Edwin_m

This is the link to the set of plans covering Curzon Street and approaches: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hs2-plan-and-profile-maps-birmingham-spur It comes out of Curzon Street on viaduct as mentioned, clips the corner of the Freightliner terminal and crosses the Derby line at the old Saltley power box to follow its south side past the depot on the site of the Metro-Cammell works. It's then in tunnel almost to the edge of the built-up area - at one time it was proposed to run under the stilts of the M6 flyover.

Actually pretty similar. Most routes are limited by federal restriction to 79mph and freight will typically run at 70mph. Amtrak may get up to the full speed on suitable routes, but will also make station calls, but the freight has no reason to stop other than crew changes every few hours.

I had a feeling someone would make that point...

But do you have to snip the capacitors out of the cat for it to run properly?

Many of the Class 1's run high priority freight which must be reliable to meet customer deadlines, and I assume is timetabled rather than arranged ad-hoc. How does the punctuality of those compare with Amtrak on the same routes?

There's something of a renaissance in sleeper travel on the Continent, driven by "flight shame". However I can't see that translating into any international UK sleepers, at least beyond London. This is partly because of the diffuse nature of the market in the rest of the UK mentioned above, and also because any such stock would have to be UK gauge. The larger size of Continental stock doesn't make that much difference to day stock (unless you are considering double-deck) but the extra space is very beneficial in improving the economics of a sleeper. Using HS2 would resolve the gauge problem, if there was also a European gauge HS2-HS1 link, not planned currently. But another issue to overcome is that HS2 is not planned to be open overnight, and there is no alternative large-gauge route if it is closed for engineering access. If a sleeper was to run towards the Continent before the end of HS2 service in the evening, with the return working in the early morning, then there would be high speed trains using the route and the sleeper would have to be capable of similar speeds.

However just looking at a map of cities with "commuter rail" gives an unrealistically rosy view. Many of those commuter routes are just that, a couple of trains in peak hour on a couple of routes where they have been persuaded (no doubt involving handover of many $$$) to allow paths at that time of day. This results in some terrible economics, incurring most of the costs of an all-day operation but much less revenue, and also being pretty irrelevant to most of the people living within the potential catchment. See for example https://humantransit.org/2021/04/us-commuter-rail-what-it-is-and-what-it-could-be.html.

I read somewhere that the manufacturer will take back used TBMs, as presumably they are in the best position to re-use them if a contract comes up for something suitable. The cutter heads are bigger than the eventual tunnel so can't just be removed bodily the way they came in, so often end up bein buried or cut up on site. Much of the rest of the TBM is probably re-useable unless worn out, perhaps even on a machine of a different size or specification. TBMs can be re-used on the same project, as mentioned for Crossrail. The main factor is the length of tunnel which determines the excavation time, and how critical that is to the overall project. So a long tunnel will probably have a TBM for each bore, or even start from both ends with a total of four TBMs as with the Crossrail central area. At Long Itchington there is only one TBM for the two bores, which will create the first one then be dismantled and returned to the start to dig the second one. That's preferable to turning it round, because either would involve dismantling and reassembling, and the segment supply and spoil disposal is at the launch end so can be re-used for the second bore.

No real reason why electric plant should be more expensive to hire than diesel, other than that it hasn't yet attained economies of scale in production. And going by electric cars I imagine it would be cheaper to operate. There would be some extra cost to provide the power supply, but in a project like this it may be bringing forward part of the electrical work ultimately needed to supply the station.

You do, but only in very exceptional circumstances such as Stonehenge (not a motorway, but same principle).

A few months ago I saw Gizmo closely examining a shrub which was making rustling noises. Shortly afterwards a frog or toad emerged, did one jump and stopped. I was expecting to have to attempt to save it from annihilation (as I did with a blackbird in the lounge last weekend) but he seemed bemused by it. He just approached it and gave it the tiniest nudge with a paw, at which point it did three more jumps to land in the pond. Perhaps frogs/toads aren't actually edible?

That's effectively what the requirement for fair access permitted, that any operator could use any light maintenance depot on equal terms. This was obviously subject to practicality and available capacity, but the depot owner couldn't discriminate arbitrarily. I believe this is still on the statute books. National Express at one point started grouping their depots as "Maintrain" and started touting for business with other operators, but it didn't seem particularly successful. Arriva Traincare is probably something similar, but the fact that most passenger depots are tied to specific franchise means they will probably change owners every few years and can't really be seen as freestanding businesses. Barton Hill was part of EWS immediately after privatisation, having been a Rail Express Systems depot previously, so is effectively permanent. It was even being talked about as a place for servicing the putative Bristol to South Gloucestershire tram-train. For heavy maintenance location is less important, as the cost and downtime of moving the train to anywhere in the country is usually not significant compared to whatever is being done to it. So this is treated as a free market.

The IRP was essentially setting out two strategies, one to emphasise north-south links (so including all of the Eastern Leg) and one focusing on regional links (so excluding some of Eastern Leg). These were presented as alternatives but there's no reason why they couldn't both be done.

There are regulatory conditions in place to ensure that light maintenance depots must accept all customers on an equal basis, to ensure that a potential operator isn't frozen out by having nowhere to re-fuel and clean their trains in the area they want to serve. Cross Country has a particular problem with trains overnighting in small numbers a very long way from their depot, and struck a deal in the 1990s with the then EWS to service them at sites including Barton Hill mentioned above. Neville Hill depot has been with East Midlands Railway and its predecessors, ever since privatisation I believe, despite a large part of its fleet being West Yorkshire DMUs. It's now being handed over, to whom I'm not sure, as EMR will no longer operate to Leeds or base any trains there.

At the risk of taking this off on a tangent, I would say keeping the 7ft gauge would have made no difference to the capability of rail today and may have made it worse. There is no real issue with stability, maximum speeds are limited by factors such as air resistance and rail-wire contact. A wider gauge increases the minimum curve radius possible at low speeds, I don't think it would affect high speed alignments, but it makes stations and depots more costly and difficult.

Sustained gradients have a significant effect on attainable speed, even on high speed lines. So a line over the Pennines could allow running in the descending direction considerably faster than might be suggested just by looking at the station spacing, which would compensate for slower speeds on the climb. Manchester to Bradford, likely to be a non-stop run on NPR, is also further than Manchester to Crewe where there is one intermediate stop.

Isn't the universe just a giant doughnut anyway?

Which is one reason why East West Rail is being built. This is, correctly, a conventional speed not a high speed railway because it serves various places between Oxford and Cambridge so wouldn't be able to get much above 100mph anyway. It's a bit different in the north, because the places served are much larger, and they are mostly connected by existing routes with intermediate stations. So the need is for more capacity in total, and for faster journeys between the main centres (where local trains can connect in), not for any service at all like EWR.

I guess it would finally prove it one way or the other. Assuming you believe the expedition that locates it isn't also conducted in a warehouse in California.

Almost every local and regional authority in the North is strongly in favour of both HS2 and NPR, even some that wouldn't be served directly. Many places not on the new route will have through services onto it, and (like HS2) taking the main city to city flows onto a new route means the timetables on the parallel existing routes can be re-planned to give the best service to the smaller intermediate stations. Again like HS2, the benefits of NPR rely on an effect called agglomeration, which essentially says that by making it easier to travel between places you create more interaction which improves the economy. London has this already because it's so big, HS2 allows businesses to locate outside London and still have easy access to it, and NPR allows the cities of the North to work more closely together.

It wasn't an entirely serious suggestion. Maybe a possibility if a permanent colony is established and someone decides to start a space tourist industry.

Watching a programme last week on Apollo, I did wonder if there would be a new mission sometime to re-visit the Apollo 11 landing site and see if anything had changed.

According to the EWR consultation a five-track option would have little operational advantage over a four-track, and cause almost as much impact on the adjacent properties as a six-track. Having said that, the link I posted upthread suggests that EWR have made a real mess of this process and made a lot of enemies in the Bedford area. They should have provided an absolutely bomb-proof justification that six tracks were necessary before proposing extensive housing demolition based on what looks like a very flimsy justification. They should also have done some more design which might have reduced the necessary land take and property demolition.

I'd guess if a future mission had the capability to do that, then it would be able to do on its own anything Beagle 2 might have planned to do.

That might be quicker London to Sheffield and Birmingham to Leeds, but London to Leeds by that route would be slower than the ECML.