Project Wareham

Actually that was precisely the battle that was fought by the early SRP to prevent the bypass from using the trackbed. A battle that went on for a protracted period, and it was people like Montagu-Jones,a retired military man,who used know how and connections to persuade the then DCC to buy the trackbed. No it was not fought so that chuffers could go to Norden Gates it was fought to reconnect Swanage to Wareham. So let us honour that spirit(you can read about it on a wet afternoon!) and give Project Wareham a fair chance next year.

Never mind the Corfe Castle battlements. you,sir, will be the front l.ine of defence against any rail intruders coming from Wareham. The Keys of Norden Gates are given to you!!

 

The published aims did not specify the details of how the service would run. Maybe the prospectus had the detail, but can't find any online.
The first trial was definitely not for commuting, I read the second trial will just be between Wareham and Corfe so will not replace the bus for local community trips. But ideal for those visiting from mainline stations for a day trip. The details of how this will be viable financed was not mentioned (at least not publicly published, Will require promotion in 2023 to get those visiting for the first time, or currently using a car to use mainline trains in order to relieve road congestion.

 

Clearly you are not au fait with smileys......

The battle for the Corfe trackbed was fought so that SR trains could reach Corfe Castle, and by that time it was first and foremost a heritage railway built by volunteers whose interest that was. I don't think many of them still hanked for community diesel services, and I don't think you come across as having any respect for their views. I'm an NYMR supporter who thinks that railway has made a big mistake extending to Whitby, even though the has, on the face of it, been successful, because any gains that have been made have been overtaken by vastly increased costs. I think the NYMR has created a millstone for its neck. I cannot see the SR's extension to Wareham creating anything like the same level of traffic but the costs will be just as high, leaving the SR with a millstone created by the likes of you, who will to listen to reason. The SR is not an ex-NER line and has no LNER teak carriages or apple green locos so that I don't really care very much whether it succeeds or fails, but I do have a great deal of sympathy for those who have put some much effort into recreating the line and worry about seeing that effort endangered by armchair zealots such as yourself.

 

I would draw the honourable member's attention to the fact that "preferring" ain't necessarily the same as "having".

 

Memories of the Swanage Branch.
Sunday School outings behind an M7 and a couple of very dusty ex suburban stock coaches then...
A few years later it was youth club excursions,alighting at Corfe and taking one of the numerous walking trails from there and holding the hand of the girl of your dreams!! Very healthy stuff!
How many bicyclists and hikers from beyond the Golden Gates of Norden are alighting at Corfe Station these days for healthy exercise?
Here in car crazy North America Go Transit on summer weekends runs 12 coach Bombardier Double Decker trains Toronto to Niagara Falls. about 100k. Several trains in each direction
Three of those double deckers per train are retrofitted to carry bicycles for a total of 54 bikes per train. There are great bike paths along the Niagara Parkway and some enthusiasts cycle all the way back to Toronto
Restoring your Railways could mean people actually detraining at Corfe and getting some meaningful exercise. Boris is a biker isn't he.perhaps he will be one of them!!

 

I cannot find 61624 in my 1955 combined?. you have me completely wrong, as is your local knowledge of Corfe Castle. The big "by-pass"battle was focused on that lovely viaduct North of Corfe Castle Station and without trotting downstairs to give you chapter and verse ,the objective of the pioneers;,a couple of whom I used to stay with on my visits to Swanage and who were 100% for the restoration of the rail link. Of course times have changed but with creative thinking this link can be put to very good use for a lot of people Isn't that what railways are about??

 

Excellent. Meanwhile, Swanage is rather a lesser attraction than Niagara, the U.K. loading gauge is significantly tighter than the North American, and the mainline trains to Wareham are set up for peak hour traffic to Waterloo, not space consuming cycles.

Scotrail, with the aid of Scottish government funding embedded in the franchise have converted some surplus class 153 units to work as cycle units on the West Highland. I forget precise figures, but that project has cost rather more than the whole of the Wareham extension and has yet to prove itself.

Ambition is great, but has to be grounded in a level of reality.


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There is cycle hire at Norden, so you don't have to take a bike on the mainline train https://www.cyclex.co.uk/hire-dorset
class 444s can only take a maximum of 6 bikes.

 

They should be rebuilt immediately to increase their cycle capacity for people wanting to travel to Corfe Castle and cycle off until the sunset! Make it so and they will come!

 

No special equipment required….

 

Ha ha
Hopefully if the Wareham to Corfe heratige DMU shuttle gets going in 2023, which primarily will be a feeder to the steam trains, the cycle hire at Norden will also do well.

SWR have a policy of first come for the 6 bike places on the 444s and you can't book bike spaces to Wareham, so some with bikes might have to go without them. Seems folding bikes are OK.
There is a thread about bikes.
https://www.national-preservation.com/threads/bikes-on-trains-or-for-hire-at-stations.1420628/

 

8 .00 Return Exeter to Okehampton. Can you beat that for a 40 min one way journey! Bikes for hire at Okehampton but of course a lot cheaper to take your own. How many bikes can our class 117 accommodate?NB is it true that actual fare paying passengers might use these units from Wareham into Purbeck some day in the future? Once you have got over those mountainous molehills at Wareham of course!! I see those same molehills are appearing up in Rossendale on the ELR thread!
One intrepid chap reports getting 12 bikes on a Tarka Line train! usually the limit is Four,which begs the question. If the Government is serious about climate change and less car use why not investigate the possibilities of suitably adapted carriages being attached to SWR service trains at weekends. It might do Sims out of a few pounds but the Jurassic Coast and the Dorset Byways could be enjoyed naturally and everyone can breathe some good fresh air.

 

Shedded at West Auckland in 1955. Plenty of coal in that area in those days one would imagine and of course happy motoring was still beyond the reach of a lot of the working class

 

You really ought to read some UK papers and understand what is happening here. This government are, where travel is concerned, at best paying lip service to climate change - and certainly not pushing policies that will reduce car use. They have caused SWR to withdraw large numbers of carriages from their fleet, without replacements being ready, and are doing so with other operators too. If they do start to shift their focus and invest, you can bet that it will not be in the safe blue seats of Dorset, but in the areas under threat - which (along with it effectively being dormant) has a lot to do with how Okehampton has got it's money.

If you would lift your head out of the sand, and recognise that heritage is actually how most of the preserved lines earn their keep, you will start to see why the emphasis on a connection at Wareham feels so utterly misplaced. @Jamessquared and @61624 have deep experience of involvement with railways that have connected to Network Rail; in neither case has that connection become the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.

 

They do indeed have that policy, what you failed to mention was that (at least pre Covid) it was rarely ever enforced (at least on any trains I was travelling on).
Mind you LU are as bad at times not enforcing their own rules on the Met Line.

 

You do realise do you not, that one type of modern train will rarely couple up to another here in the UK without some sort of bespoke coupling arrangement.
So if it was even possible, likely a 159 "tow around bike coach" for the Exeter line would not couple up to a 444 or 450 on the Weymouth line.
Then of course down at Weymouth or Exeter what happens to get the "bike coach" to the other end of the train? This is not 1960 with M7's or Panniers hanging around to move stuff, along with lots of run round facilities (and of course staff to operate them).
Remember this a country where Sunday working relies on voluntary overtime for a number of TOC's, despite it supposedly being a 7 day a week railway.

 

Ageing volunteers.Insufficient numbers of volunteers.Supporters demographics. Rising operating costs. Did I read that the return fare Norden to Swanage is 23gbp and for that some early morning punters might have to stand in the corridor? Do they know that prior to boarding??
Most HR were in their original existence Branch Lines which never made profits but contributed to,and received revenue from, their main line sources. Obviously a lot of HR would like things to continue as they are in the ethereal world of "not really railways"
Do you think that can continue in todays reality? There is a whole world of optimism on UK sites alone towards a new direction for railways,politics notwithstanding . Electric,Diesel or used chip fat, how are you going to solve the conundrum of urban congestion and ever spreading suburbia? How to enable people to enjoy quality leisure time? Why would a Government even raise the idea of "Rebuilding Your Railways" io

SR has had a very good run but can it go on long into the future as a "railway' isolated in that small fold of the Purbecks? Can it continue appeals for projects which never seem literally to get off the ground. Time to put a foot back into real world of real eailways,as envisaged by the founders.

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Anecdotally I was in a pub here and was approached by a former "Blue Streak" supervisor. That you might recall was a successful UK Rocket System. It was shut down,The Americans bought it and it became the basis of many of their subsequent Rockets. The Supervisor was in Canada looking for UK engineers who might be familiar with the system and had the know how that US Corporations were looking for.So i do not buy for a nanosecond that some modern train system cannot be made to couple up with another. The UK was the home of railway engineering was it not? The new realities will pose those types of questions. some will answer that call and other throw up all the obfuscations they can. Remember the lessons of the Luddites.

 

Have you ever considered looking rationally at your dream? Let's try running some very rough numbers and see what pans out. According to Wikipedia the population of Swanage was around 10,000 in 2021. Let's be generous and add 2000 for the surrounding villages that are nearer to Swanage than Wareham. Of that 12000 around half will be under working age and perhaps 20% beyond working age or otherwise unemployed or working from home, so that leaves us with 30%, or 3600 who might potentially want to use a commuter service. However, a high percentage - let's say 80% - of these will be employed locally and therefore have no need for the train. We are now down to ca. 800, but it's fair to assume that most of them - probably 90% will still prefer to use their car for the sheer convenience of it - that leaves us with just 80 people likely to travel regularly, barely half of the DMU's capacity if it runs just one train each way! And all that assumes that a more accommodating, competing bus service is discontinued. Is that good value for money, do you think? - which is what, in re3ality, government policy is all about nowadays.

The same sort of argument could also be applied to your bicycle van idea. I'm sure you are correct in thinking it could be technically feasible but the cost of designing, fitting and certifying the alterations would almost certainly be in excess of what could be reasonably justified for the small numbers of cyclists likely to be attracted by the service.

Please, just be grateful that team trains still ply the SR that the mainline link allows connectivity with the rest of the system and that eventually the viability of mainline connection at Wareham will be tested. Once that data exists will be the time to decide what to do next, faced with limited resources and all the unfinished projects that you so hate awaiting their allocations. Until that happens your wishful theorising really doesn'thelp other than to alienate the rest of us! (and I do mean the rest of us, I haven't really detected any support for your posts as yet).