Bluebell Railway General Discussion

Technically feasible has to include the skills, knowledge, capacity etc to do it. Plus restore the unit in the first place ... I just don’t know where the capacity is.

(There’s also the small matter of power supply at HK, which I understand tends to need someone to turn off all the lights if the signalman want a tea break so as to avoid overloading things).

To my mind, Ardingly is only viable as a steam extension - and then still not very viable.

On ambiance: I doubt you actually get many complaints from a dummy third rail at HK, it is after all period-appropriate. I’m not sure if there would be any safety concerns raised particularly from staff who operate on the third rail mainline as their main job. But I think ambiance is the one hurdle that is easy to overcome.

Tom

 

The road into the Belmond shed, the old electric loco depot, that Clan Line uses still has the third rail. We are assured that it’s disconnected but no one is prepared to test it!

 

Part of me wonders whether perhaps EGR-Ardingly could become the 'main line' and HK-SP the branch, generally used more by smaller, older locos and rolling stock? I'm not familiar with Hanson's operations at Ardingly, but the main argument in favour of the extension would surely be that it's somewhere else to put additional covered storage and maintenance facilities...

 

It's a non-starter. We have our main loco shed, carriage storage, museum, restaurant, shop, car park and so on at Sheffield Park, and are easily accessible on a main road. None of those would apply if you made Ardingly the main terminus - why would you develop a core service that bypassed all your main off-train attractions? At the very least, every train has to start and finish the day at Sheffield Park because that's where the locos and carriages are stored (a situation that already causes issues with creating a service based on East Grinstead).

Tom

 

Looking at the locos, carriages and wagons (just at the Bluebell!) in sore need of tlc, certainly can't disagree re: capacity .... worst luck!

On the skills side, with respect (Oh ye of little faith!), methinks you may be forgetting that if there's one thing our movement has demonstrated in spades over the years, it's a marked ability to rise to whatever challenges have been thrown at it and I don't see this one as any different, from that perspective.

The notion of current generation battery tech was something which cropped up when thinking about Royal Deeside's 1st generation BEMU. Though I've done no detailed calculations, the energy density of lithium batteries is a few orders of magnitude better than fitted to that unit, way back when.

If any suggestion of stacking up the luggage space of a VEP doesn't appeal, might I offer three letters for your consideration? MLV.

 

Oh indeed - and I would be more than happy for somebody else to rise to that challenge!

Tom

 

I'm off duty in editorial terms at the moment

Tom

 

Something needs to be left for the upcoming generations to get their teeth into!

More seriously, the issues surrounding preservation of EMUs have been an area which have, for the most part, defeated our generations. That's one reason I'm so glad that VEP got preserved. Mainline running aside, we've been a bit lost to formulate a viable preservation model. or maybe the horrid truth is, we simply haven't valued them. Let's face it, give pretty much any of us lot an early Southern built EMU (if any still existed) and chances are, in fairly short order, we'd be looking at a conversion to hauled stock! Even something as fascinating as the unique 4DD units haven't done well. Not knowing quite what to do with 'em, EMUs have been rather a poor relation.

N.B. If this starts a serious drift, please accept my apologies in advance!

 

The voltage isn't an issue. You can series-connect cells to get whatever voltage you want. Energy capacity in relation to weight and volume does matter, as discussed on at least one other thread here, but should not be a problem for pottering up and down a few miles at a max of 25 mph. Much more of an issue is whether it's all worth the bother. On the Epping-Ongar it seems to make sense: on the Bluebell, almost certainly not.

 

And besides, it's much harder to spot one's own editorial mistakes than someone else's.

 

One of the issues with multiple units (and to be fair this applies as much to DMUs as EMUs) is that you link your traction to your carriages. So a failure of one means an enforced failure of the other - if the engine won't start in the morning, you have no train as well. So as a practical proposition, if you base a service around availability of a multiple unit, then in reality you need two of them serviceable at the same time to provide the necessary resilience.

Add to that is the issue of servicing. If you have separate carriages, you can withdraw them in a planned cycle for the overhaul. But with a multiple unit, you have to take the whole unit out at once, so again, if you only have one, you are into a feast / famine scenario. (The Mets have a similar problem, whereby you can withdraw either of the centre cars independently and run as a three coach unit, but if you need to do anything on one of the end carriages, withdrawing one essentially is equivalent to withdrawing all four).

Then with an EMU, you have all that, but layer on the far more serious infrastructure concerns of third rail (both as infrastructure, and process).

I guess you can get round the resilience problem by saying "if there is a failure, we can use a loco-hauled train", but that does require that your loco-hauled train can go where the multiple unit can. I think that is going to be an interesting question with, say, Swanage operations to Wareham, where a failure of the DMU doesn't automatically leave a replacement that can be quickly substituted.

If you have a business model for a third rail electric that involves running on the mainline (as per the 4-VEP eventually, and the Brighton Belle) at least you don't have to worry about the infrastructure.

I suspect all those issues could be overcome, but it feels like a ton of work to satisfy a niche interest. Most of our visitors want steam haulage.

Tom

 

Without challenging your very accurate assessment, there is a part of me that is disappointed in that assessment given the museum aspects of preserved railways.

The value of that opinion needs to be quantified by the very round quantities of effort and money that transfer from me to EMU preservation projects...

 

Without disagreeing with anything you've written, to us steam age enthusiasts, doubtless 'modernisation era' kit is of marginal interest, but I'd hesitate to assert that's bound to be set in stone for ever more.

Mischievous thought for the day: Did it occur to you, when penning your post that, concerning maintenance, you just made the same point Richard Beeching did nearly fifty years ago .... just from the opposite direction!

 

I should say that that is my assessment, and not official railway policy. The official policy is as far as I can see what is in the Long Term Plan, i.e.

Projects aspired to for the 25 year period to 2038.
Investigate the possible future electrification of the Ardingly branch.​

What I would say though is that even within a museum context, it doesn't automatically mean you should try to do everything of historical value, even if nominally it fits the core objectives. Specifically, I don't believe you should take on any new objective without a very serious consideration of the opportunity cost of doing so. In that regard, preservation of an EMU would be permissible within our core objectives (especially a Maunsell- or Bulleid-era EMU), but what gives in order to do so? At the moment we have only three Maunsell carriages running and a fourth nearing completion of a lengthy overhaul - so could we really take on, say, a 4-Cor? Almost certainly committing to a 4-Cor would mean abandoning the four current Maunsell carriages.

I remain a firm believer in a mantra of "do less, but do it better". The fact that a preservation objective nominally fits your core preservation principles does not automatically mean that it should inevitably be taken on.

Tom

 

How many people who visit a mediaeval castle are doing so because they remembered them "for real" in their youth? How many people would turn up to an air show with a Lancaster as top billing, which they can't possibly remember in actual service, and how many would turn up to see a Sepcat Jaguar as top billing which conceivably they could remember?

My point is, I don't believe that the heritage industry is primarily dependent on people remembering their own lived experience of youth. Some eras are perennially popular, and remain so long after the last person who can remember them has passed away. In that regard, I think the steam era will continue to be popular long after anyone can remember it "for real": I don't think the popularity will inevitably decline as people die off. By contrast, I just don't believe that the diesel era has anything like the same draw, even though it is - in its 1960s - 1980s incarnation - bona fide history.

A little thought experiment: The Falklands War is now as far back in the past as World War II was when the Falklands was occurring. But there were World War II military shows well established in the early 1980s, and there still are now - but where is a military show based around "the Falklands era"? If such things were just dependent on recreating people's youth, there would be reams of events full of sixty year olds reliving the Falklands.

Actually, I find that view somewhat comforting, in that it feels like the preservation era has a strength beyond just recreating people's lived experience. I'd be more worried if it could be demonstrated that the only people interested were those with first hand memories.

Tom

 

That takes us into the dangerous territory of whether taking on more is matched with a change in capacity - or not. I agree entirely with you that it's better to do less well than more poorly, and a variety of linear scrapyards stand mute testament to the challenges of prioritisation. However, and recognising your all or nothing point about multiple units, the living history record risks being very distorted if one of the most important categories of train to run in this country basically can't. How you balance that with what's popular, both with paying public and (more important in this context) volunteers, is another question entirely.

I grew up with them, and regard them as of significant historical importance, but can't really imagine myself heading to the Bluebell (or anywhere else, to be honest), to travel on a 455 - a metric equivalent of the 100 seaters. Yet if we don't preserve something of that era in a form it can be properly seen in, what picture do we have.

 

I think you need to bookmark this post for easy copying and pasting Tom, I've lost count of the times you've typed more or less the same thing out! By the same argument, you could expect diesel only railways with Mk2s to be just as popular now as mainstream steam railways were in the 1990s. I don't think they are.

 

At least I am consistent with my irascible prejudices!

Tom

 

I'm not sure I do find that comforting. I actually suspect the intense early 80s memories will be lived elsewhere, probably through music, and the focus on WWII rests on it's status as a particularly intense period in collective memory that's bound up in a combination of music, fashion, and historical events, mashed up and living in a romanticised memory fug summed up by the combination of Dad's Army and Allo Allo. And given the livery debates that rage, where the tendency to BR era liveries needs to be actively resisted to avoid a BR only view of the world (and BR blue is equally preferred by a significant faction in the diesel world), I fear the over-emphasis in the volunteer world of those who remember.

My concern is, taking a somewhat "dry" view of history, that the need of railway preservation to pay the bills means that the focus on history is shifting subtly towards what pays, and a narrow window, rather than taking the full breadth - which is where I do challenge the model.

 

just a thought. I wasn’t around for the age of steam but I do remember a number of summer trips to my “home” railway when I was 10 years old in the 1980’s and that inspired me to continue as a volunteer for the next 32 years and counting....