phil-b259

5 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Well, you’ve drawn a lot of red lines on aerial photos, and an entire team of designers at EWR did much the same, but at a far greater level of detail, to preliminary engineering design and costing, and the upshot of your red lines, or their work would be the same: lots of cost, and lots, and lots of construction time, in several instances in the teeth of very firm opposition. Which isn’t the way to get a project delivered.

 

As I keep saying, my bet is that some of these flyovers will come back on the agenda once people get fed-up with sitting in their cars at level crossings. Some of the ones towards Bedford might also go, one at a time, because the number of new houses, and other things, planned in that area is huge, which may push road traffic levels over the brink for LCs.

I fully understand that my suggestions are just lines drawn on satellite imagery - but they also debunk the myth that replacing any of the crossings by bridges will always be intrusive to the community / require demolition etc.

Ridgemont should have gone ages ago what with the flyover right next door.

Bow Bricknall, Milbrook, Stewartby, Kempson Hardwick and Broadmead Lane are all easily bridgeable and in reality there are no serious grounds in terms of 'intrusion' etc to oppose these other than NIMBYs wanting to flex their muscles.

Appley Guise and Liddington do present problems in that to avoid intrusiveness then replacement road vehicle bridges would have to be some distance away from the current crossing point to prevent visual intrusion / demolition - plus there is that danger that the associated new roads etc could lead to unwanted housing development. There is also the question if those new roads should be the railways responsibility to fund given they would to some degree also act as by-passes for the villages, plus the sheer quantity of new roads means it wopuld most likely torpedo the BCR from an aciuntants perspective.

Woburn Sands is particularly difficult as there isn't an easy way top create a bypass road so in this case the crossing would most likely have to stay.

Fenny Startford requires the adaptation of the road network in the area to divert road traffic over the existing bridge to the west and the requisitioning of what may be private roads on an industrial estate so is legally complex.

18 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Of course it’s not SW London, but neither are several of the busy LCs in places where a flyover could be put in without massive intrusion, which is the key point, and why the flyover proposals created such opposition. The busy LCs aren’t in the green bits, they’re in the brown bits.

 

Woburn Sands is possibly one of the more challenging, in that the road is plenty busy, and this is what is looks like:

 

 

Fenny Stratford is a much less busy for through traffic, but gives access to several large builders merchants, so a lot of lorry movements, and the space for slopes up either side is very restricted (there’s a junction with the old A5 just off the bottom of the photo):

 

 

Some of the others aren’t so challenging, and one, Bow Brickhill, could probably have been created already with a bit of forethought, because an area of land there is currently being developed as yet another warehouse estate, and a road realignment etc could probably have been terraformed into that, but there are reasons why EWR has backed-off from the earlier proposals: cost, time, and the opposition provoked by intrusion of big, tall structures in low-rise places.

 

The service now proposed on this section is 3TPH in each direction, so even with a more modest line speed and very smart signaling the barriers will be shut for a fair proportion of each hour, so things won’t be painless!
 

 

Why the obsession with replicating vehicle crossings at exactly the same place as the level crossing is currently located. One of the advantages of motor vehicles is they travel faster than people can walk so there is absolutely no reason whatsoever why they cannot be diverted some distance away from the crossing site to get over the railway without world ending!

Its a different matter for pedestrians - but footbridges are generally smaller and easier to fit into constrained locations, particularly if you shut the road!

14 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

It

 

Look at each LC on the route in turn, and you will find that several of the really troublesome (as in busy road traffic) ones are in places where sticking a big flyover in would create immense intrusion, which is why the consultation yielded such negative feedback around those options.

 

 

Actually its not as bad as you are trying to claim! Firstly several of the crossings are more or less in open country / have no settlement around them  (Stewartby, Kempston Hardwick, Milbrook etc)

Secondly options exist in some locations to provide bridges away from the current crossing sites for motor vehicles (which could also help remove traffic from the centre of the settlements.

Thirdly in some cases alternative routes for motor vehicles that bridge the railway already exist (albut with some minor alterations needed to the road network).

Granted there are a couple of tricky spots - Woburn Sands being the biggest one where there doesn't look to be any easy way to by-pass the crossing area with new roads and in that case a overbridge could well be said to be intrusive - BUT if the majority of the other crossings were got rid of then having one crossing on the whole line would not cause that much of a problem.

But take a look at these - and by the way I would love to know just how you can claim that bridges at the likes of Broadmead Road are going to be hideously intrusive when there isn't a single property anywhere near it!

13 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

It isn’t a “fundamentally rural landscape”, as in no houses or anything else for large distances around though, is it?

 

A fundamentally rural landscape indicates that settlements are:-

(1) surrounded by fields, farms woodlands etc

(2) The settlements themselves are discrete entities and not overly large.

A fundamental rural landscape does not mean a absence of settlement - the Majority of North Yorkshire, Somerset, Cumbria or indeed Bedfordshire comfortably fits into the 'fundamentally rural' category

A fundamentally urban area would be indicated by

(1) Settlements merging into one another with no disconsiderable break between them

(2) An absence of agriculture or woodlands

(3) Green spaces being things like parks or Graveyards, etc

Go and have a look at Satellite mapping and compare Wandsworth- Feltham with Blectchley - Bedford and the difference is obvious!

6 hours ago, Arun Sharma said:

 

In reality, local and national politicians have long been opposed to their territory being bypassed. In the not so recent past, I was talking to the [then] Commissioner for Transport [when Ken Livingstone was Mayor]. he told me unequivocally that he [and the Mayor] opposed the creation of a London orbital railway because the London Mayorality wanted people [transiting from West to East etc.,] to have to change trains and use the underground because they would then spend [more] money in London.

 

There is also the logic that if rail traffic has to be routed through London then any infrastructure upgrades which are designed to benefit through traffic will also have the potential to benefit Londoners.

i.e. A particular scheme might not generate a positive BCR if it’s benefits only a due to Londoners but if it also helps people living outside the capital then those extra benefits might just be enough to turn the BCR positive.

15 hours ago, Bernard Lamb said:

What is wrong with putting the roads under the railway rather than over it?

Bernard

Nothing per se - but…..

(1) Generally diving under the railway is more disruptive as it usually requires a railway closure to remove the ground and slide / lift a bridge into position where as an over bridge can be done bit by bit using overnight possessions.

(2)  Depending on the ground conditions and the water table diving down under the railway might require the installation of pumps and a structure designed such that it cannot ‘float’ upwards due to water pressure.

(3) Because of the requirement to provide 16ft 6 clearance to the roadway (and thus avoid becoming a target for bridge bashes / prevent it being signed as a low bridge) but keep the slopes to an acceptable gradient them then your approaches will need to be longer than they would be for an overbridge as the U.K. railway structure gauge (even with OLE) is still significantly lower than what new build roads need.

6 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

From a railway throughout perspective, possibly, but the reason this is so complex is that the railway runs through real places, with real people living in them, who don’t necessarily want whacking great bridges plonked in the middles of their town or villages, and have made that very clear indeed in every consultation so far.

 

 

 

 

Level crossings are a hazard which the railway can well do without, particularly seeing as the general public increasingly cannot be trusted to use them properly.

As such I have no patience whatsoever with NIMBYs whinging about bridges ‘soiling’ their views etc. - they need to go! No ifs, no buts……

Obviously in situations where extensive demolition is the only way to build a bridge then I am a bit more sympathetic - but in what is a fundamentally rural landscape (compared to the likes of SW London) then in 99.999999.999% of cases its perfectly possible replace level crossings with bridges - footbridges at the site of the crossing for pedestrians and new road bridges further out (which could also function as partial bypasses for the settlement.

17 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

 

Not denying that, it's why many US citizens see no need for a passport. However I am not sure nasty is the right word to use if a country requires foreign visitors to hold a valid international travel document. The UK was never part of the Schengen area so not sure why there'd be much of a change on that point.

I think the point was more that because the UK is now a 'third country' as far as the EU is concerned then various officials might be much more rigorous / inclined to stop Brits for checks than they would have been had we still been an EU member state....

As the queues at Dover to clear Passport control have aptly demonstrated simply applying the laws as they are written en-mase (as opposed to applying them selectively) can make a huge difference in practical terms even if, in theory, 'nothing has changed'...

2 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

Out of interest, what percentage of EU residents have passports? I wouldn't call requiring foreign visitors to have passports nasty given that passports are the normal international travel document. 

Please remember that within the EU (and certainly within the Schengen zone IIRC) National ID cards are usually considered sufficient means of identifying you and confirming your rights as an EU citizen to reside / work / visit that country.

As such there are probably a substantial number of people who simply have no need of a Passport because they can still travel to beach resorts on the med or to sking resorts in the alps etc without the need for one!

53 minutes ago, SM42 said:

 

The only way round it then is like the M25 .....

 

A completely new line that bypasses the bottleneck that is the existing. 

 

Not sure there's enough money in the pot for that. 

 

Andy

Not quite - interventions like building bridges to get rid of as many level crossings as possible plus modifications to signals / station platforms and possibly a loop or two would do wonders fro improving what exists.

That all comes with a hefty price tag though - not as much as building a new line would but hefty nonetheless

22 minutes ago, SM42 said:

Err.

 

Doesn't that bit already exist?

 

Bedford to Cambridge I could understand.

 

Andy

It might exist but due to things like signal spacing and an abundance of level crossing line speeds are low and journey times long.

In other words when seen in the wider context of the East -West scheme (which is basically a new build railway then the current state of Bletchley - Bedford becomes something which threatens the viability / effectiveness of the whole project and thus it needs a substantial upgrade on what currently exsisting to be useful.

If it helps imagine the 3 / 4 lane M25 still only had two 2 lane tunnels to cross the river at Dartford and you get the idea….

27 minutes ago, 90136 said:

I am all for transparency. Despite it being constantly drummed into us and preached that we must be, we as an organisation rarely follow it! 

Transparency is all well and good - but when that results in searching questions being asked for NRs Maintenance  strategy or the DfT demands for cuts you rapidly find that transparency’ becomes expendable in cooperate terms….

2 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

More NR instigated chaos this morning (and subsequently all day) with 2L10 apparently DERAILING one bogie after reportedly hitting PW equipment left over from this weekend's 52-hour possession on the Up Fast at Walton on Thames

Things being left behind after a possession being given up are increasing - a few weeks ago a train on the ECML hit some sort of  rubber surfacing piece used by RRVs that had been left foul of the line….

I suspect that the banning of lookouts (and the consequent shifting of huge quantities of extra work into possessions) plus general staff shortages means it’s only too easy for things to be forgotten in the rush to make sure everybody is clear for an on-time hand back.

2 hours ago, Fair Oak Junction said:

In fact here are two photos of E1s with numbers in the 2xxx series in lined black.

2151 is indeed lined, it's just very faded. It is possible to just about make out the lining on the tank corner, splasher, and running plate.

Looking closely at those photos you can clearly see that the area of paint around the numbers is different to the rest - suggesting that the renumbering was done as a stand alone exercise and not linked to the repainting of the loco.

While this fits well with the Southerns well known frugality when it comes to painting (I.e. making paintwork last as long as possible through patch painting and re-varnishing) it doesn’t mean that the pictures are representative of what you would expect to see on a loco which had received a full repaint to the latest specification post 1931.

On 23/02/2024 at 17:37, Wickham Green too said:

Depending on the solidity of the smokebox numberplate, a BR model might be a marginally simpler starting point ............... particularly if the SR black is lined in green !

The green lining was disposed with even before the mid 1930s renumbering / dropping of the A / B / E prefixes because the Southern quickly realised that it rapidly became obscured with dirt (and goods engines were never the priority when  it came to cleaning)

As such you can be sure any ex LBSCR engine numbered 2XXX will NOT have any lining....

56 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

 

I agree that the RTR companies’ real customers are the shareholders and those they owe money to, and that the prime directive os to make profits for those, but the best way to make profits is probably to provide product the buying punters want at a price the market will bear.  I very seriously doubt that anybody who buys generic coaches from Hornby or Hattons/Rapido really actually wanted them in that form, they settled for second best because there was no alternative, a rather blinkered definition of ‘demand’, and as soon as proper stock becomes available, those coaches will be landfill or will flood the Bay.  Meanwhile, they act to effectively stifle production of what we really want to spend our money on, proper models!

'Generic' coaches can only 'stifle' production of more accurate rolling stock if manufacturers had any plans to do them in the first place!

That is ultimately the bone of contention here - you appear to consider that manufacturers were going to seriously consider producing accurate ranges of 4/6 wheel carriages for multiple railway companies while I believe there isn't a hope in hell of them doing that as the economics simply don't make any financial sense even if the Hattons / Hornby 'Generics' had never been made in the first place.

As I said earlier Bogie stock is generally speaking a different matter as accurate renditions can cover many more markets (and after grouping could end up being used behind a wider range of locos or in different contexts - such as ex SECR birdcage stock being used with BR standard tanks on ex LBSCR branch lines for example) so make much more financial sense.

18 hours ago, The Johnster said:

 

Just, no. 

 

No.

 

A Genesis approach is the worst thing that could happen, as it will completely scupper any chance of correct models being produced.  This has already happened with the Hornby and Hatton's/Rapido four/six wheelers; anyone wishlisting almost any RTR four or six wheeler will be referred to these coaches.  I was hoping for RTR GW Dean four-wheelers to replace the incorrect Ratio kits one day, but now there's no chance, and the only options are the balloon LBSCR-type brake compartment versions, even more incorrect from Hornby because of the air braking detail.  The problem with incorrect models, apart from being incorrect, is that they are out there in the market, and prevent production of accurate versions.  Another example is the old Triang shorty clerestories, wrong length, wrong bogies, but for many years a standard in the hobby for general use as non-gangwayed generic panelled stock typical of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods.  Only in recent years have such coaches appeared as accurate representations of anything, in the form of the LSWR and SECR 'birdcage' stock.  I wonder how long the Hornby A30 auto-trailer, compromised by A28 features, crude by current standards, and basically unaltered since Airfix introduced it back in the Silurian era, will continue to prevent the production of a decent model of what is I am sure something that would fly off the shelves were anyone to produce one to current standards (not that I'm complaining about Dapol's choice of the Diagram N).

 

The toplights are quite distinctive, the only similar coaches that come to mind offhand are the Midland clerestories as produced by Ratio, and highly unsuitable for a generic approach IMHO.  And I'm a long way from what most people would regard as a rivet counter, there are plenty of anomalous and incorrect models on my layout that I can live with.  But manufacturers have the research and production facilities to get models right, or at least close enough to scale to be detailed and worked up, so I have always been irritated when they get things wrong as a matter of deliberate policy.  I would tolerate a generic 4-wheeler set of miners' workmans based on the Glyncorrwg train but the balloon brakes are a step too far for me and the old, inadequate, and equally incorrect Ratio/Parksides will have to do, another item got deliberately wrong by the original manufacturer and perpetuated in, well, perpetuity...  Moulded detail doesn't cut the mustard anymore.

 

So, please, no more generics!

I fear you are rather forgetting that model railway manufacturers primarily exist to make as much money for their shareholders / owners as possible - NOT to pander to the wants of modellers.

Though 4/ 6 wheeler may well have been very common in the pre-grouping era, they had pretty much all vanished by the 1930s - and that therefore means they will not generate a much revenue as something which lasted well into the British Railways era, an era we are told has been very popular with baby boomer modellers seeking to recreate what they saw in their youth.

That means tooling up a accurate set of 4 / 6 wheelers for a particular pre-grouping company is not going to generate substantial sales making them an unattractive proposition for a manufacturer to tool up for - particularly given the intricate panelling many such vehicles possessed.

Hattons and to a lesser extent Hornby both realised that by making their 4 / 6 wheeled stock 'Generic' they would not be limited to just one company - and as I have pointed out before the fact that in Hattons case they pretty much all sold out on pre-order shows that from a financial perspective the 'generic' approach is likely to be much more profitable than tooling up a an accurate rendition of a particular companies offering due to the increased number of sales which can be made. And I repeat model railway manufacturers primary function is to make as much money for their owners / shareholders...

Moving on to bogie coaches, the situation here is fundamentally different - because many designs did indeed survive into BR days and as such they represent a far more attractive subject for manufactures in terms of potential revenue to tool up. Hence we have seen things like the Birdcage stock from Bachmann, the ex LSWR rebuilds from Hornby, and the LSWR cross country sets from Kernow  and even the Toplights (the subject of this thread) which all fall into that 'sweet spot' in terms of the largest pool of potential buyers.

As such the introduction of 'generic' bogie stock could well have the potential to reduce the number of accurate items coming to market in a way that 'Generic' 4/6 wheeled stock does not - because with 4/6 wheelers manufactures won't even be considering accurate renditions an economically viable prospect but may well take the view that accurate bogie stock does have some potential, as long as there isn't some sort of 'generic' offering to dilute sales.

Should just add that the points at Worthing were run through because of a track circuit failure holding signals at red and thus requiring the points to be individual set to the correct position by the signaller* and without the usual safeguard the interlocking provides when signals are what give permission for drivers to make movements.

* (they unfortunately made a mistake when setting them).

10 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

Not so. You get more trains per hour past any given point by running them more slowly, with correspondingly shorter braking distances. If each train carries the same payload (passengers or freight) then you can transport more payload per hour with slower trains, at the expense of longer journey times.

But at the price of requiring more trains, which in turn means more depots space to house them, more crew to drive them, more staff to fix them….

It also needs to be remembered that there is a environmental need for the sake of the planet for people to use less polluting forms of transport - we all know that a train is not as confident as a motor vehicle which can transport you from door to door, so having trains which are substantially faster than road transport is an important tool in encouraging modal shift.

47 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

 

 

It's the bits that ain't being built that causes angst.

 

Brit15

👏👏👏👏👏👏

(Or people who who can’t be bothered to read through the entirety of this thread which debunks the myths and lies surrounding the need for it in the first place)

1 hour ago, APOLLO said:

 

 

Oh and get these b***dy strikes sorted. THEY are killing our railways (and affecting my daughters new job in Manchester).

 

 

That requires the DfT to stop playing "I'm Margret Thatcher and going to break these Unions regardless of the collateral damage" ethos.

Granted ASLEF are a militant bunch when they want to be - but where is the incentive to compromise when the DfT is approaching things from a "we will crush you" standpoint

26 minutes ago, Steven B said:

 

Perhaps too many posters living in the south-east forget that there's life outside of London. Getting between the larger towns and cities via public transport can be time consuming and expensive - regardless of where you are in the country.

 

Pre-Covid I took my daughter from Leeds to Bolton to visit family - we had a lovely day out, but the combination of buses and trains took 3x the time as driving would, cost more despite my daughter being under five and not needing a ticket.

 

Getting into the centre of Leeds (e.g. for access to station) takes three times longer by public transport than in similar sized cities in France of Germany.

 

The problem's not just restricted to the north - my in-laws travel from the north Kent coast to visit relatives in Hastings - again, travel by car is faster and less expensive.

 

HS2 won't fix any of these problems - if anything with the extended platforms being cancelled and HS2 train-sets being non-tilt enabled, speeds and capacity on the northern sections of the WCML could actually be reduced!

 

Steven B

Which has nothing to do with HS2 and everything to do with subsidy levels and more to the point the amount of tax you are prepared top pay!

In most of Europe taxes are higher than the UK and that allied to much higher productivity levels (thus generating morte tax revenues from business) means their Governments are able to spend more on subsiding rail fares

The UK is a developed country with an ageing population and ageing infrastructure - and unlike lies spouted by political parties and certain think tanks, once you get to that stage taxes HAVE to be high just to stand still, let alone continue to improve.

41 minutes ago, Reorte said:

Any particular reason why it was removed now? Siding needed (whether as a siding, or pulled up and replaced with something else)?

Probably because it was representing a risk to the adjacent running line! Given its deteriorating condition it wouldn't have taken much for the body to become foul of the adjacent line with the potential for a in service train to crash into it.

11 hours ago, Pendle Forest said:

We know who would benefit... everyone south of Brum.  The whole area North of Brum would get nothing from HS2. Had the whole thing been built we could have got to London from Manc or Leeds slightly quicker but at greater cost than we can now. Wow!  Weirdly not everyone in the north really wants to do that.  In fact the majority couldn't careless.  

 

Absolute rubbish!

People north of Brum would still gain extra services between the likes of Brum and Manchester etc while the released capacity on the existing network would have allowed extra passenger services between Manchester and Crewe or Manchester and Stoke. Theirs would also have been more paths for freight. Thats in addition to the extra services to / from the South East (which given the proportion of rail journeys which start / finish in the Capital, even from North West England, on a statistical basis is not something to turn your nose up at) plus some journey time savings. 

Far too many posters living in ‘the north’ have this attitude that if it’s not happening at the end of their street so to speak then it’s not going to benefit anyone outside of London / the South East and it follows it must be opposed at all costs - which is a pretty selfish and narrow minded thought process. I don’t have (and am never likely to) have kids - if I adopted the same mindset I would be going round whinging like mad about my taxes being wasted in schools because there are ‘loads of childless people who get zero benefit from them'…

In something called a ‘society’ it is necessary to accept that what is needed in the wider scheme of things rarely aligns with things which you personally want or which only benefit your local area…..

Note:- For what it’s worth HS2 will be of very little use to me personally even though I live in that ‘greedy’ part of the country as I rarely have cause to venture to the Midlands / North of England. Yet in spite of that I am able to set aside emotion or regional bias and look at the project on a factual, long term basis….

3 hours ago, melmerby said:

Looking at the breakthrough more clearly, what the cutting head cuts through looks more like wattle & daub, than concrete.

Some types of concrete are designed to be deliberately weak - usually precisely because they are temporary and it’s intended they will be removed / cut through at some stage.