What-if....?

Not forgetting retention toilets, Mr Hosking is doing it for his stock, but will West Coast and Tyseley?

Dave

 

Here's another one: After closure, part of the Waverley Route, from Galashiels to Riccarton Junction was saved. Maybe a Borders Heritage Railway?

 

But did they have the money?

 

But it's interesting, because had it succeeded, the line would probably be electrified right now.

 

They wanted to use Kriegsloks as I recall.

 

I heard (rather a long time ago) of bringing a complete Austrian set of coaches and loco over to work on it.

 

My recollection of an interview with Symes is that LMR could not have been more helpful with regards to the English section of the line, but that Scottish Region went out of its way to make life difficult, probably because it was their management who had decided to close it in the first place. This was after all during the period when if you wanted to get ahead at BR then you closed things. A successful privatised Border Union Railway would have left the Scottish Region top brass looking very silly.

 

David Spaven's book on the Waverley Route (Waverley Route, the life, death and rebirth of the Borders Railway; Argyll Publishing, 2012) has several pages on this attempt to resuscitate the Waverley Route. He is clear that the scheme was a little, erm, optimistic. Some quotes give the flavour:

"predictions of 8%-10% returns on investment...can be viewed as hopelessly over-optimistic"
"no robust analysis to demonstrate the commercial viability of the project"​

It's also worth note that Spaven is specifically very critical of Symes and his style on the project, arguably to the extent of accusing him of ensuring the failure of the project. At the same time, the archive evidence he presents suggest that BR (including the BRB) were surprisingly tolerant. The final comment is perhaps most damning:

"...by the time the Conservative Government was in place, BURCo and it associates had lost all credibility with both the public and private sectors"​

 

Not at all surprising. I remember at one stage they were intending to obtain a large revenue from transporting cabbages.

PH

 

Not explicitly referred to, but perfectly possible to believe in the context of the attempt.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Regarding BR being relatively tolerant of the BUR idea: although they had put the closure on the table, the Scottish Region did not expect it to be approved, at least not for the stretch that is now open.

My only evidence for this is a conversation I had with a chap, some years ago now, who worked at Scottish Region HQ in the relevant period (I can't recall if Buchanan House had been built or not at that point!) One of the things he had worked on, circa 1969, was the Waverley Route modernisation plan. When the government refused closure, the plans were all in place to rationalise the line, simplify the signalling, make all the station staff redundant and operate the line with a Paytrain stopping service.

I think this conversation had started over a discussion about the panel from Galashiels power signal box, which has survived in the hands of the SRPS.

Incidentally, I recall when I moved to Edinburgh about 20 years ago, being surprised to note that the buses operating the Hawick and Galashiels service had the double-arrow logo on the side because they were still officially the Waverley Route replacement service.

 

Anyway, what if the Llangollen Railway had extended north, instead of heading south, and what if the Severn Valley Railway had managed to save the bridge immediately north of Bridgnorth station?

 

They would be led into excessive route mileage.

PH

 

I meant east towards Ruabon.

 

So the local authorities did them a favour.

PH