Re-Opening the Fawley Branch to passenger traffic.

[Ron Ron Ron]

The possibility or potential for re-opening the Fawley Branch, has been discussed a few times here, over the years.

This week, a SWR Class159 has made the journey from Southampton Central to the gates of Fawley Oil refinery.

 

A new BBC video of the event was posted yesterday.......

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-hampshire-53592492/video-shows-passenger-train-on-disused-fawley-branch-line?at_custom1=video&at_custom2=twitter&at_medium=custom7&at_campaign=64&at_custom4=3BFDA9C0-D30B-11EA-A6F2-40BF96E8478F&at_custom3=Regional+BBC+South

 

 

.

 

[St. Simon]

Hi,

 

Despite the article saying that everyone is in support of it, I get the feeling that this is one of those ‘might be a bit of fun’ projects which doesn’t go that far.

 

I might be wrong, but it reminds me of the phrase ‘it’s very easy to spend someone else’s money’

 

Simon

[John M Upton]

£45 million?!?  Never going to happen.

[PaulRhB]

Hmmmm
Nice to do but the linespeed has surely got to be raised to make it competitive with buses and cars and if the plans for ex military port come off they’re going to need a longer loop at Totton as it can’t hold a freightliner length train. Eastleigh had kittens a couple of times when I sent a booked train out and they’d sent a train too long for the loop early without telling me   

Retiming six sets of AHB’s for faster speeds, at least two more staff each for Marchwood and School Rd Xing or resignalling to Eastleigh, that’s not going to come cheap.
It’s been talked about it’s imminent since I started on the railway there! Usually it’s the council who scupper it’s because they won’t support the railway on top of the buses. To be honest buses serve the sprawling winding roads of modern estates better so you can see their point. 
 

Edited July 31, 2020 by PaulRhB

[eastglosmog]

When I lived in those parts, the passenger service was hardly used.  Much quicker to take the ferry.  Can't see that having changed since 1966.

[Ron Ron Ron]

54 minutes ago, eastglosmog said:

When I lived in those parts, the passenger service was hardly used.  Much quicker to take the ferry.  Can't see that having changed since 1966.

 

We're not in 1966 anymore, in case you haven't noticed.  (only joking).

There's already a much larger population in that area these days, with many more houses.

Now there are plans to build thousands of new homes in the Fawley and Hythe area.

The local roads will be put under further strain and the existing public transport will be insufficient.

 

As mentioned, this idea has been regularly floated, mostly in vain hope, for years.

This time round, the plans for large scale development and the fact that all the local councils are in favour, as is the rail minister and TOC, makes it a serious proposal for once.

 

£45 million on transport infrastructure in the south again ?????

That's a bit of a tall hurdle to jump with all the promises of help elsewhere.

 

 

.

 

 

[eastglosmog]

The stations are not well placed and it is still faster by ferry!

[PaulRhB]

8 minutes ago, eastglosmog said:

The stations are not well placed and it is still faster by ferry!

The existing stations aren’t all in the plan. Marchwood can’t be easily extended due to the wiggle of the loop and MOD spur. Hythe Building is in use and the platform would need rebuilding and Fawley is inside the refinery.
The draft plan is a new station just north of Marchwood village and new station(s) in the new development beyond Fawley. 

[Northmoor]

1 hour ago, eastglosmog said:

The stations are not well placed and it is still faster by ferry!

Assuming your destination is close to the Southampton Ferry terminal.

 

I have to admit that it level crossings that could be the death (and drive the cost) of this scheme; I counted 10 vehicle crossings.  As well as the cost of upgrading them all to remote operation, it also means there are 11 places for the locals to complain that the trains that they don't use hold them up.  Of course they still support the re-opening because it means other drivers will take the train and get out of their way.....

 

It is a very busy part of the world though and I can think of many worse ways to spend £45M on a rail re-opening.

[PaulRhB]

14 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

As well as the cost of upgrading them all to remote operation

No need to upgrade all of them, occupation and accommodation crossing already have phones and operation would be unchanged as far as the user is concerned. It’s the six AHB’s that need retiming and School Rd and Marchwood manual gates would need new operating protocols or replacement for raised linespeed as the crossings aren’t physically interlocked with the signalling with TPWS and don’t retain grandfather rights in a change of use. Not an issue with the current use and protocol but I suspect would be required to be fully interlocked for passenger operation after the Moreton on Lugg incident. 
Currently two members of staff are all that’s required but to bring in a late shift would need at least one extra at School Rd xing and potentially two at Marchwood with the increase in hours if the port was to go 24hr. 

Edited July 31, 2020 by PaulRhB

[stivesnick]

£45m - bargain! 

 

The reopening of the March to Wisbech line is costed at £200m for slightly longer route! Figures in the latest Rail magazine (issue 910) or read the full 900 page report on the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority web-site.

 

Most of the cost is associated with dealing with the level crossings, farm and footpath crossings. Either build a bridge or close completely. If re-opened the line would have no crossings at all to improve safety and reduce running costs. The rail industry may adopt a similar approach for this line. 

 

Regards 

 

Nick 

[phil-b259]

16 hours ago, stivesnick said:

£45m - bargain! 

 

The reopening of the March to Wisbech line is costed at £200m for slightly longer route! Figures in the latest Rail magazine (issue 910) or read the full 900 page report on the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority web-site.

 

Most of the cost is associated with dealing with the level crossings, farm and footpath crossings. Either build a bridge or close completely. If re-opened the line would have no crossings at all to improve safety and reduce running costs. The rail industry may adopt a similar approach for this line. 

 

Regards 

 

Nick 

 

There is a VERY big difference between level crossings on operational infrastructure and those on a mothballed / disused line.

 

The zero tolerance ORR (and Network Rail) policy for level crossings of ANY description only applies to new build infrastructure (and given the current state of the mothballed Wisbech line its reopening would certainly fall into the 'new build' category in the same way the officially 'mothballed' Calvert - Claydon line is).

 

The Fawley branch by contrast remains in a fully operational condition so level crossings can stay (subject to a suitable risk assessment and mitigation measures like crossing upgrades). A suitable parallel with the Fawly branch might be with the Alloa line in Scotland where some level crossings were retained and upgraded as determined by risk assessments. That said, naturally I would expect any upgrade to try and close crossings where possible (most likely foot crossings) as they are a general pain in the backside for NR.

Edited August 1, 2020 by phil-b259

[PaulRhB]

16 hours ago, stivesnick said:

March to Wisbech line is costed at £200m for slightly longer route!

 

16 hours ago, stivesnick said:

The rail industry may adopt a similar approach for this line. 

 

And replacing all the crossings with bridges would soon push it up to or beyond £200m  

The level crossings are all in the very flat areas so it’d need huge amounts of civil engineering and impossible at two of the AHB’s, Marchwood and School Rd due to housing meaning no room for approach ramps. With the resurgence of OD Xings with a new source or radar they are far more likely if a risk is identified and they are just as reliable as AHB’s now plus easier to reset from the box in many cases if there is a minor fault. We’ve got two OD’s and more in the works in a few years time and we like them. 

[Joseph_Pestell]

17 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

 interlocked for passenger operation after the Moreton on Lugg incident. 
 

 

Not familiar with this incident as it would have been before my time here.

 

But the time spent waiting at those gates can be very long. OK on what is a quite lightly used road but perhaps not good in a more densely populated area.

 

Edit to add: Just looked it up. How extraordinary that there was not (and never had been) any interlocking between the barrier and the protecting signals.

Edited August 1, 2020 by Joseph_Pestell

[phil-b259]

2 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

Not familiar with this incident as it would have been before my time here.

 

But the time spent waiting at those gates can be very long. OK on what is a quite lightly used road but perhaps not good in a more densely populated area.

 

 

On 16 January 2010, a collision occurred between a passenger train and two cars at the level crossing at Moreton-on-Lugg, near Hereford. The front-seat passenger in one of the cars was fatally injured. The driver was seriously injured and detained in hospital.

The two occupants of the other car attended hospital as a precaution. There were no casualties on the train, which did not derail.

 

The level crossing is controlled from the adjacent signal box. The cause of the accident was that the signaller raised the barriers in error when the train was approaching and too close to be able to stop before reaching the level crossing. He had just been involved in an absorbing telephone call that had interrupted his normal task of monitoring the passage of the train. As a result he believed that the train had already passed over the crossing.

 

There was no safeguard in the signalling system to prevent this from happening. There was no plan to fit such a safeguard, and no industry requirement to formally consider the safety benefits of one.

 

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/547c8ff3e5274a4290000191/R042011_110228_Moreton_on_Lugg_v2.pdf

 

 

[PaulRhB]

There’s been a load of work done in tweaking box instructions where there’s a, increasingly rare, lack of physical locking.
The Marchwood branch already had a good system in place that provided a high level of safety due to the two types of dangerous goods carried, the only change was the School Rd xing keeper now has to ask the Marchwood Signalman permission to open them again after the train passes as an extra check. 

[caradoc]

5 hours ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

How extraordinary that there was not (and never had been) any interlocking between the barrier and the protecting signals.

 

Agree, and a very valid point, but on the other hand such incidents are extremely rare; I cannot recall any similar accident (tragic though this one was), hence the reason it was not then considered necessary ?

 

[Joseph_Pestell]

10 hours ago, caradoc said:

 

Agree, and a very valid point, but on the other hand such incidents are extremely rare; I cannot recall any similar accident (tragic though this one was), hence the reason it was not then considered necessary ?

 

 

Lots of things have never happened on the railway that are still protected against in the interests of safety.

 

To paraphrase Conan Doyle / Sherlock Holmes, one should never confuse the unlikely with the impossible. Since the wheel (or in this case, probably, a button) that operates the barriers is released by a lever, why was that lever not interlocked with the signalling?

[PaulRhB]

1 hour ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

Since the wheel (or in this case, probably, a button) that operates the barriers is released by a lever, why was that lever not interlocked with the signalling?

Because when the un-interlocked wheel was replaced with a button they just replaced the mechanism with a motor and didn’t spend money on new interlocking because it had operated safely like it for years. Hand opened gates, like Marchwood, are even safer because you have all the time walking out there to see the approaching train.
Moreton on Lugg was an unfortunate set of circumstances and timing that played into human frailty when unusual things happen. Like the whole rule book it then prompted a response to eliminate the what if no one had thought of with additional procedures that added more steps to the chain of safety. 
Remember TPWS only came in in the last 20 years and at a rapid pace  and huge cost because of an accident. Similar solutions, tripcocks and atp, had existed for 50+ years?

The whole thing rests on risk assessment and even that can’t always predict things like Ufton Nervet because humans are unpredictable when under unusual influences. 
We get pilloried by the media and politicians for our pay but we are part of the safety interlocking through following procedure and if we fail we are responsible and can face jail. I’ve potentially, and in a couple of cases actually, saved lives because of those procedures and rules because I followed them. It doesn’t half get the adrenaline pumping and there’s still an investigation to see if you did everything right and if anything else can be done. Like the emergency services it’s part of the job though so when it goes right there’s no big media fuss because you’re just doing what you’re trained to do  

 

Edited August 2, 2020 by PaulRhB

[caradoc]

6 hours ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

Lots of things have never happened on the railway that are still protected against in the interests of safety.

 

I would have to disagree; Many, if not most, perhaps even all, of the safety systems on use on railways are the result of devastating accidents, mainly but in the past but more recently too; Continuous brakes and interlocking of signalling among the former, TPWS the latter.

 

[keefer]

6 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

Moreton on Lugg was an unfortunate set of circumstances and timing that played into human frailty when unusual things happen.

This is of continuing interest to, among others, the RAIB. In May they released a class investigation into 'Human performance in signalling operations' - looking into the most common types of incidents, where the human behaviour has been a factor eg level crossings, unusual events/circumstances etc.

https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/report-03-2020-class-investigation-into-human-performance-in-signalling-operation

Paragraph 4 is particularly relevant to what has been discussed here:

[Context of investigation]

"Since it became operational in 2005, RAIB has investigated numerous incidents in 
which the decisions of front-line workers have been pivotal, and where the safety 
of the railway system has been heavily dependent on those decisions (that is, 
scenarios in which there were no, or limited, engineered safeguards)."

Edited August 2, 2020 by keefer

[PaulRhB]

20 minutes ago, keefer said:

Since it became operational in 2005, RAIB has investigated numerous incidents in 
which the decisions of front-line workers have been pivotal, and where the safety 
of the railway system has been heavily dependent on those decisions (that is, 
scenarios in which there were no, or limited, engineered safeguards)."

Oh yes we read that with interest and there’s quite a lot more in there we will be watching with great interest. 
In reality, as we saw with TPWS, the risk has to be balanced with cost and new installations are locked as far as it is possible but some locations are still effectively 50-60 years old in locking and working very well. 

It’s easy to use human frailty as a focus but equally the training means that often that human element saves something worse happening. A human can be better at pulling together unique circumstances and responding than a fixed rule book, or the very best locking, because there are factors external to the railway that become involved we have no control over. Cars, trees, weather, animals, structures and people etc outside the fence introduce unknown’s you can’t design a failsafe for. 
There was an incident in leaf fall back in the early 2000’s where a Signaller technically broke the rules to keep a train in front away from one sliding behind it. The RAIB recognised that their response in those circumstances was actually was safer and I know of a second similar incident where a Signaller used that info in the report to make the same decision. I know the driver of the train sliding in the second one and he was extremely glad of the lesson learnt and shared that meant he didn’t hit anything. 
Humans aren’t always the weakest point  

[Joseph_Pestell]

4 hours ago, caradoc said:

 

I would have to disagree; Many, if not most, perhaps even all, of the safety systems on use on railways are the result of devastating accidents, mainly but in the past but more recently too; Continuous brakes and interlocking of signalling among the former, TPWS the latter.

 

 

I expressed myself poorly. I meant that there are locations on the railway where things are guarded against that have never happened there, only elsewhere.

The weak link in the process is usually human frailty. But it is fairly easy to make the machines cover for that.

Interesting to note that when the level crossing was operated by a wheel, that was interlocked. But the button to lift the barriers was not. Surely, that is a lack of basic reasoning on the part of the installers.

[SWT442]

On 31/07/2020 at 20:49, PaulRhB said:

The existing stations aren’t all in the plan. Marchwood can’t be easily extended due to the wiggle of the loop and MOD spur. Hythe Building is in use and the platform would need rebuilding and Fawley is inside the refinery.
The draft plan is a new station just north of Marchwood village and new station(s) in the new development beyond Fawley. 

 

I think that might have been the plan in the past? The flyer that was given out on Thursdays train showed that the existing station at Marchwood would be upgraded, while a new station called Hythe Town built in Hythe and another called Hythe & Fawley Parkway as the terminus of the line, built on the former Hardley Halt site. I'd imagine the best suited site in Hythe is on the site of the old library. Granted the line is on an embankment there, but it's waste ground and big enough to fit a station on, plus there's already a car-park there and it's pretty much by the village centre.

 

 

There's no way you can get through to the new development in Fawley, as I can't imagine Esso would give the thumbs up for a passenger service to pass through the middle of their refinery. There's no real way to divert around it either.

 

As a resident of Hythe, (likely soon to be ex-resident) this scheme needs to get off the ground, as the road 'enhancements' planned for the A326 & B3053 amount to widening the roundabout approaches and chucking some traffic lights in for good measure. Quite frankly, it's not good enough to help traffic in and out of the Waterside cul-de-sac once the near 1,500 homes are built. The whole of the A326 should be converted into a dual carriageway as was supposed to happen nearly half a century ago!

 

Anyway, here's my video of the train running down the branch. Caught at Frost Lane & Trotts Lane:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ZnM2c-zco

 

Andy.

[PaulRhB]

Interesting there’s another map doing the rounds with Marchwood station in that red shaded (1) area. 
 

Edited August 2, 2020 by PaulRhB