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East West rail, Bletchley to oxford line


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11 minutes ago, Bernard Lamb said:

I thought that HS2 is being built because of a capacity problem on the WCML. The amount of time taken not just in running between the two stations but in getting trains clear of the through lines would be considerable. As for more trains to Tring. Where do they go when they get there? Can it be justified running them back to Euston from there? The idea of a new Crossrail line terminating at Tring was thrown out long ago on grounds of VFM. There is such a lack of capacity south of MK that the slightest problem escalates for several following services. A good example, a time period in which I am a regular traveller,  is the first couple of cheap London bound trains in the morning. OTTOMH from Hemel 09.29 full price. 09.36 first off peak 8 car. 0943 Southern via Clapham Junction. 09.53 4 car and usually packed on arrival.  With different stopping patterns those in the know watch the indicators and the announcements and make a last minute decision as to which train to use. There are times when the first arrival is not the best option.

Bernard

 

Your problem there seems to be some short-formed (4 car) trains rather than a lack of paths.

 

Tring was, historically, a terminating point for trains from Euston. It still had all the facilities necessary when I last looked.

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14 minutes ago, Trog said:

Is the overtaking facility much used though? May just be a function of when I have been there but the old DF platform seems not to get a lot of use

I don't spend much time there to see overtaking (or not), but I have seen sequential stopping trains using the alternate platforms to call rather than queuing outside the station, which wouldn't be possible at Bletchley.

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1 hour ago, Zomboid said:

The "mistake" was made decades ago, when MK wasn't just a huge expansion around the existing town centre of Bletchley. MK is at least as much of a destination/ source, particularly for local traffic as it is an interchange, so the major benefits of EWR will more readily be realised if the trains go there.

 

That was anything but a mistake, which I think you've alluded to!

 

Most towns are expanded from smaller old ones, so the road systems (including buses) are unable to cope. MK was designed explicitly to be different. 50 years on, it still works in a way older town cannot manage.

It also sits almost equally between 4 older towns: Bletchley, Stony Stratford, Wolverton & Newport Pagnell. Why expand 1 in preference to the others?

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2 minutes ago, Zomboid said:

I don't spend much time there to see overtaking (or not), but I have seen sequential stopping trains using the alternate platforms to call rather than queuing outside the station, which wouldn't be possible at Bletchley.

 

The bi-directional slow platform is used a lot by terminating services. This is more difficult at Bletchley because a terminating down service has to cross the up line. Since the bi-directionals were added in MK, it seems to be more common for trains to terminate there then head back south to Bletchley for storage. This prevents them from having to run wrong line to get to the carriage sidings.

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25 minutes ago, Trog said:

the overtaking facility much used though


A fair bit, especially when things get behind schedule. The old DF platform is used for parallel stopping and overtaking moves in both directions (not simultaneously!). Causes utter confusion to customers when Up trains are put there at very short notice though.

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MK is definitely a destination over a wide area around it and most people have to use a car to get there because public transport often does not exist.From Aylesbury we have two bus routes one express and one that goes all round the houses and both are not over used.If we get a rail link maybe with special fares it might succeed but its going to take a lot of selling to our local population who are firmly wedded to to thier cars.On a lighter note I have recieved the Vidioscene catalogue and their is a new dvd on the Oxford to Cambridge line loooks interesting KR139 is the code number.Contains many photos,a trip over the whole line worth seeing what has been lost.

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5 hours ago, Pete the Elaner said:

 

That was anything but a mistake, which I think you've alluded to!

 

Most towns are expanded from smaller old ones, so the road systems (including buses) are unable to cope. MK was designed explicitly to be different. 50 years on, it still works in a way older town cannot manage.

It also sits almost equally between 4 older towns: Bletchley, Stony Stratford, Wolverton & Newport Pagnell. Why expand 1 in preference to the others?

Because one of them is a potentially important railway junction?

 

The fundamental problem is that MK, like many other developments of its era, was mostly designed around the car.  Places that are easy to drive around are generally difficult to serve by public transport.  

 

Hence...

3 hours ago, lmsforever said:

MK is definitely a destination over a wide area around it and most people have to use a car to get there because public transport often does not exist.From Aylesbury we have two bus routes one express and one that goes all round the houses and both are not over used.If we get a rail link maybe with special fares it might succeed but its going to take a lot of selling to our local population who are firmly wedded to to thier cars.

 

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The whole point of MK was that it was a green field site. And as it was the era of the car, the city centre isn't especially near to the station.

 

To build it around an existing town, even one with a major railway junction, would have defeated the point of what they were trying to do. Of course times have changed now, and we probably wouldn't do MK again...

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1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

But, I would say that incompatibility with public transport is MK’s main, possibly only really significant, design failure.

A pretty fundamental one though.  

 

Even the 1950 map shows open land within a few hundred yards of Bletchley station.  If the will had been there it could have been focused there instead of further north.  It could also have been designed so that the Bedford line served several local centres, with light rail to serve others.  

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52 minutes ago, Edwin_m said:

A pretty fundamental one though.

 

Wasn't seen that way in the brave new world of the 1960s though, and it hasn't stopped the place growing at a prodigious rate.

 

Even now I think the jury is still out on the topic, because autonomous electric taxis, which are not far over the technological horizon, would work superbly well in MK, and could save it from the tyranny of cars that currently threatens it as much as everywhere else - congestion, land-take for car parks, air pollution etc.

 

We tend to think that 'public transport' and 'lots of people travelling together in one vehicle' are necessarily synonymous, when that needn't necessarily always be so.

 

Also worth remembering that in 1965 the Marston Vale and Bletchley were still "brick works central", which might have coloured people's views about whether they were appropriate locations for a new city.

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28 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

Wasn't seen that way in the brave new world of the 1960s though, and it hasn't stopped the place growing at a prodigious rate.

 

Even now I think the jury is still out on the topic, because autonomous electric taxis, which are not far over the technological horizon, would work superbly well in MK, and could save it from the tyranny of cars that currently threatens it as much as everywhere else - congestion, land-take for car parks, air pollution etc.

 

We tend to think that 'public transport' and 'lots of people travelling together in one vehicle' are necessarily synonymous, when that needn't necessarily always be so.

 

Also worth remembering that in 1965 the Marston Vale and Bletchley were still "brick works central", which might have coloured people's views about whether they were appropriate locations for a new city.

I'm not suggesting that anyone would have done that in the 60s, not in the UK at least.  When we were building roads the Germans and Swiss were keeping and developing their light rail.  

 

Some sort of autonomous transport system is probably the only way out for Milton Keynes, but still have problems of their own such as tyre particulate pollution and the risks of antisocial behavior in an unsupervised vehicle.  And they won't solve the problem that the focus of the local transport network is a longer-distance railway station serving only two points of the compass, maybe three in future, when it could have served four if it had been at Bletchley.  

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IIRC the original plan for MK was for a mono-rail type rapid transit system once it grew. That was why some of the central reservations on the dual carriageways are so wide, allowing the system to be built alongside the road one. The other thing that was envisaged was, the replacement of the roundabouts with traffic lights when traffic flows increased.

 

Reality has led to no RTS, roundabouts with traffic light control, and the grid road upgrades being abandoned with some awkward entry/exits onto the roundabouts (especially for HGVs) where the dualling hasn't been done. It all went by the wayside when the MK Development Corporation disappeared.

 

I guess when all the EWR planning was done, it was envisaged that you could nip an EMU or bi-mode on the OHLE between Bletchley and CMK quite easily, with a swift turn around. With the descoping already implemented, the pathing becomes more of a problem. A couple of extra 110mph 350s on the fast to/from Ledburn might be doable???

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10 hours ago, Edwin_m said:

 

Some sort of autonomous transport system is probably the only way out for Milton Keynes.

 

You don't seem to like MK at all?

It was designed with the car in mind. Like it or not, most people like to use their cars for most journeys. Until this changes, it will continue to be faster to get around than anywhere else in the UK, which is exactly how it was designed over 50 years ago.

 

It may not appear to be the prettiest town when you drive though it, but there are a large number of lakes & parks, some of which are surprisingly close to the centre.

 

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10 hours ago, Davexoc said:

I guess when all the EWR planning was done, it was envisaged that you could nip an EMU or bi-mode on the OHLE between Bletchley and CMK quite easily

Oxford (Didcot!) to Bedford was supposed to be electrified back in those halcyon days.

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25 minutes ago, Pete the Elaner said:

 

You don't seem to like MK at all?

It was designed with the car in mind. Like it or not, most people like to use their cars for most journeys. Until this changes, it will continue to be faster to get around than anywhere else in the UK, which is exactly how it was designed over 50 years ago.

 

It may not appear to be the prettiest town when you drive though it, but there are a large number of lakes & parks, some of which are surprisingly close to the centre.

 

Many of us criticise Milton Keynes. But everyone that I have ever known that lives/lived there, liked it.

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8 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

Many of us criticise Milton Keynes. But everyone that I have ever known that lives/lived there, liked it.

 

#Me too - lived there for about 20 years.

 

I think we also need to remember that MK was developed at a time when there was a positively ant-rail movement going on, with lines such as the GCR being run down and closed, and even local branches such as that to Newport Pagnell being closed - so it is more than just "pro-car", I feel.

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I used to work near Milton Keynes Central Station and back then Milton Keynes was really good for wildlife (It may still be so).

 

I remember that as I walked up the path towards the shopping centre from of the station in the morning before the rush hour got started, to get to my office there were rats everywhere.

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1 hour ago, Pete the Elaner said:

 

You don't seem to like MK at all?

It was designed with the car in mind. Like it or not, most people like to use their cars for most journeys. Until this changes, it will continue to be faster to get around than anywhere else in the UK, which is exactly how it was designed over 50 years ago.

 

It may not appear to be the prettiest town when you drive though it, but there are a large number of lakes & parks, some of which are surprisingly close to the centre.

 

It sets a bad precedent for sustainable transport.  Just look at the situation most of America is in to understand where we would be if everywhere was like that.  Most American cities are similarly built for access car (though with signal junctions not roundabouts), with the result that those without a car have to rely on rather desultory transit services.  They still have traffic congestion and keep having to build more roads which essentially makes things worse due to induced demand.  So MK is probably fine for those who have cars and still have the ability to drive them, or are fit enough to cycle.  But I don't believe it's a model anyone should be recommending.  

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11 hours ago, Davexoc said:

IIRC the original plan for MK was for a mono-rail type rapid transit system once it grew. 

Which also shows how hopeless transport planning was at the time.  Monorails don't do junctions, so how would you make a grid system easily accessible?

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43 minutes ago, Edwin_m said:

So MK is probably fine for those who have cars and still have the ability to drive them, or are fit enough to cycle.  But I don't believe it's a model anyone should be recommending.  


But, at the level of sustainable transport, nobody is recommending it. It’s very much ‘yesterday’s news’ as a design in terms of sustainable transport.

 

Probably no worse in that respect than any other city in the UK, but still poor on an absolute scale and certainly way-short of the utopian’s dream in respect of sustainable transport.

 

In the vanishingly unlikely circumstance that anyone gets the opportunity to ‘Top down’ design a new city on a green-field site In the UK again, it would be different because we are in different times.

 

As a BTW, MK is very good in some respects for the severely mobility impaired, because the walking/cycling paths are great for battery mobility scooters and electric wheelchairs too - loads of people use them for that.

 

The monorail ‘Plan’ was never serious, it amounted to a few conceptual sketches - at best it was a faintly deluded pious hope (of which there were a lot around in 1967), at worst a cynical sop.


 

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28 minutes ago, Edwin_m said:

Which also shows how hopeless transport planning was at the time.  Monorails don't do junctions, so how would you make a grid system easily accessible?


That’s not the point - the key is space was reserved for future public transport routes rather than squeezing the maximum amount of development in.
 

That space is therefore available for use by trans, dedicated bus roads or indeed monorails, the later being perfectly able to have junctions through having bits of the structure that pivot to and fro - much like the switch rail does on a set of conventional railway points.

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A visit around 1015 this morning revealed no removals overnight.

 

However, there appears to have been some work done on the overhead lines with some shiny new masts highlighted in yellow on the second picture (between the Park PH and the second remaining span at the end of Duncombe Street). As the shiny new overheard masts are behind the Avis garage, better views are not available.

DSC_0007.JPG

DSC_0004.JPG

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1 hour ago, Edwin_m said:

Monorails don't do junctions, so how would you make a grid system easily accessible?

 

Rather a sweeping statement. No great difficulty in creating "pointwork" for a monorail: a traverser with one straight route and one curved route.

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