc in Switzerland, which are extensive 1000mm gauge networks with what amount to S-Bahn & regional services on them. Not sure what vitesse max they have, but I would imagine 90-100km/h. Surely would have merit, if the case for re-instatement can be made at all.