That infortunate British loading gauge!!

Agreed. I've never understood why the marketing people seem to think the 20 minute time improvement or whatever it is convinced anyone, I haven't met a single person who's been impressed by this, but when I mention capacity a reasonable amount of people who previously had no idea went "oh ok, fair enough, that makes more sense now".

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If freight capacity was the be-all and end-all, would it not make more sense to reopen routes like the GCR, the Midland line through the Peak District, the Woodhead Route, the March-Spalding GN/GE Joint line, the GWR Temple Meads avoiding line, etc? The thought occurred to me that if you bunged the GCR, GlosWarks and Swindon & Cricklade Railway a few billion quid each and compulsory purchase rights, you could run through steam from Manchester Victoria to Romsey via the London Extension, the Stratford & Midland Junction, the Honeybourne, the Midland & South Western Junction and the Sprat & Winkle, with interchanges with other lines, most notably the GW main line at Swindon... ;-)

 

And today's WIBN Award goes to...

One problem with the bottom end of both the WCML and ECML is stopping services, semi-fasts and express services trying to use the same tracks. Pathing is a nightmare because of the vastly differing speeds. (The ECML has the bottleneck of Welwyn viaduct too, of course). Take the majority of express services out of the mix, and many more paths are possible.

freight can always move at night, of course.

 

But if you're contracted on a scheduled delivery as part of a production process (e.g. the Cowley - Longbridge car parts) or similar "Just in Time" contract then the "night scheduling" effectively debars the rail contribution thus seeing the transit move by road - which is what Government policies are enforcing despite the lower emissions that quickly emanate from rail use.

On a more contentious note is the concern that recent DfT announcements regarding future railway operations are geared to passenger services with little if any thought given to the contribution to lowering emissions by directing policies at the FOCs. To this linesider the best sign of such commitment and rational policy thinking would be the insistence that the Felixstowe - Bury St Edmunds - Peterborough - Leicester - Birmingham route be electrified for freight traffic. If the DfT feels that Bi-Modes are such "value for money (VFM)" then encourage to TOCs to adopt them for services in the acceptance that electrification gaps should be for TOCs (using bi-modes) to resolve rather than FOCs to resolve by using emission-generating diesel locomotives throughout.

But since when has (any) Government Policy in respect of Railways been part of any rationality ??

 

One other issue of course is that in Europe the railways were either built by, or under the control of the Government. As a result of course you had much more efficient allocation of capital & nationwide standards.

In addition to this the UK suffers from difficulty in raising funds for investment, be it new diesels or electrification and a very conservative approach to new technology

 

Regarding the suggestions above that British railway engineering innovations .." in the main, ended at about 1900. Churchward looked to France and the USA for modern steam, and every modern steam locomotive in Britain was based on Churchward's ideas. Name the three greatest steam engineers of the 20th Century: DeGlehn, Chapelon, Porta. All from abroad. When it comes to Diesels you only have to look at the chronic unreliability of early diesels in this country to see how we lagged behind our continental counterparts. Rail manufacturers in the UK just weren't used to diesel construction - and had to learn from those who had trailblazed the way abroad." :-

I think this is a bit unfair to British locomotive engineers. Britain went from the depression of the 1930s to WW2; and then to some ten years of economic austerity, while coping with a very tired (but not wrecked) railway infrastructure.

On the Continent, many of the railways and their loco fleets were very badly smashed up by the war, then rebuilt to state-of-the art standards with aid from the USA. Meanwhile in the latter, the economy and the rail network were in much better shape; and dieselisation experiments (no doubt also aided by the less constrained US loading gauge) could proceed with fewer constraints.

Britain had much early experience with electrification. Arguably the Southern Railway actually suffered by being an innovative pioneer, pushing ahead to electrify a large milage of commuter lines on the low voltage DC third rail system; whereas if it had hung back a bit, it would have soon become known that one of the higher-voltage overhead wire systems would have been a better bet. Decisions then had to be taken (and are still being taken when the subject is revisited now) that we have to stay with the 3rd rail system, as it is too expensive to convert the large 3rd rail mileage we have.

On diesels, UK railways made a quite impressive start (shunters, plus the two LMS mainline locos and the three Southern ones) but were unable to follow this up immediately after WW2, due to the economic situation.

When faced with Government pressures in early BR days to (1) avoid expensively imported oil and use domestically mined coal instead, and (2) pause mainline electrification plans due to the lack of money, Riddles favoured missing out the interim stage of dieselisation. His design teams instead worked out improved steam locomotive designs to match the current economic and social constraints - thus choosing simple, rugged yet efficient standard designs that were easy to service, and could be kept going until electrification could be afforded.

This is surely not a lack of innovation, but a considered attempt to make improvements that matched the needs of the UK railways at the time. Yes, with hindsight things might have been better done, but that is an unfair criticism.

 

I consider myself a business traveler. That extra speed and frequency give me more space to make plans, more space to balance work and home. I stand on the platform at Grantham, and see large numbers waiting for trains to London despite the cost of peak travel.

On your hypothesis, I doubt that there is any connection between loading gauge and speed or frequency. Had the ECML been built to continental gauge, I doubt very much that the service would have been much different as commuting expanded further from London.

Rather, I see a commendable responsiveness in British railway management to changes in demand; one that Britain was perhaps ahead of other administrations in reacting to.

It's for that reason that I support HS2. The ability of even four tracked main lines to support mixed traffic is increasingly limited, as service densities increase and there is less and less space to mix the traffics. Something needs to change, and getting the fastest traffic out of the mix seems like the best option in what will always be an expensive choice.


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Right, firstly the Great Central London extension was not built to the Berne loading gauge - the latter didn't even exist in the 1890s when the line was being built.

The term arises from the international railway conference held and consequent convention signed in Bern, Switzerland in 1912. The official name of this gauge is the Gabarit passe-partout international (PPI, literally "pass-everywhere international"), and it came into force in 1914.

So yes while the GC London extension may well have been superior to what went before in loading guage terms, it was most emphatically could not accommodate vehicles built to Berne gauge without further work. This should not be a surprise - many railways in the northern areas of France were built by British engineers and to British standards and required some extensive works before 'Berne Guage' could be used throughout most of the French network.

Secondly please note that NONE of the original Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway system (that later rebranded itself as the 'Great Central') was built to anything larger than required by the traditional UK practice.

Note the word 'practice' in that previous sentence - with the UK Government determined to leave railway construction and operation in private sector hands and not to interfere unless absolutely necessary so as to preserve what Conservative politicians today call 'the power of the free market' individual companies were free to develop their own standards in all matters other than the rail gauge)

Thirdly you mention Watkin as a 'genius' in these matters - he was most certainly not! The Great Central London extension from Sheffield to just north of Ayelesbury may well have been well engineered, but the other key railway elements needed to reach his proposed Channel Tunnel were not! These included the Metropolitan Railway from Aylesbury to Baker Street and then round northern section of what is today London Undergrounds circle line with its miles of shallow depth cut and cover tunnels built to traditional UK guage under the Capitals streets, followed by the East London Railway which used similarly small sized tunnels and finally the South Eastern Railway itself which used shingle for ballast and was again built to UK gauge

Rebuilding these lines simply wasn't credible in the 1890s for the same reasons as it isn't credible to do the same today - the disruption to exsisting users (particulalry the thousands that use the Metropolitan Railway sectors) would be too great (not to mention loss of shareholder dividends) and Watkin never provided any indication that he appreciated, much less had any plan to deal with them.

 

And when pray tell do you expect the engineers to go round servicing, testing, or renewing safety critical components like track, signalling or power supplies then? These things don't magically look after themselves - and with workforce safety being an important consideration these days even things like bi-directional signalling don't help that much (nor do they if all signalling fuctions run in a single 48 cire cable and that cable needs replacement due to rodents chewing at it).

 

Video conferencing has been around since the 1980s if not earlier. It is ok for some meetings but it can never replace face to face meetings hence even now with Skype etc business travel still predominates. As a railway journalist, however, I would think you would fully understand that hs2 is more about capacity than time savings.

 

Alternatively, if the railway won't take it when the shippers want it to go, it will go by road.


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OK, perhaps I should have been more specific - slow bulk trains can move at night - as many do already, of course. These are the ones that struggle for paths already, and they too would be benefit from the very fast services not being part of many pathing conundrums once the new lines are built.

As for the infrastructure maintenance - that's a valid point, but these things are usually planned well ahead already, so nothing would change there. Indeed, surely this is another good reason for the new lines - it does offer more (planned) alternatives.

 

Absolutely the case. NBL seemed to bear the brunt of making shockingly bad locomotives, whilst EE arguably produced the winners - some of which are still in service today. But the whole process of saying "we'll take fifty of anything" was utterly daft.

 

Can I add the observation that on virtually every standard gauge or wider rail network in the world, containerised freight traffic is as inefficient as the UK passenger networks in terms of gauge. The width of containers is restricted by the road network and not by rail. If it was down to the railways containers would be significantly wider than the current 8 feet. When they standardised ISO containerisation led by the USA they must have had some tough decisions when deciding to go for 8 feet wide given that the US & mainland Europe rail network could have coped with much wider containers. Road vehicle dimension legislation was obviously more standardised than rail internationally, so they based the whole system on that even though it probably didnt suit the railways. Transport is always about compromises.