long arch bridge

Some shots of Long Arch Bridge, which forms the northern boundary of our land at Midford. This would also presumably form the southern boundary of the Up Goods Yard land. Judging by the SAD-17 marker in the bridge it's still owned and maintained by Network Rail. If we do proceed with developing a sustainable engineering facility at the Up Goods Yard it may be that we could negotiate rights to running through the bridge without having to take on the liability of ownership.

When we are running regular trains we'll be more than happy to take these redundant bridges, viaducts and tunnels over from BR Residual and Sustrans but until then I suspect they would be too big a drag on our finances to maintain with no clear cash flow emanating from them.

the biggest mistake of all?

Economists often talk of opportunity costs and misallocation of resources. I reckon that in 50 years time we'll all look back and see the Beeching cuts and the, once quite serious, belief that railways were finished and the policies that grew out of that huge error as the biggest misallocation of resources the UK has ever seen.

For a start the Beeching cuts didn't save the railways a penny - they made no contribution to reducing the costs of the railways. If anything they reduced the overall income as many people living on closed routes simply abandoned the railways altogether, rather than find alternative means to get to the railhead.

But even more importantly the consequent congestion effects caused by people being FORCED to use the roads, both for passenger and freight services, had a huge cost, massively outweighing any savings made by scrapping a few branch lines.

I know some people think that the second railway age will merely reverse the Beeching cuts, but remember that this assumption is based on some miraculous energy source being available to keep at least some cars running. In reality of course once the level of traffic on roads falls to a certain point it will no longer be viable to keep roads open. Rail will really be the only available option. So just reversing the Beeching cuts will nowhere near solve the problem, unless we're prepared to totally abandon whole swathes of countryside. But surely these will be the very areas that need transport to bring food to the towns and cities? So if lines will be needed to bring food in then surely it will be best to operate them as passenger routes as well? This supposes a huge expansion of light and ultra-light rail, bringing rail to every corner of the country. So as well as a total reversal of Beeching the trunk and branch lines will be accompanied by a Vicinal style network of narrow gauge and light railways. I do sometimes think most of us simply haven't taken on board the scale of the rail revival, and the benefits (and problems) that will bring!

And as for misallocation of resources - how many billions were wasted on developing a road system for a form of transport with a severely limited life, and what will the costs be to restore the network, particularly through developed areas, compared to the costs of keeping the routes open? These questions will keep transport economists in work for decades!

transport madness

Blot on the landscape - and what for?



How modern transport should blend in!

My in box has been full of stuff about the laughable Cambridge Guided Busway. This extraordinary white elephant has still not been opened, and costs are still spiralling. Will we ever know what this idiocy was ever about? Or perhaps it's just a very long-winded way of preserving the trackbed without letting the Peak Oil cat out of the bag?

The simple fact is that this piece of essential transport infrastructure needs to be rebuilt as, preferably, a heavy railway or, at the very least, a modern interurban tramway. The cost would be around 30%/15% and ridership would be far higher. Fuel use would be around 25% of that for the buses and who knows what the maintenance costs are going to be?

This is why cold hard economics needs to be applied to transport investment rather than agenda-laden posturing by idiotic politicians who are desperate to keep Peak Oil below the radar.

We all know that buses are considered to be the most unpopular form of public transport. It is almost impossible to prise people out of their cars to use them, whereas many car drivers are happy to switch to trams which are seen as modern, clean, fast and efficient. Buses even try to disguise themselves as trams to tempt people out of their cars by being given smart modern lines, but it won't work. Passengers need the added security of a FIXED route to convince them that the new transport system is here for the foreseeable future, rather than buses which use pubic roads. Okay, the concrete tram-like tracks of the guided busway suggest a similar commitment, but we can see that they are just a stage towards modern transport - ie the eventual replacement of the method of propulsion to overhead wire (trolleybus fashion) and the eventual replacement of concrete by steel rail (giving a 75% fuel, efficiency and cost saving). But why not just build the railway/tramway in the first place?

People locally HATE this monstrosity and will boycott it until they get their trams or trains. I fully expect to be reporting on the replacement of this joke by a modern tramway or railway within ten years.

The extraordinary thing is that this lunacy is being threatened on two other essential rail routes - Fareham-Gosport and Luton-Dunstable!!

deadly serious

Swanage Railway.


Welsh Highland Railway.


Gartell Railway. (John Penny).


Jinty at Midsomer Norton 2005.

One of the oddest things about all this New S&D thing is that I still occasionally get asked 'Is this a serious scheme?' It's deadly serious. I have studied the economics of Peak Oil, of transport and of railways and I still can't see any way - short of apocalypse - that this can't happen.

Consider two futures. One in which - somehow - economic expansion continues and some sort of alternative/s to oil is found. Roads would become increasingly congested, towns would continue to expand. Already our railways are bursting at the seams - new lines are not just desirable but inevitable. And in this (extremely unlikely) scenario economic expansion could lead to increased carbon output. How long before every government finally 'gets' what the rest of us have for years - that fuel efficiency is one way of reducing atmospheric carbon? Railways are at least FOUR times as efficient as road transport, much more than four times as efficient as air travel (which even in this scenario is doomed). Light and ultra-light rail are even more efficient.

The other future, the far more realistic one, will see economic expansion halt and even contract, and the road system grind to a halt due to a mix of sky-high oil prices, deteriorating maintenance of roads and ever greater limits on carbon output. This could happen over decades, years or even weeks. In this scenario rail expansion won't only be desirable but a matter of life or death, for communities if not for individuals. New railways will be opening everywhere, not just totally reversing the Beeching cuts but reaching places that never got a railway first time round, because in this scenario no railway = no way of continuing as an economic community.

The New S&D has never been about dreams, but more about stopping a nightmare. A New S&D is already needed, many feel that the original line should never have closed, in twenty years time only a few rocking lunatics won't see the need for it.

What we need - HAVE - to do is get organised NOW, develop our networks and contacts, within the rail industry, among local people, at local, regional and national political levels. It will be a struggle to get resources, human and financial. We will be competing with hundreds or even thousands of other routes desperate to reopen before the oil runs out. Serious? You could say that!