East Coast Mainline Routes & Branches Part 1: Thameslink Works

1. Network Rail report now released into what went wrong for those interested.

   Old Oak Common was a delay in signing off the signalling as being safe due to multiple paperwork inconsistencies.
   Holloway Road considerably more complex with a whole snowball of little problems leading to big ones: New equipment not fitting with machines, tipper wagons getting stuck preventing engineering trains from being moved on time so drivers out of place etc etc.

   Few comments on sub-optimal provision of passenger information & problems in the use of Finsbury Park (mistake in platform allocations leading to crowding when the first long distance service tried to discharge its passengers)

   Plenty to learn & improve on in time for next years renewals at the same place, fortuately the team made the call to fully redo the ballast so the track is good for 25yrs rather than 10.

2. What puzzles me is why the diagram on page 14 (figure 5 extent of possession) specifically includes the line from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace – the Northern Heights Railway closed in 1957.

3. Of course it is! I noticed that too but couldn’t for the life of me work out which line they meant. I’m sure its a mistake though (before people think Network Rail have let the cat out of the bag on future reopenings…)

4. Yes, clearly someone picked the wrong map. The map also shows (but doesn’t include in the possession) the Palace Gates Branch.

   Strictly speaking it would be correct to say that, during the possession, the Northern Heights lines would not be available for public service.

5. They really need to get on with building an over-platform bridge (as at Canonbury and Hi&I) to assist platform transfers.

6. The killer issue on Kings Cross seems to have been running out of freight train drivers, having used them all up earlier because of other problems.

   And the key crowd-causing issue at Finsbury Park seems to have been miscommunication between station staff and signallers as to which platforms would be used for what.

7. @Malcolm 16:34

   I can see that now. Clearly they have taken a very old map and coloured in the LNER lines. One can also see masses of non-existent sidings as well as the lines into Moorgate from King’s Cross supposedly being part of the possession site.

8. If the red lines are supposed to show the extent of the possesion, how were they able to get trains into Finsbury Park from the north?

   According to the map, not only the Northern Heights line but the Hotel Curve were part of the possession, although in those cases the possessions have run on for rather longer – 61 and 38 years respectively!
   There were also no trains running into Kings Cross Goods depot over Christmas, which must have been a relief to the custodians of the British Library!

9. It’s a failing of many report/article writers/editors that they take the diagrams and maps for granted. They blithely assume that the tecchie that they leave in charge of that operation has read the entire report/article and knows the first thing about the subject anyway.

   The killer bit about the Finsbury Park fiasco is that KX signallers and FP station staff agreed on the 27 Dec to bring incoming East Coast trains into platform 4, in spite of the bigwigs having agreed THE NIGHT BEFORE, that platform 5 would be used. I don’t blame the front-line staff for what they probably felt was best on the day. The true blame lies with the bigwigs not having a full-blown detailed operational contingency plan agreed months in advance for the use of Finsbury Park with exact plans and instructions already printed for distribution to signallers and station staff. Not only that but the ‘overrun’ was declared on Boxing Day morning but the plans for the following day were not agreed until Boxing Day evening after a conference call!

   When things are going pear-shaped in this monumental way, the balkanised railway entirely lacks that essential character – a top-level manager with overall project and operational responsibility who can not only make timely (and probably uncomfortable) decisions, but also be personally accountable for them. I guess that in GB only the ‘South Western Railway’ (SWT/NR Alliance) might have one of these persons. Perhaps there’s a lesson for the RDG here!

   Making up plans via a conference call with only 14 hours to get them assessed, understood and communicated is just plain unprofessional.

10. It is a very curious map – it includes both the Alexandra Palace branch (closed 1954) and HS1 (opened 2007)

11. The map in Fig. 5 clearly indicates that Network Rail’s contractors had access to powerful time travel technology. Lines, depots and sidings closed and removed since the 1950’s were still available to be possessed. If this is the case they had the following options:

    Carry out the work at a time when trains still ran on Xmas and Boxing Day
    Requisition relief drivers from Finsbury Park Diesel Depot
    Have the work done by navvies and platelayers using hand tools
    Run some relief passenger trains using surplus coaching stock and standby engines and crews

    Alternatively just ask the Doctor to revisit Boxing Day 2014.

12. I’ve looked again – it really is a weird map. I wonder where they found it.

13. I can summarise the Holloway incident in one sentence. Not to put relief drivers on standby is a schoolboy error.

    Having performed a risk assessment that there was a 95% probability that the project would complete on time, Network Rail decided not to draw up any contingency plans.

    Also, the business continuity plan doesn’t work, as it assumes the loss of just King’s Cross. It needs large numbers of TOC people at Finsbury Park to direct lost people, and Moorgate terminators to be at full capacity. People are needed on 12 hour standby.

14. Isn’t that the NLL on the map rather than HS1? And it appears to mark the Northern City line still as a tube, but fig 8 appears to show that it was included in the possession at the Finsbury Park end.

    I just hope that the rest of the report isn’t of the same standard of accuracy.

15. timbeau
    Errr …. The British Library is on the site of St Pancras Goods ….

    “the Map”
    As Mike says, if that is the standard of their investigations & reporting, it is no wonder that the whole operation fell down in a heap.
    Seriously, it’s disgraceful – isn’t it?
    [ Anonymous @ 23.35 – LURVE it! ]

16. @Mike
    “Isn’t that the NLL on the map rather than HS1?”
    It shows a connection into St Pancras, which wasn’t there until HS1

    ” mark the Northern City line still as a tube, but fig 8 appears to show that it was included in the possession at the Finsbury Park end.” I think the red line is the Canonbury spur, not the NCL which runs underneath

    @Greg
    “The British Library is on the site of St Pancras Goods ”
    Mea culpa: it’s St Martin’s College and Granary Square which were part of the possession: the Midland Railway was free to run goods trains in and out of the British Library all through Christmas.

17. I see that they have now replaced the diagram (figure 5) in the report.

18. New link to report

    I can understand what happened at King’s Cross, but there’s little clue as to why additional testing needed to be done at Paddingdon. Wrong forms?

19. @PoP
    “they have now replaced the diagram ”

    Spoilsports! Still, it shows someone is reading this. But it still shows the posession going all the way out to New Barnet (possibly beyond, but that’s the edge of the map). How then did they get the trains as far in as Finsbury park? s

20. How sad that they have replaced that historic map. I hope it is archived somewhere.

    However, maybe that will stop the sniggering and in-jokes (for which I include myself in the guilty) and let us concentrate, should we wish to, on rubbing the noses of those professionals whose strenuous efforts to plan and execute a very tricky piece of engineering went so badly wrong while most of us were enjoying our mince pies. (Readers should kindly add the phrase “in it” at a suitable point in the preceding sentence, as I’m blowed if I can see where to put it).

21. @ Edgepedia – my reading of the report is that the competence of SSL, the signalling contractor, is not what it should be. There’d been a similar major overrun on a separate scheme and the problems there were identified and reviewed and changes made. However it seems clear that that process was also substandard so whatever it is in SSL’s management processes for signalling that is flawed or inadequate had not been uncovered and rectified. Whatever else is concluded by the ongoing investigation I think there will be a lot of soul searching in Network Rail and SSL. It seems very odd given the extent of senior management / expert participation in the work at Old Oak Common that things still went so badly wrong.

22. Re malcom,

    I did archive it just incase…

    WW + Edgepedia

    My reading of it is that the scope of testing required was incorrectly assessed in the planning phases and the person on the ground realised this when they started doing the actual work. Probably combined with miscommunication at some point.
    It is entirely possible that the testing scope issue wasn’t all SSL’s fault for example if part of the existing installation was damaged during the work and this was only picked up after testing started.
    There have been many issues with the GWML signalling lately probably due to its age so emergency scope creep is entirely plausible.

    As the report note signal testers are in very short supply so the high level supervision might suggest an AGILE project management style if they knew they were resource short with a potentially variable scope.

23. @Malcolm#
    “professionals whose strenuous efforts to PLAN AND EXECUTE a very tricky piece of engineering went so badly wrong while most of us were enjoying our mince pies. ”

    Yes and no
    Doubtless the professionals on the ground on the day trying to execute the plan were very dedicated and hard working. But it is evident that there was something badly wrong with the plan itself – if only the lack of contingency planning. And having the head honcho on holiday down in Cornwall at the time (from where he couldn’t have got back easily as Paddington was shut too) was not a good plan.

24. @timbeau I think there was a partial possession out to New Barnet, with two of the four tracks being used to accommodate the engineering trains (drivers permitting), while the other two were open to accommodate a limited public service, to Kings Cross in the plan or Finsbury Park in the fallback option. Quite a lot of trains were being turned back further north at Stevenage or Peterborough.

    Regarding Paddington, my admittedly quick reading of the report is that the over-run at Old Oak was probably as much or more to do with the paperwork not being in order than the actual testing. Given the very extensive and detailed reporting requirements for any safety-critical signalling works post-Clapham, it seems highly likely that some testing had to be re-done because the paperwork was incorrect or missing.

25. @timbeau

    Yes and no. I didn’t mean to shut down discussion on what went wrong, just to recognize that, as well as the mistakes, there was a lot of real hard work going on.

    And of course it is a perhaps misleading simplification to say that there was “a lack of contingency planning”. Most probably there was plenty of contingency planning, but it did not all hit the spot, presumably because the contingencies which arose were not exactly the ones which were planned for. It is apparent that there exists, quite rightly, a general contingency plan for whenever Kings Cross is unavailable, and that was in fact used. Not entirely successfully, however.

26. Odd how the new diagram uses network rail symbols on Overground Stations including those on the Eaśt London Line . But no TFL symbols at stations like Highbury and Islington .

27. My basic criticism of the contingency plan for the Kings Cross works is that it wasn’t robust enough to make the shift to Finsbury Park work safely. It also seemed to be based on the principal of ‘over to you ops chaps. Just do what you usually do’. It’s easy to wish for a single commanding presence (as I have already done), but one boss with the power to fire people (or seriously damage their careers) can crack heads together and take an overall passenger focussed view. I’ve been there. It works with remarkable effectiveness! Mark Carne may have been the biggest fish and been on holiday, but he had/has zero power over EC and other operators’ managers. That is a risk in itself, and needs to be mitigated by rock solid contingency plans. Once the overrun was obvious on Boxing Day morning, all efforts ( including that of the NR contractors) should have been directed to making the Finsbury Park contingency plan work, as already set out and briefed to all operators. No last minute alterations by conference call should have been allowed.

28. With regard to the King’s Cross overrun, I would like to draw your attention to page 14, where the report states:

    The optimum engineering plan would have required the closure of all four railway lines at Hollway in a seven day blockade and to renew all four junctions and all four stretches of track in one activity. (…) The plan was reworked in June 2014 in such a way that this could be achieved with four lines blocked for two days over Christmas Day and Boxing Day with two lines open over the following two days, 27th and 28th (Saturday and Sunday).

    If 7 days worth of work was squeezed into 2 because of the combined whingeing of TOCs, the media and homegrown experts in railway maintenance methods who believe that railways do not need to be closed at all, then it is high time to replace the person signing off the possession plans with someone who actually possesses a spine and does not give in to the collective whingeing of the aforementioned parties.

    Also, remember that due to the volume of engineering work taking place across the network over Christmas there were no spare drivers available anywhere. The contingency built into the project was effectively made null and void.

29. @Straphan, quoting the report
    “The plan was reworked in June 2014 in such a way that this could be achieved with four lines blocked for two days over Christmas Day and Boxing Day”

    ……except that, as it turned out, it couldn’t be achieved.

30. I interpreted the re-working of the project to mean that they needed 7 days for the whole job in one go, but they reworked it to do half the renewals in the period just gone, taking 4 days, and half postponed until next Christmas taking another 4 days. Each 4 day period included 2 days of full blockade followed by two days of two track working.

31. That is still far less access than the optimum (if you include the time required to set the possession up nad then clear it again). The timescales where thus such, that if a certain machine were to break down (as machines tend to do every now and again) there would not be enough recovery time or resource available to allow for the timely reopening.

    Trouble is – this could happen again next year when they have to do part two of this job…

32. @ Straphan – I doubt anyone in the possession planning department has the requisite power to overrule managing directors of train companies or Network Rail in the event of the inevitable escalation of an issue.

    Surely what we have, at a high level, is a collision between the engineering / asset health issues on the railway, passenger expectations, political grandstanding and intolerance, the demands of regulators for ever more efficiency and lower cost and the need for ever rising revenue to keep the Treasury happy? I would be astonished if all of those factors were “pulling in the same direction” and therefore trying to meet or even balance all of them is a thankless / impossible task. I note that no one in a senior position has yet dared to suggest publicly that are mismatchs between key influences on Network Rail and that if people want more rational solutions to the impact of large scale engineering works then some other trade off might be needed.

    I know everyone is just questioning the competence of Network Rail at the moment but you rightly point out that the optimum methodology and timescale for the best overall scheme at Kings Cross was deemed impossible or unacceptable. Once the politicians have got past their “yah boo sucks” stage of slagging off Network Rail perhaps the rail industry, ORR and DfT might like to have a rational debate about how to deliver the renewals and new projects that the government have asked for?

33. Whatever lack of competence at Network Rail (or elsewhere) may have been demonstrated by these events, we should bear in mind that there was no-one was injured, and everyone involved remained safe. (With one possible minor exception of the full train brought into a crowded platform at Finsbury Park). There may have been many “right-side failures”, but these are different in kind from the incompetencies of Railtrack which were demonstrated at Potters Bar and Hatfield.

    [I don’t think it is so much the lack of competence, as these are railway professionals, but in the fragmented UK railway industry there are sometimes cracks between organisations and their responsibilities.

    So we heartily discourage using words suggesting incompetence, so that this blog also maintains its fact based and non-aggressive tone. As has been noted, there were no injuries that we know of, and the situation was rapidly improved to the extent possible. LBM]

34. @ LBM – my reference to incompetence was in the context of what people far removed from this blog have been saying publicly. In most cases it has been politicians flinging the comments around in order to secure some sort of electoral advantage / point scoring. We all have the ability to read the report as published. While there were clearly errors made and equipment failed I’ve read enough similar reports to know that there is nothing particularly “unique” about either of these incidents. Much of the planning and multiple review stages and risk reviews is very similar to what LU does. The fact plans get iterated and resourcing is fine tuned is nothing new either. The wider advantage LU has is that it is broadly in control of its own destiny and the operators and engineers should have reasonably aligned objectives. It’s not as fractured as the NR network can clearly be.

35. WW
    … perhaps the rail industry, ORR and DfT might like to have a rational debate about how to deliver the renewals and new projects that the government have asked for?
    All pigs fuelled & ready for take-off, sir!

36. @WW: As it stands, all pressures on NR are working against a sensible approach to railway maintenance and enhancements:

    – Schedule 4 payments to TOCs/FOCs
    – Political pressure to keep railway open
    – Pressure from HLOS targets for current Control Period to contain costs

    The only thing on the other side of the scales is safety, but a railway can be fundamentally operated safely in a state of significant infrastructure degradation and where capacity does not grow with demand. NR is already struggling to cope with all the enhancements/renewals it has signed up to carry out in CP5: something has to give.

37. Kings Cross 27 December

    I was surprised that Govia Thameslink Railway didn’t have anyone on duty until 2000 on Boxing Day. This left very little time to plan and to communicate the plan to staff and passengers

38. @ Straphan – that was pretty much my point. NR have a thankless task and no wider support to do it. The sensible, albeit difficult, next step is to change the interraction of those conflicting objectives. If we don’t then something will slip possibly with dire consequences not matter what controls are in place. Placing organisations and the people within them under intolerable strain leads to accidents (eventually). We may be a long way away from that with NR but it is hardly “news” that conflicting objectives causes crises.

39. Paddington

    I’m pleased to see that the safety people were able to act independently despite the immense pressure and that the railway was not re-opened until safety procedures had been properly completed

40. With so much pressure to reduce possession time, sooner or later we will undoubtedly come across one safety person who will end up giving in to the pressure. With predictable consequences…

41. If anyone is a glutton for punishment then there is an hour and forty minutes of a one off evidence session of The Transport Committee from the 14th January looking at the Christmas disruption available on the BBC website.

    The first hour or so is evidence from Mark Carne and Robin Gisby, of Network Rail, followed by around half an hour from Richard Price and Joanna Whittington of the ORR. Richard Price apparently lives near Finsbury Park and went down there on the 27th to see what was going on for himself!

42. @ Savoy Circus

    Although it looks as if the Paddington works did not get off completely incident free for safety, 2 episodes of workers mistakenly on ‘live’ rails according to RAIB investigation.

43. I do wonder if the Kings Cross problem was due to it being just* a routine renewal. If it had been a serious chunk of project then a bit more top-management focus might have been present. Possibly even the risk register was a cobbled up revision of previous ones that no-one really had a hard look at. All speculation, I agree, but fairly silly problems came up and kicked them hard in the backside.

    Although GTR’s control room couldn’t be woken up early on Boxing Day, it’s not hard to imagine that a more senior presence might have a few useful mobile phone numbers that he/she could have worked on. But only if they were involved, and those nearer the ground took the problems seriously enough. Anyway, no-one hurt, but a few reputations (possibly the wrong ones) have been given a severe battering.

    * the word ‘just’ used with care here.

44. @Fandroid,

    I really don’t think it makes any difference whether it is routine renewal (like replaced with like) or an alteration (result at the end of it is different). From Network Rail’s engineering point of view there is no difference. You remove what what there and then build what you require. There is no difference to the way equipment is ordered or contingencies made in the event of problems. Having been quite close to (in one sense) the replacement of points at Stoats Nest Junction at Christmas a year ago I think I can safely say there was no complacency that this was *just* a renewal.

    In fact reading the report I would say, if anything, quite the opposite. If they had *just* treated it as routine renewal they wouldn’t have had such concern about the reliability of the “log grabs” attachment and demanded new ones be used – which then turned to be more troublesome than if they had just used existing ones.

    I note with concern that the original report seems to have disappeared from the internet and I relied on my previously downloaded version to check the info about “log grabs”.

    Mobile (and other phone) numbers are a different matter. They fact that staff do not have these when something happens or they phone and there is no answer sometimes gets a mention in accident reports. Some of LU’s preparation for 2012 consisted an audit involving going around staff and making sure they had all the phone numbers they could conceivably need. A small detail but very important.

45. PoP. I take your point about the log grabs, and accept that my theory is almost certainly wrong.

    However, it seems that the contingency planning (including those phone numbers) was not really adequate. In these rush-in rush-out activities, it would seem to us outsiders that it’s essential to have fully organised plans ready (and understood by all appropriate NR and TOC managers) in case Murphy’s Law arrives red in tooth and claw (as it did), and NR was unable to restore lines for use at the programmed end of the works. Christmas adds extra problems, so the contingency plans should have been extra well discussed and communicated.

46. @PoP: The more important and high profile a job is the more attention it will get. London Bridge had every executive and his dog look through all the plans on a number of occasions and it seems to have gone relatively smoothly. The results of the work are of course a different issue.

    King’s Cross was treated as a ‘regular’ job, and was therefore not scrutinised as closely, with the result that a weakness of the contingency plans (no spare drivers) was overlooked.

    That said, I still stand by my initial conclusion: if NR had been allowed to shut the line for as long as it wanted, this would never have happened…

47. @ Fandroid – having read the report there’s nothing in it that suggests there was not plenty of advance discussion and iteration of what to do. I’m not even certain there was any issue with people knowing phone numbers. What does seem to be the issue is not trying out new equipment before using in earnest, not having people rostered on call in things like timetabling and rostering departments in the TOCs “just in case” and possibly not understanding the implications of maxing out all freight drivers across the country and not modelling a few “what if” scenarios before hand. The programme clearly had float in it, there was a clear “stop / go” decision point albeit early in the work and senior management were on call in all the relevant organisations.

    I don’t understand all the clamour from “know it alls” (not here btw) for Mark Carne to break from his holiday and personally pontificate on site. What you need are people who can “crack the whip” and get things done but who crucially have the right knowledge and skills and relationships to get stuff done. It would be essential to keep Mr Carne informed and up to date with events so he is aware and can act, if he needs to, in the event of some serious blockage at a senior level with a TOC or a supplier. That event, though, should be the exception. Things like the staff at FP locally deciding to ignore an agreed plan are an ever present risk. I’ve lost count of the times when local staff instruct maintainers or others to do things that were not requested and then other people get lumbered with the financial and other consequences of formally agreed plans being overridden on site. That sort of behaviour, even if well intentioned, causes havoc.

    The advantage now is that Network Rail and others have real life experience to learn from and to incorporate the right lessons. Before anyone gets excited I am not saying that it was good that things went wrong. Unfortunately they did, people were seriously inconvenienced but we have some good learning to incorporate from the mistakes and errors. If there is ever a repeat of the same errors and the same scale of chaos then we are in to serious territory where people may need to be sacked to make the point that incompetence is not tolerated. We can all make a mistake, the key is not to repeat them and to learn how to do things properly.

48. I wonder if they could have used the lines at Finsbury Park with 2 platform faces ie 2/3 (up) and 6/7 (down) to mitigate overcrowding

49. @ Savoy Circus – one of the real problems with Finsbury Park is the single entrance to NR platforms from the street and the narrow corridor and stairs. I’m ignoring the spiral stairs for now. In the event of a major disruption there’s a need to manage dispersal of arriving passengers from upstairs and then getting people upstairs as effectively as possible while minimising conflict. I can’t imagine that’s an easy task. As for next Christmas there is the added risk that LU’s works to expand capacity may impose other site specific constraints.

50. I got the impression (possibly wrongly) that the GTR control room was not available until fairly late on Boxing Day. If half of the operations personnel are absent then most things are guesswork until they turn up! Hence the fairly late agreements by conference call.

51. Graham H 15 August 2015 at 08:55 on ‘Making the Grade’

    @RayK- NR were quoting the need for a 10 mile tunnel to EC bidders last year, but then they were also quoting a silly cost. It’s not obvious to me, at least, why a Welwyn avoiding tunnel needs to be so long – perhaps half the cited length? If so, the cost for a twin bore plain line tunnel 5 m long should be about £ 1bn +the cost of some connecting/slewing work. Gain – maybe 4-6 fast paths/hour? That’s probably too far off thread now…’

    It’s potential effect on the northern Thameslink services does put it fair and square on this one.

    Ten miles is far in excess of what is required for bypassing the Digwell Viaduct. I originally couldn’t see a justification for much more than three miles as that is the length of double track. Then I started looking (Using Google Earth). The line between WGC and Welwyn North is near enough to level at an altitude of 90 metres. The river below is approximately 65 metres. So we have a 25 m difference. Take the bottom of a tunnel 15 metres below that and we have 40 m. Taking the nearest bridge South of where the tracks change from quad. to doubled(Knightsfield) as being 750 metres from the river; this gives a gradient of about 19:1. Obviously far too steep.

    I then asked ‘Where, South of there, could a tunnel start?’. Just South of Woodhall looks promising and at an altitude of 75 m gives us a gradient of 142:1. This is much more practical and gives us about five miles of tunnel.

    Looking further South we can see that between Welwyn and Potters Bar there are a number of curves which do much to limit the line speed. These curves pass through territory which would be extremely controversial to provide an alternative to on the surface. Tunnelling to a point somewhere near Brookmans Park gives us the ten Miles that NR quote.

    NR get a ten mile section of high speed railway. Thameslink and others get a ten mile section of line freed from long distance services. Is NR’s quoted cost still silly with this scenario?

    [Well done RayK for posting this in a more appropriate place. Please feel free to discuss anything about Welwyn here. PoP]

52. @RayK – the issue was one of capacity, not line speed,so eliminating the capacity bottleneck requires about 5 miles of tunnel, and that buys you about 4-6 extra paths. £200m a path may be worth having and might even pay for itself. Those extra 5 miles on to Potters Bar buy you 5 miles worth of 125/140 running as opposed to 110 (?) – a very small time gain for the additional £ 1bn or so and almost impossible to reflect in additional revenue. It’s quite important to deconstruct megaprojects like this to see what benefits are being bought and where. (BTW, I was applying the adjective “silly” to the size of the number, where NR figures ranged from £10bn upwards, not to the rationale, which needs deconstructing as above.)

53. Graham H,

    If the issue is about capacity and not speed then you don’t, or at least in a pre-enhanced Thameslink world didn’t, need to do anything. The capacity is, or at least was, there by using the Hertford loop via Hertford North.

    Also if the issue is capacity then any solution obviously needs to ensure that the work done at Welwyn is worthwhile when taking into account the limited capacity at King’s Cross, Moorgate and free slots via the Canal Tunnels to St Pancras Thameslink.

54. @PoP – To be strictly accurate, it’s about the availability of 110/125 paths; if you could send more stoppers round the Hertford loop then you could free up some, albeit fewer, fast paths. Without producing a before and after timetable, it’s difficult to be precise, but you could -now – probably run 15+ tph on the fast pair of tracks at least as far as Peterborough, if not to Donnie (but freight gets in the way on the two track section, of course) if it weren’t for Welwyn, but as we know, even 8 is tricky. Certainly EC bidders identified, during the timetable modelling process, Welwyn as the main obstacle to doing more, although I take your point that at some stage,other constraints such as the KX throat would kick in.

55. A shorter, albeit more curvaceous, Welwyn bypass might be possible by routing a tunnel under the high ground to the west of the existing ECML, between Woolmer Green and WGC, using a short viaduct next to the A1(M) to bridge the valley. (it may even be possible to re-use part of the old Welwyn-Luton branch, although that is seriously curvy!)

    If the curvature is too much for 125mph running, you could send the stoppers that way, with a new station at Old Welwyn, more conveniently located than Welwyn North.

    Two double track tunnels each about 2km long, plus 1km on the surface, plus a station.
    How does this compare with a minimum 8km of high speed tunnel. (Incidentally, 1/142 is no trouble for modern traction – I’m sure a tunnel could start further north than Woodhall – even dig between WGC and Woolmer Green would only need about 1/70.

56. @timbeau – an interesting lateral thought! You are right, it doesn’t have to be the fasts in the tunnel. BoFP costs for your version would be £500m?

57. Graham H,

    But there is, or was, absolutely no capacity reason why you can’t send 110/125 mph trains around the Hertford loop. It is all about unacceptably extended journey times if you don’t go the direct route.

58. @WW – oh indeed; as I remarked, it’s all about fast paths.

59. @poP/Graham H
    I understand the Hertford Loop hasn’t the electrical capacity to handle the full service on the ECML fasts. Any long distance trains have to slot in between the locals, so it’s not really an extra two tracks (any more than the Catford Loop plus West Dulwich routes can provide two fast and two slow tracks).

60. Graham H
    Yes you were quite clear in attaching ‘silly’ to ‘cost’ and that is how I took it. You then said ‘It’s not obvious to me, at least, why a Welwyn avoiding tunnel needs to be so long.’ And like you I could see how five miles of tunnel did the job. I then asked what were NR doing with the other five miles and the only thing that I could see was eliminating curves. I could be that NR had some other plan in mind but if so I cannot see it. I would also expect NR to be looking ahead beyond the current growth restrictions and if they can see an advantage in the extra five miles and can get EC money to back it . . . We would need to hear more details from them. Was there any clue to when they were suggesting the plan might be put into effect. I would expect quadrupling Huntingdon to Fletton Junction to be done first as sixteen miles of double track will cost much less than even five miles of tunnel.

61. BoFP – Back of Fag Pack

62. timbeau,

    But electrical capacity can be upgraded a lot cheaper than digging tunnels. And fast trains are quite capable of running slowly. It is not about overall capacity, but, as Graham H states, it is about maintaining or increasing the number of fast paths.

63. How expensive would it be to build a second bridge which looks exactly the same as the one that’s there now? Sure it won’t be the same age as the other one, but if we let that stops us we’d still be living in old Roman houses…

    This is of course if this is the problem I’m thinking of that’s being discussed!

64. @RayK – no timescales (and clearly not in CP6!). I agree with you about re-quadrification as a cheap thing to do – £10-20m a mile assuming that all the old earthworks and bridges are still available (cf the cost of reinstating the Waverley route @ £10m a mile) . [I have remarked before how cheap it would be to do the job all the way to York and how well that compares with a certain other scheme in the same general direction but I know I am teetering on the edge of a cruel and unkind cut, so I’ll desist].

    @SHLR – probably the cheapest option of all but English Heritage will have none of it – even the heritage – conscious Swiss have allowed the Loetschberg to do exactly what you suggest in some highly sensitive scenery.

65. @Graham H

    at some stage,other constraints such as the KX throat would kick in.

    A couple of questions.

    1) At what point? And would opening the third set of tunnels south of FP help?

    2) Is 15 tph fast sufficient for the medium term, or is there sufficient capacity from places which don’t have a direct high-speed direct service in the peak for more than that?

66. @ian Sergeant – I’m sorry, I haven’t undertaken a detailed modelling of the KX throat – it’s merely that any station layout inevitably has a limit to what it can handle, with constraints such as conflicting movements, pathing time, and so on . More access tracks doesn’t necessarily make it easier; for example, the approaches to Waterloo were thought to function better when the layout enabled each block of platforms to be swept sequentially -but no change to the number of approach lines.

    Personally,Iwould be surprised if 15 tph wasn’t sufficient for the foreseeable future -it’s difficult to imagine what they would be (4 Scotland fasts, 4 Leeds, 4 semifasts, then what? Hourly Bradfords, Lincolns, and? Grimsby or Sunderland hourly? Surely not!)

67. Sorry, forgot Hull- easily done.

68. @poP
    “And fast trains are quite capable of running slowly. It is not about overall capacity, but, as Graham H states, it is about maintaining or increasing the number of fast paths.”

    But fast trains do not eat capacity as much as slow ones, simply because they clear sections much more quickly.

69. @timbeau : the sections can be made shorter. But it’s all rather an angels-on-pinhead discussion, because everyone agrees that, while the Hertford loop may add to the theoretical capacity of the KX main line, it cannot be effectively used in that way, because neither the operators nor the passengers would put up with the slow service. (Taking more time than you need is uneconomic, as you use the train and its staff for longer to collect the same fare).

70. timbeau,

    Conversely one could argue that fast trains eat capacity more than slow ones since a slow train is capable of being in the following block section running through on single yellows whereas a fast train on the ECML needs a green signal (three clear block sections). So you can have slow trains bunched together maximising capacity or fast trains spread out minimising capacity.

    Needless to say it is more complicated than that but I am pretty sure I am correct in saying that with a decent number of relatively short block sections the theoretical maximum capacity is at quite a slow speed.

    We also enter into a self-fulfilling argument because it depends on whether you have optimised the blocks sections for fast services or slow services but I am pretty sure that if you only care about capacity you optimise the block sections for slow services and then run the fast services slowly.

71. @Graham H

    Thanks for that. My instincts is that the extra approach lines wouldn’t be justified on BCR, and it comes down to turning trains around quickly to avoid constraints (as has been discussed before).

    Four costs have been missed in the previous discussion.

    1) Grade separation at Werrington Junction is pre-supposed (please no discussion on March to Spalding – we’ve been here before).

    2) With 15tph between Peterborough and Newark, level crossings become impractical. Having been stuck at Tallington for five minutes today – a Sunday – bottlenecks such as this would have to be sorted out.

    3) Running semi fasts with non-stoppers to Doncaster and even York doesn’t work at 15tph without passing loops between Peterborough and Newark.

    4) Lincoln-Nottingham services – already limited to below what could run by Newark Flat Junction – would need a flyover to be practical. The link from Newark Northgate to the Lincoln Line now starts to look a bit like Hitchin pre flyover, and would need grade separation to join the flyover.

    By this time we are a long way from London, but it illustrates well how sorting a capacity constraint close to the M25 doesn’t necessarily create the number of paths we might want it to without remedial work.

72. Malcolm,

    Yes it is getting a bit silly. I just wanted to make the point that the East Coast Main Line, strictly speaking, does not have a capacity issue as such. The issue it has is that in order to achieve the desired capacity one has to make compromises on journey time.

    It is the same on the Metropolitan Line north of Finchley Road. You don’t need the fast tracks for capacity reasons because you could run the entire Metropolitan service on the slow lines which is what happens on the Jubilee line which only has slow lines – and it has a more frequent train service than the Metropolitan. The reason the Metropolitan line has fast tracks is to make faster journeys possible. The clue is in the name.

73. The clue is in the name.
    Great Northern Railway, you mean?

74. @Ian Sergeant – yes, there are other costs,too, as you point out – and indeed,in a perfect world replacing the Lincoln freight avoiding line to enable most traffic from Felixstowe and Thamesport that is headed north to travel via the Joint Line. (I fear we will try the patience ofthe moderators if we pursue this too far). The general strategic point has been well made by you – sorting out operational problems at theLondon end often requires attention to something going on 100 km away. (The SW main line is a good example, where failure to sort the trains out into the correct order at Woking screws up their presentation at Waterloo with all sorts of downstream platforming consequences,althoughI sometimes suspect that the inhabitants of Woking box play trains just for the hell of it…)

75. @PoP
    “the theoretical maximum capacity is at quite a slow speed. ”
    In the limit, the maximum number of trains you can have in the system is equal to the number of block sections, but with a train occupying each section, none of them is able to move.

    @ian Sergeant
    “[presupposing a Newark flyover]”The link from Newark Northgate to the Lincoln Line now starts to look a bit like Hitchin pre flyover, and would need grade separation to join the flyover.”

    The only link is from the up side at Newark Northgate, so trains between Lincoln and Northgate do not obstruct the ECML. Even if the fabled direct services from London to Lincoln ever materialise (now running eight years late), full grade separation to avoid a crossing movement of one train every two hours (in one direction only) seems over-egging it.

    The construction of the A46 bypass bridge immediately on the south side of the flat crossing has reduced the options for connection of any rail flyover to the Northgate link, but it should still be possible. The road itself is also badly in need of dualling.

76. Originally posted by Captain Deltic elsewhere and moved to here:

    Coming in belatedly on the ‘nothing done about Welwyn viaduct/tunnels’ point, Railtrack was actively planning an extra track cantilevered off, from memory, the west side of the viaduct and a new tunnel. It slapped the necessary compulsory purchase notices on Welwyn North causing enormous angst for the locals and held local exhibitions to show what was planned.

    I remember driving over to Welwyn for a briefing, it must have been around 1997-98. The scheme was costed, but years of analysing ORR periodic reviews seems to have over-written the relevant brain cells. This went on for several years until Railtrack’s demise.

    As it is, the plan is to run 18 trains an hour through the two track section. Judging by current regulation on the route I’m not sure that even with traffic management the necessary plus/minus 30 seconds of right time will be achievable.

    @ww. Talking of speed up Stoke Bank, following electrification a Panchex automatic pantograph monitoring system was fitted near the summit. This also recorded the speed of the loco and legend has it that drivers had to be warned that speeds of over 130 mile/h were not acceptable. The number ‘9’ comes to mind.

77. @timbeau

    I know the area well hailing from not that far away. For a two hourly train with the current setup – absolutely no need to do anything with Newark. But with 1tph to Lincoln and 14tph coming from Doncaster it would be another matter. There is space for both dualling of the A46 and a railway flyover with some work, as you suggest.

    But my point wasn’t really about Newark – I was illustrating that work at Welwyn wouldn’t give you the capacity it could without a lot of extra work, and that work shouldn’t be forgotten.

78. @Ian Sergeant
    “But with 1tph to Lincoln it would be another matter”
    I don’t think that will be an issue any time soon. The current service is one train per night. There is no realistic prospect of anything more in the forseeable future.

79. @PoP….I remember reading about those plans on the Railtrack website circa 2000. Presumably they died when Railtrack itself bit the dust? Would it have made any difference today if the plans had been carried out?

80. What do you think the good folk of Welwyn (amd not WGC) would have more angst about:

    A new viaduct, tunnels and necessary CPOs
    Closing Welwyn North station and asking them all to drive to WGC (which releases at least 4 paths an hour)

    Noting that additional paths are effectively unusable, as KX, Moorgate and the TL core are all full from 2020.

    Anyway, doesn’t HS2 phase 2 provide the necessary additional 2 tracks to the north, albeit 20 miles to the west?

81. @SFD – TLK may be full by 2020 but I have not seen it stated anywhere that KX will be so. (And yes, HS2 does provide the extra capacity if you are prepared to drive that far – and as you admit, the good burghers of Welwyn North may not be willing to do so. There’s also the small matter of relative cost but I won’t rehearse the arguments again: not only will I get snipped …snip).

    [Well that was rather asking for it. PoP]

82. Graham H,

    But surely if HS2 provides an alternative route to York then there will be freed train paths as longer distance services to York and beyond got re-routed via HS2 and therefore you could afford to stop local trains at Welwyn North and the good burghers of Welwyn North would have a service at their local station at least as good as now – maybe better. So they wouldn’t need to drive to use HS2 (which probably wouldn’t have a station in the vicinity anyway).

    I think this is the point Sad Fat Dad was trying to make.

83. @PoP there’s no probably about it. The nearest HS2 station to Welwyn North will be Euston, followed by Old Oak Common and Birmingham International. While the lack of shovels in the ground means that HS2 is not yet completely certain to be built at all, there is no doubt at all, if it is built, where it will go and stop.

84. @PoP – 🙂 and thank you for the clarification. It’s not clear how any of the freed up capacity will be used – quite possibly the present level of classic services will continue.

85. @PoP thank you for clarifying my poorly worded attempt. In the post HS2 world it is inconceivable that there would need to be more than 5 or 6 long distance paths an hour via Welwyn, which leaves between 10 and 13 free for commuter traffic.

86. @SFD -we simply don’t know that; one of the interesting issues about HS 2 is the response of classic operators to HS2, both in terms of new services and pricing strategy, given the likely need to charge very substantial premiums over existing levels. (The carrying cost of the capital cost of HS2 is likely to exceed the total revenue of the UK rail system by a factor of 2 to 3, not to mention its operating costs, so unless there is to be a massive subsidy, high fares seem inevitable).

87. Has HS1 made a significant dent in the number of fast services through Bromley South or Sevenoaks?

    Why would HS2 be any different?

88. Given the current state of play about open access services on the ECML then I don’t see HS2 as being any sort of saviour for anyone. If government abolishes the regulator and is prepared to be dragged through the courts then perhaps it can force everyone to use HS2 services at ridiculous fare levels. However I tend to side with Graham H in that there is no clarity whatsoever as to what the post HS2 world looks like nor how the DfT, TOCs, passengers and competing modes would respond. It’s an almost raging certainty that any view now would end up being completely wrong. I rather suspect Welwyn viaduct will continue to be a pain for ECML operators for decades to come, HS2 or not.

89. The strategic issue facing Thameslink vs East Coast/open access paths in a situation of constrained capacity is surely that the rail industry has been poor at valuing train slot access, and the facing the consequences (which may of course then need to be moderated for political and local sensitivities!).

    A proper large scale capacity relief scheme may cost a nine figure amount, but the number of additional slots (of varying value) compounded over a 60-year life and then discounted, may give a strong edge to a project otherwise seen as poor value if only being charged back to a 7-10 year franchise. GH may well have views about the 60-year value of a single intercity slot. Clearly the Government with another hat on is willing to back a £50bn outlay in HS2 slots which presumably is being value-tested in a 60-year model for HM Treasury’s sake…

    There are also the economic growth values of adding London commuting capacity, where no one yet expects that the GLA area on its own will in practice shoulder all the forecast population/housing volumes. The Gross Value Added role of unencumbered Thameslink capacity should therefore also be taken into account in such infrastructure judgments. Having a narrow, short-term perspective on the merits of a big number scheme is the worst way to go about things.

90. JR
    Having a narrow, short-term perspective on the merits of a big number scheme is the worst way to go about things.
    Like “pausing” electrification, rather than fixing the admitted problems as we go, you mean?
    It’s entirely possible I’m being unfair of course, but…..

91. Loving the discussion of capacity vs journey time.
    Those who’ve ever been near computer networks will know of the fabled Jumbo Jet full of tapes, which delivers an absolutely massive bandwidth at a competitive price.
    The latency, however, is so large that it’s hard to envisage an appropriate application for this (except, perhaps, storing NSA and GCHQ packet captures offshore).
    Edge cases are never a good idea to contemplate.

92. @Greg Tingey:

    The West Coast Route Modernisation (WCRM) project is an example of how badly such large projects can go wrong if not managed properly, and it’s not so far in the past that Whitehall has forgotten its lessons. It has led to an extremely risk-averse approach to running such mega-projects. The slightest hint of something going wrong and the accountants start to have palpitations.

    Which is fair enough. Their job is to keep the costs in check as the money they’re spending is the taxpayer’s money.

    It does seem that some elements of the northern electrification plan could do with revisiting, so this may yet turn out to be a good idea. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that.

93. Greg,

    I don’t think “pausing” electrification is primarily about cost. The government is adamant that the financial commitment to the railways announced in their manifesto will remain. The issue is about being deliverable in the planned timescale and facing up to the consequences if not. The issue is more of a technical one that admittedly has financial consequences but it is the potential failure to deliver which is the primary concern.

    You “can’t fix the admitted problems as they go” when something is fundamentally wrong – that’s really what they initially tried with WCRM but it needed someone to say that the whole thing was massively flawed before it could get sorted out.

    If they tried to fix problems as they go then you would be the first in a few years time to moan about how the problem wasn’t dealt with properly.

94. My latest Boiling Frogs analysis in next week’s Modern Railways (blatant plug) shows that at today’s prices the Great Western Main Line electrification is costing just under four times per single track km as the ECML electrification. It is also running 18-24 months late. All numbers may be conservative.

    We are entering a replay of the Ford Factor in 2003 when DfT SRA and Network Rail all denied that infrastructure project unit costs three-ish times those for BR were in any way relevant to the privatised railway.

    McLoughlin says he has paused electrification to avoid a repeat of the WCRM saga where the final cost was 4.5 times the initial estimate. Too late I fear.

    I confidently expect fresh claims that comparisons with BR costs are irrelevant, as the temperature continues to rise and the frog stays put.

95. @captain Deltic
    “We are entering a replay of the Ford Factor ……………infrastructure project unit costs three-ish times those for BR ”
    If I recall, the actual value you quoted was pi.

    If the “pause” is genuinely to review whether the project scope is correct, it may be the right thing to do. For example, it may be wise to modify the current electrification scheme to future-proof it for HS3: I seem to recall at one time that a planned WCML upgrade involved demolishing the only recently-rebuilt station at Rugby.

    Similarly, if stage 1 of a project is falling behind, it may be better in the long run to combine it with stage 2.

96. Captain Deltic 18 August 2015 at 09:53

    This may seem a silly question to some of you railway insiders but,
    are the causes of the
    1) 16-24 months delay, and the
    2) costs 4 times those of the last comparable big project
    mostly the same causes?

97. @timbeau
    “Has HS1 made a significant dent in the number of fast services through Bromley South or Sevenoaks?”
    I’m pretty sure they have taken the shoes off the Eurostars

98. @Timbeau – and the fast services from beyond Ashford have been replaced by not-as-fast services from Tunbridge Wells.

99. Point taken – the quality/speed of the services on the fast lines may have reduced – but the number?

100. Alan Griffiths

     Yes, corporate amnesia. plus lack of experienced people involved in the last big project.

101. @timbeau. It’s the same. But the point is they originate from different places, closer to London, where the capacity is most required. Which is what could well happen on the ECML.

102. “But the point is they originate from different places, closer to London, where the capacity is most required. Which is what could well happen on the ECML.”
     So paradoxically HS2 might not do much for Chesterfield and Wakefield, which it will whizz past without stopping (so residents will have a choice between slower direct trains, or changing at Sheffield or Toton to HS2) but it would be a boon for Granthamites and Retfordians. We might even get Tuxford station re-opened!

103. @SFD

     closer to London, where the capacity is most required.

     Things are different south of the river. They always are.

     Whereas a vast majority of the London capacity south of the river is taken by National Rail trains, much of the capacity from north of the river is taken up by tubes, and they are of course much more frequent. I would contend that the biggest challenge for the ECML is how to increase capacity to deal with untapped medium-distance markets such as Lincoln, Scunthorpe, etc. I would not expect that any paths released by HS2 to be given to commuter services, with a resultant reduction in the traffic north of Peterborough.

104. @Ian S
     “deal with untapped medium-distance markets such as ………”

     (channelling Captain Mainwaring) “Now I think we’re drifting into the realms of fantasy, Sergeant” By definition, there can be nothing east of the East Coast?

     An advert from the ICEC shadow franchise, in about 1994.
     http://www.davewoodz.com/portfolio/aboveTheLine/easternrailway.jpg

105. This speculation as to what the capacity released by HS2 will be used for is all very well, but nothing has been said and the present criteria for specifying franchises is obscure to put it mildly. We simply can’t use words like “surely”, “expect”, and so on. if it goes on commercial criteria – but no one knows whether it will – then the capacity would be used to convey the longest possible distance punters; if it goes on cost benefit/ GVA or similar, then it may – MAY – go to London commuter traffic. If it goes on accessibility then there’s a long queue of medium-sized settlements close to ECML which lack through services to the capital, but many (most?) of them are failing and as has been repeatedly demonstrated, faster travel from a dud town to somewhere better merely carries on sucking the commercial lifeblood out of them. Like Aunts Dorcas and Porcas, their fate is bacon (I mean dormitory settlements at best) . To the best of my knowledge, DfT doesn’t have, let alone use a PTAL type software to evaluate accessibility.

106. Oh, and one more option for filling that spare capacity – I can hear the Adam Smith Institute and the CMA in a duet “Why not auction it off?” In which event, some smart money would be put on the freight operators..

107. Pop
     I take your points entirely.
     Probably “my bad” as they say.
     However, we now (as already moted) that there is good practice & on-tim & under-or-equal-to-budget methods working “out there” so why can some people/areas/sectors make it work & others are falling down in big smelly piles?

     Cap’n D
     So, why will “They” consistently deny any 3-or-Pi times factor relative to BR days? ( Surely they are not going to quote John Major ?? )

108. @Graham H
     I would expect a word like ‘Intershire’ to fill the word gaps/train slots on the ‘classic’ lines currently used by ‘Intercity’ – not that any marketing executive currently uses that easily understood word within Britain.

     The HS2 prospectus for post-HS2 WCML ‘classic’ services after HS2 Phase 1 says it all. I’ll leave you to judge whether this is based on a real assessment or is aspirational. http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/hs2/A_McNaughton_Presentation_11_02_15.pdf

     That could be more ‘Northampton Cobblers’ or, on ECML, ‘Lincoln Poachers’ – or more ‘Intershires’, or, goodness gracious, open access operators. What might DfT do about that?!

     What’s also possible in a commercial development world is a Southern Railway type of deal – “we’ll run a better service if you build the housing, we might even allow you to build a station at your risk”. Hinchley Wood didn’t cost SR, it profited from it… ‘Country Homes at London’s Door’ was the SR slogan and booklet, Metroland style.

     The same could apply anywhere within 1½ hours of London in post-HST land. Let’s look at the ECML. Timbeau’s Tuxford? Bawtry? Stamford & Bourne Parkway? – a station there could be as fast to Kings Cross as a Met Line from Chorley Wood, for example…

109. @JR – yes, could be any of those -with the greatest respect to McNaughton, the presentation is, at root, essentially about the process of timetable design made simple for parliamentarians.

110. @Graham H
     “faster travel from a dud town to somewhere better merely carries on sucking the commercial lifeblood out of them.”
     Maybe so, but places of touristic interest will attract business the other way. How many tourists does York get compared with, say, Salisbury, Lichfield, Lincoln or Wells: all about two hours from London, but:
     – one has several trains an hour, all InterCity stock,
     – one has suburban-layout emus
     – one has noisy dmus
     – one has just a single direct train a day (none on Sundays) , arriving after supper and leaving again before breakfast
     – one has no trains at all

111. @Jonathan Roberts: I think “Parkway” is a contraction of the following “F*** O** Great Big Carpark next to nowhere”….

     @timbeau: Lichfield a tourist destination? I’ve not heard of that other than it being a stop on (a) rail route(s), please do enlighten me! And “Wells”, this seems to be an overused phrase, so please enlighten me as to which…

112. @SHLR
     Parkway is either a rebranding of the Victorian ‘Road’ stations – nowhere near the stated town name but OK with horse & cart (21st Century = 4×4) – or “we’re sorry we can’t reopen the branch line to Wells Somerset/Wells Next the Sea/Malvern Wells/any other Wells, but since the majority of you out there own vehicles and it’ll only take you 20 minutes to get to our railhead, we think you’ll use our services” — and the punters do, in significant numbers. So unless you somehow espouse a vast re-investment in branch lines, please do think positively about Parkways, generally they are a fast way from A to C (via P).

     @timbeau
     Wells Somerset is only 20 minutes drive from Castle Cary at legal speeds. The biggest problems are traffic congestion if the Royal Bath & West is busy, and lack of parking spaces at FGW Castle Cary station – hopeless incapacity for years past.

113. @Southern Heights
     All historic cathedral cities – if you weren’t aware of that, I think that rather proves my point. You do realise that the Bishop of Bath & Wells was not just an invention of Blackadder’s scriptwriters?

114. Intershire…..what a great name! Whoever wins the Cross Country franchise next time it goes out to tender should definitely use that ;).

     @Southern Heights…..timbeau is referring to two historic cathedral cities: Lichfield in Staffordshire and Wells in Somerset. The former isn’t well known as a tourist destination; the latter is slightly better known (perhaps thanks to the ‘baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells’ 😉 ), but isn’t easy to get to, since it lost its train service thanks to a Dr R Beeching.

     I’m not sure though whether a good train service = more tourists necessarily. Norwich and Canterbury are beautiful cathedral cities which are an easy day train trip from London, but get nowhere near the number of visitors that York and Bath (and possibly even Salisbury, thanks to nearby Stonehenge) get.

115. (dammit, timbeau beat me to my Blackadder reference!)

116. @Jonathan Roberts
     “Wells Somerset is only 20 minutes drive from Castle Cary at legal speeds. ”
     Quite apart from the infrequent train service from Paddington to Castle Cary – no direct train between 1106 and 1506 – Wells being twenty minutes drive away is of little use if you are a London-based tourist. I can find no evidence of any bus service to Wells. Journey planner directs you via Bristol and the 376 bus

117. @timbeau

     Via Bristol would be a quicker routing for Wells, especially as both the train and bus are 2 per hour and there is even a through fare. I would be interested to know which Journey Planner you are using as I had to put a number of different sources together when I made a journey recently.

118. @timbeau – the list of near misses on EC isn’t about tourist destinations, Lincoln apart; the list comprises towns such as Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Middlesbrough, Billingham – hardly major tourist destinations -most of these are by any measure, declining towns whose traditional employment base has gone.

     BTW, you are right about Castle Cary and bus services (Brutonian used toserve the station a few decades ago…)My daughter-in-law’s parents farm near Wells and I can assure JR that they have no alternative but to go and fetch visitors from Castle Cary themselves.

     @JR -parkways aren’t an unmixed blessing: Intercity’s studies showed that opening a parkway could often have a generative effect on car mileage (and a corresponding reduction in rail fares revenue) as people drove further to take advantage of the easier parking. That’s why IC resisted opening more than a couple of them.

119. @James Bunting
     Google and Traveline both came up with that routing

120. @timbeau
     Perhaps there should be such a bus from Castle Cary!

     Re Castle Cary vs Templecombe, well, which service gives you an earlier start, a later finish, more frequent trains, a cheaper fare, and doesn’t start somewhere on the margins of Central London… So SWT win by zillions?

     Starting in Wells, heading to London, in a car, the constraints are as described above.

     Coming the other way, you’d be lucky even to find your bus at Bristol TM. The Wells bus stop is at the far bottom of the station ramp and round the corner (passing the former tramway crossover, still evident, along the way). I wish you Well(s).

     @GH
     Parkways deserve a different, considered comment, so not at nearly midnight.

121. Graham H

     You mention Middlesbrough and Billingham but neglect to mention Stockton – the birthplace of passenger rail !

122. Parkway stations are perfectly fine when you are starting your journey from them (and returning to them later) but utterly useless when doing the reverse. Because they presume the availability of (motorised) vehicular transport to access them and few of us carry such with us on the train then they are of little use to the daytripper.

123. @AlisonW….Actually, I once made a return trip to Bristol Parkway for a job interview nearby (albeit requiring a taxi journey from there to the venue). As I found out later that day from one of the other candidates, I saved myself a small fortune by avoiding a taxi journey from Temple Meads!

     Plus, if you’re going to visit friends/relatives with a car by train, it might be more convenient for them to collect/drop you off at a Parkway station instead of braving the traffic and restricted waiting areas of a city centre station.

124. @AlisonW – I was pleasantly surprised some years ago to find that the bus connection from Bristol Parkway to Thornbury worked well for me. Between this and Anonymously’s experience, I do wonder if Bristol Parkway happens to be more usefully located than many.

125. Re: Tourist destinations – I think we may be in danger of getting a little too train-centric in our analysis of popularity.
     York has promoted itself massively as a tourist destination – the Viking connection and the Yorvik centre forming a key part of their strategy. The others aren’t as visible – whether they’ve looked at their connectivity and decided it wouldn’t be a worthwhile investment or there are other reasons, I know not.
     Canterbury certainly isn’t short of visitors, either. A large proportion aren’t high-spenders though – at least when I made a tourism visit there. Or it could be that a small number of foreign school-age young people appears to be a much higher number – a “swarm”, perhaps.

126. JR
     Parkways also work if there is a dedicated local bus service to the nearby centre(s) of population.
     [ Or even dare I say from a n other thread ] a tram-route, as in the forthcoming extension in Nottingham?
     

127. @Chris C – my list wasn’t supposed to be exhaustive! (Stockton is a pleasant enough town these days, although its “hospitaility” business leaves something to be desired -last time I stayed there,the waiting staff were lightly repurposed ex-miners who thought the smart thing to say when placing a plate in front of diners was “Here it is”).

     @Alison W – despite serious efforts in the UK to make Parkway/Road stations as inaccessible by public transport as possible, the French LGV stations probably take the biscuit (not least because rural public transport in France vanished in the ’50s ) – Champagne-Ardennes-Bourgogne anyone?

128. Parkways- aren’t there three types?

     (1) In the middle of nowhere – a sort-of Castle Cary. Great for the rural catchment, but unlikely to have a decent passing bus service because the area as a whole doesn’t sustain that. So very dependent on car/taxi access for city to country journeys – but that will be true of any rural station not just parkways. Parkways should be better at hoovering in passengers to the railway, so increasing total rail market share even if the length of the rail element of some journeys is shortened. So a view is required on whether you want to maximise rail market share or just concentrate on a segment of the potential market.

     (2) Polycentric settlements – car access but also buses are likely to pass the station, and services could be stimulated. In the case of a notional Stamford &Bourne Parkway, there is a Delaine bus service linking those towns, and also a bus via The Deepings. A Parkway if promoting access also from cities to those places might help the bus operator to justify a higher frequency than the present 1-2 hourly intervals on the main route, and a longer operating day.

     (3) City fringes – helpful in speeding access to the railway from outer suburbs where the city centre station can be slow to reach. Cambridge and Bristol Temple Meads both come to mind. At Cambridge, Addenbrookes – how many thousand high-value jobs? – is a strong candidate for a new station on the city fringe, for local commuting as well as Parkway purposes. It is the total journey time which matters, not just the rail element. In the case of Bristol Parkway mentioned above, it has in practice become a Bristol North station as the city has expanded around the station. Arguably the station was a stimulus for the population and jobs growth.

     I note Graham H’s comment about railway aversion to reducing the income from some flows, but Parkways are about growing the total rail market. What we have in practice is inconsistent. Ebbsfleet does a ‘city fringe’ job. Watford Junction did for the WCML until its downgrading some years ago (and could do so again post-HS2), yet InterCity resisted an Iver Parkway stop on the M25 – though any future Heathrow Hub station would provide that functionality. NSE looked at a Brighton Parkway and decided against that, yet Southampton Airport Parkway is successful. On the ECML there isn’t anywhere very convenient on the London fringe, so Stevenage has become the default location, similar in distance from Central London as Luton Airport Parkway on the Midland route.

     Many existing town stations also act as Parkways – but may not have adequate parking capacity. Having a full car park by 8AM is not an incentive to use the railway for offpeak journeys from the surrounding catchment, which may be up to 30 minutes/15 miles in time/distance. Is the railway in the offpeak business – or not?

     As commented above, the ECML has the ability to offer other stopping options if/when the Intercities are routed via HS2. There will certainly be merit in reviewing that railway’s ability to support population and jobs growth at targeted locations along the corridor south of Doncaster. Much of that will of course be at existing settlements. However there is also (with or without quadrupling?) scope for a south of Peterborough stop at the expanding dormitory settlement near Yaxley, just as Arlesey was opened some years ago closer to Hitchin, while Welham Green was also a recent station on the inner service.

129. On the ECML, Peterborough already acts as a parkway for Stamford and Spalding – many people preferring to drive there rather than rely on connections. Likewise Newark for Lincoln. But, as Alison has pointed out, these are much better at extracting residents from the local economy to work in the Smoke, than to encourage visitors in the other direction.

     Back on topic, the upgrading of the Joint Line for more freight sadly did not include electrification, which Spalding has been asking for to allow extension of some TSGN services. Indeed, given electrification, there is no reason they could not be extended to Lincoln – many people would consider the twenty minute time penalty (because of the calls made south of Peterborough) a price worth paying for the reliability of a direct service, especially as a missed connection can easily cause a delay of up to an hour. Indeed, a TSGN service to Doncaster via the Joint Line might be worthwhile. Look at the London Midland services on the WCML – these have a loyal following amongst those with less money than time.

     @Mike P
     “York has promoted itself massively as a tourist destination The others aren’t as visible – whether they’ve looked at their connectivity and decided it wouldn’t be a worthwhile investment or there are other reasons, I know not.”
     Lincoln certainly promotes itself hard, but is hobbled by the dreadful train service – especially on Sundays. That a tourist market exists is evidenced by the specials run for the Christmas market and – on five Saturdays only – for this year’s Magna Carta Octicentenary: Lincoln and Salisbury hold the only two surviving originals outside the British Library.

130. @Jonathan Roberts – thank you for a helpful taxonomy, although I suspect that there is much blurring at the edges in such a densely populated country as England. Whether it is a Good Thing to maximise rail useage or not depends on your objectives; if you were BR, you wouldn’t be interested in maximising social benefits/reducing emissions and so on, you’d be concerned to maximise your take. If you were a transport planner, you might take a different view depending on what your paymaster wanted – not that we have anyone at a national level of authority doing that just now- which iswhy I don’t expect your prediction of “targetted” population growth in the east coast corridor – however sensible – will happen. Have you seen how ONS has distributed the housing targets to local authorities? (And what does ONS know about planning anyway?)

     I think you are wrong to expect Cartesian consistency in the selection/rejection of specific sites – local circumstances are the key.

     I do not share your optimism about parkway sites that rely on public transport to link them to the settlements they serve. For obvious reasons people will be arriving and departing at the parkway at hours outside the normal working day. Here in the countryside, buses after 18.00 are a great rarity(and those that do exist are pretty well depot runs “livened up” to earn a bit of subsidy, not to for aserious transport purpose. The classic examples of what I mean are park and ride operations on city fringes, many of which pack up in the early evening. Want a night out in town? Better go and fetch the car from the PNR and bring it into the city centre after work then…

131. Southampton Airport Parkway’s success is in part due to its co-location with an M27 junction allowing it to act as a de facto New Forest Parkway. Another Parkway with good road link is Tiverton, close to the North Devon Link road junction with the M5.

     Are these a fourth type of Parkway?

132. @PeterR
     I agree you could argue that some Parkways are ‘roadheads’, in some cases replacing the former railway junction function. Thus Tiverton Parkway and the North Devon Link Road replace the Taunton-Barnstaple railway. Port Talbot Parkway is a great roadhead for western South Wales valleys and even for West Wales via the M4. It is much faster than any direct train service or changing at Swansea.

     @Graham H
     Living as I do in a village with only a school bus service and the nearest regular bus three miles away, I’m very aware of the fragility of the country bus offering. (Mind you, Imber will be getting a service this weekend!) Often it would require a far-sighted and monied local authority – ours isn’t either of those – to up the bus offering in order to connect regularly with any train service at existing stations, let alone a new railhead.

     One lives in hope, and these days there is some slim recognition that a core railway and a feeder bus link may be useful. Cornwall has just secured permission from Central Government to have more powers over the local bus services, as part of a devolution deal – the railway will be the county public transport ‘spine’.

     Along the ECML, there will be population and jobs growth. It could be unplanned and unco-ordinated, as it generally is now, and unrelated to what could be added value from maximising the scope to locate homes and jobs in places with strategic transport capability.

     However, I would argue that it ought to be somebody’s job to demonstrate what the options are for the future ECML, if minus Intercities, to be used to greater public policy purpose, for the benefit of both the local/regional and (unavoidably) the London economies. There is time to assemble and make the case, to the many stakeholders along the route. If that wasn’t done, then it will indeed be happenstance.

133. @Jonathan Roberts……The local councils have been lobbying for a new station next to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (which Addenbrooke’s is in the middle of) for quite a while, but IIRC Network Rail says there is insufficient capacity for an extra station on the line here. I guess the only way of doing this would be an expensive quadrupling of the line from Cambridge station to Shelford Junction (at there is plenty of space alongside the line to do this). In contrast, Cambridge Science Park (aka Cambridge North Parkway!) will soon have a station, since there is plenty of capacity (only services to Ely/King’s Lynn, Norwich and Birmingham use the line here) for an extra stop. Mind you, it has only taken 25 years to happen…..

     This means Cambridge will soon have at least three ‘Parkway’ stations in relatively close proximity: Cambridge Science Park (on the northern urban fringe), Whittlesford Parkway (in the middle of nowhere; previously just plain old Whittlesford prior to 2007; I have no idea why it was renamed, since it doesn’t have a large car park, but perhaps it’s something to do with its proximity to the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus?) and Audley End (aka Saffron Walden Parkway). Pretty impressive for a city of Cambridge’s size!

     I would also suggest that Audley End is another type of Parkway station….an unofficial station used by the inhabitants of a nearby sizable settlement with poor or non-existent railway access. Examples might include Radley (aka Abingdon Parkway), Castle Cary (aka Wells Parkway, or Glastonbury Parkway for one week every year!), Newark North Gate (aka Lincoln Parkway), Northallerton (aka Ripon Parkway)…..you get the idea.

134. @ J Roberts – I agree with the views about bus links in rural areas often being in a parlous state. It is somewhat telling though that the big bus groups often run large rail franchises in areas where they also run buses. There’s little or no attempt to even jointly market the two never mind provide some bus links to a main railhead. First Group is a case in point – they’ve taken over a decent slice of the old Western Greyhound bus network in Cornwall and there could be a good market for connected rail and bus travel but where’s the effort to promote them side by side. There’s very little info about buses on the FGW site (mostly about Bristol and Bath) and no great recognition of trains on the First Cornwall Bus site. There is a combined bus and rail ticket for Cornwall but you have to dig around to find it. Lots of nice words about “green travel” but not much practicality unfortunately. I know bus feeders have been trialled in the past but have often failed because they end up being neither one thing or another. They’re not wonderful as feeder buses because no one knows about them and they’re often designed not to provide a local service either. The better option is to get a sensible blend of both but they’re very rare. I don’t know why we’re so hopeless in doing this in this country when some European countries are notably very good.

135. @timbeau….Did the freight upgrade replace the manned level crossings with automatic ones north of Spalding? AIUI from Wikipedia, it is these that prevent a better service being run between Peterborough and Lincoln, due to the staffing costs of manning them 24/7.

     TSGN to Spalding/Lincoln/Doncaster??? I know you’re trying to keep this on topic and relevant to London……but come on, seriously? Your best bet is for either Virgin East Coast (or perhaps East Midlands Trains or even an open-access operator) to do what you’ve suggested, since TSGN is plenty big enough as it is.

     I have no idea how much cheaper London Midland services are compared to Virgin…..but surely their longer distance services are to facilitate local/medium-distance journeys, not Intercity ones? No one in their right mind would travel from Crewe to London by LM instead of Virgin out of choice, surely :S.

136. @JR = “I would argue that it ought to be somebody’s job to demonstrate what the options are for the future ECML,” – so would I, so would I (not exactly trampled to death in the rush to fillthegap,however.)

     @WW -here in Stagecoachland ,SWT and Stagecoach buses run parallel train and bus services,with zero coordination of fares, times or information. One ofthe mainproblems withBus+ schemes (apart from their secrecy) is that they havebeen tied into franchises,but only as an optional extra. Change the franchisee and the bus may disappear.

137. @anonymously
     “No one in their right mind would travel from Crewe to London by LM instead of Virgin out of choice, surely ”

     Why then do LM offer advance fares? £12 to Crewe on the 0846 tomorrow, at a time when the cheapest Virgin fare is £70 – it may take an hour longer, but to save £58 many people would think that is time well spent. (and a 350 is a nicer environment than a 390 too!)

     Wikipedia’s statement that “There are no services between Sleaford and Spalding after around 17:00 Monday to Saturday” is still true, although the reason “as the signal boxes are closed” is out of date as Lincoln Signalling Control Centre now controls the whole line.

     “Did the freight upgrade replace the manned level crossings with automatic ones north of Spalding? ”

     https://paulbigland.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/the-gnge-joint-line-renaissance/
     All level crossings replaced with remotely monitored crossings controlled from Lincoln.

     “TSGN to Spalding/Lincoln??? I know you’re trying to keep this on topic and relevant to London……but come on, seriously?”
     Why not? – there are several ex-Network South East precedents taking over former regional railways services:

     GN’s Cambridge service has been extended to Kings Lynn,
     LM’s Northampton service extended to Crewe.
     Chiltern’s Banbury service extended to Leamington and indeed Kidderminster.
     Thames Trains (now FGW’s) Oxford service extended to Worcester.
     SWT’s Salisbury service includes some extended to Bristol, and soon to Frome and Castle Cary as well.

138. @ Timbeau

     There is also a Bishop of Sodor and Man. There are railways on the Isle of Man……..
     Will we get Ian the IEP?

139. @timbeau – your point about why people use LM for long-distance travel nicely illustrates mine about probable classic operator response to HS2.

140. Anonymously@1314

     Looking at the National Rail Planner just now has offered me the following:

     Euston/Crewe 1340/1510 (90 min) Virgin Trains £73.20 Off-Peak Single
     Euston/Crewe 1343/1607 (144 mins) Virgin Trains £73.20 Off-Peak Single
     Euston/Crewe 1346/1624 (158 mins) London Midland £28.00 Off-Peak Single

     If I look at the same trains for a week’s time it quotes Advance fares of £29.00/£65.00/£10.00 respectively. For many people the difference in fare is well in excess of the time cost of their journey. A bonus for almost everybody on London Midland is a large window to be able to look out of.

141. @Anonymously: you would be surprised what kinds of loadings the LM London-Crewe service has. Not just because it serves all those towns/cities that Virgin forgot (Tamworth, Lichfield, Nuneaton, Rugeley), but also because the journey time to price ratio is very decent for places like Stoke-on-Trent or Crewe. Especially if you consider walk-up fares:

     – Crewe: 1h30, £73.20 Virgin; 2h38 £28 LM
     – Stoke: 1h28, £66.40 Virgin; 2h14, £28 LM

142. straphan & others
     A similar tale can be told regarding journey times & fares between London & Brum, via “Virgin” & Chiltern respectively, can it not?

143. @ Anonymously – the slower London Midland longer distance services most certainly are well used. I’ve used them a few times – even to Stoke and Stafford – and that was before they were speeded up. Plenty of cost conscious travellers and I happened to coincide with the PM peak on a journey from Stafford – I was very lucky to get a seat. The train was well loaded all the way to London. I’ve also taken part in the “Euston platform stampede” for a LM Crewe service – again lots of people using them. Nice and fast as Virgin are they are also unaffordable if you cannot commit to an advance fare well before the date of travel. Earning a massive salary will also help you to afford Virgin standard train fares.

     I happen to think there is definitely a place for good inter regional trains which are not priced as Inter City services. The UK isn’t too bad at those sorts of services but we could be very much better than we are. In some respects the future Thameslink service pattern is creating exactly that concept within the South East and we may end up with some rather unforeseen results in terms of journey patterns in a few years time. We may even see the same with Crossrail although its reach is somewhat more limited. People do trade convenience and price against speed and high fares – why else do coach services still survive?

144. @Jonathan Roberts, 19 August 2015 at 09:43
     ” . . . in the middle of nowhere – a sort-of Castle Cary. Great for the rural catchment, but unlikely to have a decent passing bus service because the area as a whole doesn’t sustain that.”

     Castle Cary is a funny case because it is a traditional railway junction that has become a parkway rather than a modern site best placed for the road network, or at least the main roads where commercial local bus services are likely to run. There is an hourly daytime service between Wells and Glastonbury and Yeovil, the 377:
     http://www.firstgroup.com/uploads/maps/375_376_377_29march.pdf
     That crosses the Great Western route clearly, but at Somerton where there is no rail station!

145. @WW:

     There is no place for ‘budget’ interregional services anywhere in Europe, despite there being a clear demand for them.

     – France: The Trains du Equilibre d’Territoire have slowly been strangled and killed off by SNCF who see them as either a distraction or competition for TGV services. A recent report counted the subsidy towards these trains as being 400m EUR per year!
     – Belgium: SNCB/NMBS operated Interregio services till 2014 until these were withdrawn and converted either into local or intercity trains. The reason was a lack of capacity to accommodate them.
     – Germany: Interregio trains ran until 2003 and – from what I can remember – were always better patronised than intercity trains running on the same routes. Sadly, Deutsche Bahn decided to increase yields from them by converting most of them into intercity trains, thereby watering down their IC brand. As a result long-distance journey numbers in Germany have been rather stagnant, and have taken a dip due to the recent deregulation of the long-distance bus market.
     – Poland: Interregio trains (operated by the regional operator) ceased to operate this year as the infrastructure manager (owned by the same group as the intercity operator) decided there is no capacity to fit them in. The moment the regional operator announced the cancellation of interregio services, the intercity operator pledged to run its own trains as a replacement (but with higher fares, of course).

     Only in Great Britain do we still have ‘proper’ interregio operations – such as London Midland, Chiltern Railways or Transpennine Express. Long may they prosper.

146. Well, for Advance fares the price differential isn’t all that big (£29 vs £10 according to James Bunting above). I also suspect that season tickets for LM must be significantly cheaper than for Virgin, explaining why they are so well used in the peak.

     I accept though for last minute / same-day travel, Virgin is very pricey (possibly they see their competition as more with domestic airlines than with other TOCs?). I too will sometimes use a slower and/or cheaper service if it is direct or involves fewer changes (especially cross London interchanges). Hence to go to Liverpool from Cambridge, I will travel by the East Midlands service after changing at Ely, even though going via London is quicker. Interestingly, outside of the peaks, I have noticed there are far fewer passengers boarding the Liverpool Street trains at Cambridge when compared to the packed KX trains, despite being cheaper, and not that much slower (80 mins on the fastest LS service as compared to 50 mins on the non-stop KX services).

     I guess all I’m saying is that if money isn’t a constraint (which I appreciate is not the case for the majority of people), then when given the choice, one would almost certainly opt to use the fastest, most direct service possible between A and B.

     Re. 350 vs 380 comfort…..other than the larger windows, my experience is that the Desiros are not that much less cramped than the Pendolinos, IMHO. At least on those one can reserve seats in advance and hopefully get a table seat, which I’m unsure is possible on the LM services.

147. @WW/straphan….Interesting. Of course, there were far more ‘intershire’ (sorry, couldn’t resist!) services before the major closures in the 50s-70s. Cambridge to Doncaster via Lincoln is a good example, before the March – Spalding line was shut. Now to travel to Lincoln, one has to change at Peterborough, and time it carefully in order not to miss one of the handful of trains from there to Lincoln!

148. @timbeau…..actually, the Cambridge – King’s Lynn trains were part of NSE from the start. Had they been part of RR (like the Cambridge – Ipswich trains), then I strongly suspect we would today still have a diesel shuttle to Cambridge instead of electric trains to London!

149. @Anonymously
     “for Advance fares the price differential isn’t all that big (£29 vs £10 according to James Bunting above)”

     That’s a 190% markup for Virgin, actually a bigger markup in percentage terms than on the walkup fares quoted by Straphan (£73.20 Virgin; £28 LM, a Virgin markup of – only – 161%) And even £19/hr is 2.4 times the official “living wage” rate.

     And some LM advance fares are as low as £9

150. @Anonymously
     “Cambridge – King’s Lynn trains were part of NSE from the start. ”
     Technically true, as London & South East Sector was only renamed NSE in 1992, but it was part of Regional Railways from sectorisation in 1982 until transferred to L&SE in 1987.

151. @Anonymously
     Yes I understand that 3 or 4-tracking might be required past Addenbrookes, to give operational capacity for the GTR, WA and XC services, and ideally also for trains from north of Cambridge to access the Biomedical Campus and reverse there if they aren’t running on towards Stansted or London. You can then serve many thousands of biomedical staff, however, and even some patients and visitors…

     This would be a significant project, if the railway wants to respond positively to the future scale of Anglia commuting and getting-around requirements, rather than just doing for its own convenience what it’s always done – which is a real risk. I would expect any eventual Wisbech-Cambridge service (which the area LEP is also supporting as an initiative) also to require access…

     I have compiled a little graph which I shall ask a kind moderator to add to the dialogue. Basically it shows Cambridge station usage volumes from 1997/98 to 2013/14, and comparable data for stations in a local commuting catchment as far as Ely/Newmarket/Audley End/Royston. Those stations facing towards London will also be influenced by London commuting effects. The surprise though is Ely, behaving as a Cambridge clone in travel growth rates. Others, including the bulk of stations nearer to Cambridge, are clearly failing to respond at the same pace to the changes in travel demand being experienced at the city station itself. Arguably, this is because the railway is increasingly distant from where the action is, in demand, jobs location and growth.

     It will be fascinating to see if demand can take off with a Science Park and (hopefully) an Addenbrookes station in due course, so creating stronger contra-flow usage for what are at best moderately used trains from the London direction, and better to-Cambridge use from the Fens. (There are exceptions already – one train that I know is well loaded is the Stansted-Birmingham train at about 0740 at Audley End, where often 60-80 schoolchildren – mostly from Audley End judging by the connecting buses – board to get to Cambridge schools).

     @Mark Townend
     Castle Cary I’m told was taken up officially following a MSc student thesis in the 1970s that was submitted to Imperial College’s transport studies section! It was presumably cheaper and with less impact to train services, than re-opening Somerton (and/or Langport) which is still a logical opportunity. But then, Somerset is not known as a county with any strong support for its rail services, unlike its neighbour Devon.

152. @timbeau…..Actually, NSE branding was launched in 1986 (see Wikipedia), which tallies up with my memory of seeing NSE liveried stations and trains on the Orpington line around 1988/89. Didn’t know King’s Lynn trains were part of RR before 1987…..I suppose their transfer had something to do with electric trains reaching Cambridge around this time?

153. @Jonathan Roberts…..Yes, I’m not surprised by that. Cambridge is now a major destination for work, study and leisure in its own right, and few can afford to live in the city itself (property prices around here, both to buy and to let, are eye-wateringly high!).

     I would love to say more, but I sense the moderators’ axe is close at hand, so I’ll shut up for now……

154. My mistake – 1992 was the date of electrification. of the Fen Line.

155. @ Anonymously

     Whittlesford Parkway does actually have a large car park alongside the A505 and is generally pretty full weekdays with users from as far afield as Haverhill, not to mention the nearer towns/villages of Sawston and Linton. As well as the car park there is extensive on street parking in Royston Road which is usually fully taken by 7:00 a.m., leaving the car park for later arrivers. So it appears that the commuters of Cambridgeshire would prefer to park for free and walk a quarter of a mile to the station, rather than pay and park alongside.

156. @Duxford….But Audley End station car park is much larger (664 vs 383 spaces, according to the AGA website), and also attracts commuters from those places that you mention. Which I guess goes to show the inconsistency of what is / isn’t considered a Parkway station, with at best only a tenuous relationship to the station’s actual name.

157. straphan
     What about “RE” services on DB then?
     I used one to get from Köln to Rheine & back earlier this year – definitely cheaper.

     Anonymously
     The LM units have seats with padding/depth in them – really surprised me about 9 months back …
     

158. @Anonymously
     Audley End should have been renamed Saffron Walden (parkway) as its main source of passengers comes from Saffron Walden which lost its station in the mid-sixties. Whereas Whittlesford Parkway (which until parish boundary changes made a couple of years ago was actually in Duxford) is a true parkway drawing in commuters from a wide range of villages/small towns. As I mentioned above, the size of the car park is probably matched by the cars parked in Royston Road and environs much to the chagrin of the residents there.

159. @Greg Tingey: RE services in Germany tend not to extend beyond 150km or so and tend to either serve the slightly longer-distance commuter flows, or run only till the next ‘big town’ along the line, and usually within one state. Cologne to Rheine is probably a longer example of RE services.

     IR services would run the length & breadth of the country, but stop more frequently than IC trains. They would also provide direct connections that the IC network did not. As an example: to get from Berlin to Bremen with IC trains one would normally have to change at Hannover. IR trains ran directly from east of Berlin (Cottbus I think…) every two hours or so.

     In the UK you could argue there are a lot of services that are similar to Interregio, although they are not seen as such. TPE – to me – is very much an Interregio service, as it stops at places like Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Stalybridge, Thirsk, Northallerton or Darlington. Yet it is classified as ‘Intercity’. On the other hand, you have services like Liverpool – Norwich or Nottingham – Cardiff, which are longer than anything run on TPE, yet are classified as ‘regional’ services.

160. @ Duxford,

     Unless station car parks become “free”, there will always be those who park half a mile away and walk. It is the only exercise some commuters get. It happens all over the country, not just Essex/Cambridgeshire. Many think they given enough for their rail tickets and are not prepared to pay their local train operator any more.

161. Straphan
     “On the other hand, you have services like Liverpool – Norwich or Nottingham – Cardiff, which are longer than anything run on TPE, yet are classified as ‘regional’ services.”

     Although originally part of the Central Trains franchise, both of those are now run by the Cross Country franchise, which was part of the Inter City sector.

162. @timbeau: Liverpool – Norwich is operated by East Midlands Trains. And neither service is classified as a long-distance service in most rail industry systems.

163. Both were part of Central’s “City Link” long distance network (formerly part of Regional’s Alphaline, originally coined to market the services operated by 158s) along with Birmingham – Liverpool and Birmingham- Stansted. Two of the four routes were transferred to XC, the Birmingham Liverpool one going to London Midland but, as you were right to correct me, it was the Stansted service which went to XC – Norwich- Liverpool service went to EM.
     In BR days, the Transpennine route was also part of Regional Railways, not Inter City, and was initially part of the Northern Franchise.

     I don’t know what you mean by “And neither service is classified as a long-distance service in most rail industry systems.”
     “Regional” and “long distance” are not mutually exclusive terms – nor, except in the old “Regional Railways”, do either of them have a specific meaning. (Liverpool – Norwich is a longer distance than that from either Liverpool or Norwich to London!)

164. Bearing in mind too that Inter-City (as originally punctuated) was coined as a marketing term and not a term of art – although it may since have become that.

     A caption at the end of the 1967 British Transport Films production “Speedrail to the South” refers to the trains from Waterloo to Bournemouth as part of the Inter-City services.

165. Advertisement from 1982
     http://www.projectmapping.co.uk/Reviews/historical_train_rail_maps.html

     Not only Bournemouth, but Dover, Brighton, Grimsby and Barrow are on.

166. @Ronnie MB/timbeau – yes,it’s important to understand that terms such as InterCity started life merely as marketing terms,with no organisational or commercial structure behind them. Once Intercity had some administrative substance, it was defined simply as those routes which were likely to make a profit (as defined in the ’80s); so the obvious radial routes were clearly IC, XC a marginal case, and what is now TPE just fell the wrong side. Norwich was included but Salisbury not. The policy objective was to carve out of the mass of passenger services that element that was profitable. Hence the transfer of airport links also.

     What was unfortunate was that the boundary was arbitrary. Some Regional Railways services (don’t get fazed on the name – it was simply an attempt to avoid the hopelessness of OPS) clearly had many of the characteristics of IC services albeit with lower volumes; in particular, they seemed to have the same fares elasticities,which would have permitted pricing them up in a way that “real” OPS services such as Barrow to Carlisle couldn’t have been,so moving them out of subsidy. The Alphaline services in effect drew that distinction.

     Somewhere on file is the GH proposal to dispose of the Board’s services thus:

     – IC as emerged
     – Alphaline priced up and marketed as (?REX to use a Swiss term) but out of subsidy
     – LSE out of subsidy after 10 years of pricing (as would have happened were it not for privatisation)
     – PTEs to take on their own areas in full
     – Scotland and Wales ditto
     – That left a rump of ex-OPS services most of which could be handed to the relevant counties (perhaps with a rural equivalent of MRG)
     – at the bottom of the heap were a handful of services which straddled several counties and which would have been quite difficult to park; there were not many of these.

     The real difficulty was finding a suitable formula for the distribution of “MRG”. Had we cracked this, I’m sure that Ridley would have leapt at it: he was very very keen to hand over services to the PTEs if it meant that BR disappeared.

167. If I may elbow in on Mike’s role, a glossary for Graham’s recent message might comprise:
     IC: Inter City (however hyphenated and cased)
     XC: Cross Country
     Alphaline: “a 1990s brand used by British Rail to differentiate certain provincial express trains with enhanced passenger accommodation from general regional and middle-distance services operated by older rolling stock”
     OPS: Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg, or possibly Other Passenger Services
     LSE: London and South-East
     PTE Passenger Transport Executive
     GH: Graham H
     MRG: YGIAGAM

168. I was wondering what OPS stood for!

169. I thought the “P” in OPS was “Provincial”

     MRG – Metropolitan Regional government?

170. MRG = Metropolitan Railway Grant (see HC Deb 18 July 1995 vol 263 cc1493-513 at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1995/jul/18/metropolitan-railway-grant)

171. @Graham H….Wow, what a fascinating insight into the mechanics of how rail privatisation was proposed to be carried out. I deeply regret you were unable to persuade your colleagues and/or political masters as to the merits of your proposals. If rail privatisation was inevitable, I would have much preferred for each BR business sector to be privatised as separate entities, owning their own assets, instead of the mess and problems we subsequently got. From what you’ve said though, the non-Alphaline RR services would probably need to remain in the public sector indefinitely since I doubt they could ever be made profitable enough to exist on their own…..but wouldn’t this have been cheaper for the taxpayer in the long run than what we’ve got now? I very much doubt the Freight, IC (with Alphaline merged into it) and NSE businesses would have required any taxpayer subsidy by now.

     @Malcolm….YGIAGAM???

172. @Graham H

     the list comprises towns such as Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Middlesbrough, Billingham – hardly major tourist destinations -most of these are by any measure, declining towns whose traditional employment base has gone.

     faster travel from a dud town to somewhere better merely carries on sucking the commercial lifeblood out of them

     That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that people who are from an area and work in London can move back if there is a decent train service, putting money into the local economy, not the reverse. The move to a service-led economy forced many people away from small industrial towns who would rather never have left.

173. @ – Anonymously – 20 August 2015 at 23:22

     @Malcolm….YGIAGAM???

     Your Guess Is As Good As Mine ???

174. I remember hearing,at the time,”Withered Arm” conspiratorialists muttering darkly as to why Salisbury/Exeter was not included in the Inter City brand….or That Map….

175. @Anonymously – that particular piece of work, as described, was not a plan to reduce the cost of running the railway to the public purse as such,but more an attempt to reduce the size of the PSO grant. As you say, nothing could, or can, be done to eliminate the need for subsidy for much of the regional network, but we were keen that the bill for keeping it going fell as far as possible on those who clamoured loudest to spend DTp money – noteably the Scots and the Welsh – Dornoch bridge tcha…

     Nevertheless, the Board wold have come out of grant by the mid-90s had not privatisation supervened: IC was already cash positive, and our five year plan for NSE would have seen it out of grant by about 1997, freight and parcels were already strongly cash positive, and those four businesses between them would have thrown off more than enough cash to keep RR going. Note,however, that getting out of subsidy is not the same thing as being profitable: investment still requires substantial borrowing, as the history of Railtrack and NR shows. There is no such thing as a profitable network on its present scale.

     The form of privatisation finally adopted was designed to satisfy a number of conflicting interests. On the one hand, there was a wish to maximise cash from sales, on another hand, there was a cry for competition on a third hand, there was a wish to reduce and refocus the components of the industry that would require subsidy (a transparency argument), and there was also a wish to get rid ofBR (the Colin Powell argument, passim).That’s four hands -mmm now which Indian goddess has four hands?

176. straphan
     The RE I caught terminated at Rheine at the N end, but went through Köln to eleswhere, actually.

     [I think this is a far as we can go with this which is getting well off the discussion that led here which itself seemed to be veering off from the main thread. PoP]

     Hmm, “cross-country”/inter-regional/whatever.
     Of course the Livepool- Norwich or Liverpool-Stansted services are themselevs ghosts of a famous cross country one from the 1920’s.
     The Liverpool-Harwich boat train, usually hauled by a pair of “Sandringhams” ….
     Towards the end, it was hauled byan EE type 3 “growler” – somewhere, I even have a photo of the westbound one passing through Guide Bridge & passing EM1 Bo-Bo’s.
     Long ago days.

     [And let’s not go too far down the nostalgia route either. PoP]

177. @Graham H…..Which begs the question, if BR was not going to require subsidy by the mid-90s, why privatise at all? As you mention, the only further call on the public purse would have been for investment projects (borrowing for which is far cheaper for the public than for the private sector), and I would argue with a very good chance of seeing a return on your investment for the economy and taxpayer.

     Now excuse me whilst I go and bang my head on the nearest wall……

178. @anonymously
     “Which begs the question, if BR was not going to require subsidy by the mid-90s, why privatise at all?”
     Government policy at the time was to sell off anything that might be profitable. After all, isn’t that what Big Business is for?
     (the posters claiming that 97% of fare revenue goes back into the railways – what I want to know is where the other 3% is going)

179. Anonymously,

     I hesitate to venture more down the political route but a three points:

     – The fact that privatisation was largely ideological can be seen from the first privatisation of all. This was British Telecom. Throughout the privatisation debate the argument was that British Telecom could borrow from the free market for its necessary investment plans and not be hampered by government restrictions. After privatisation BT, as it then became, found that it could finance its development cost wholly out of existing profits thus largely negating the great supposed reason why that privatisation had taken place.

     – Whatever BR may have thought about the future, and I am pleasantly surprised by Graham H’s comments, the general government view was that railways were in decline and they wanted the private sector to handle this “managed decline” – which I think the government of the day regarded as inevitable. A lot of the early ‘problems’ started occurring because the process of privatisation, with its many procedures for all sorts of eventualities, did not really adequately consider the possibility that there might be a revival.

     – Remember that, I believe, the Underground generally makes an operating profit. Despite that it needs enormous outside investment. It would not surprise me if Crossrail is expected to make an operating profit. Some TOCs make a profit in the highly artificial market they are in and others require subsidy but TOCs don’t pay for long term infrastructure improvements (Chiltern on its long franchise being an exception). So you still have the issue of whether capital enhancements should be in the public or private sector. Railtrack and Network Rail have together shown that there is no simple answer. Both can do well and both can do badly.

180. I don’t think that BR privatisation was particularly ideological, since both Thatcher and Ridely (according to wikipedia) were against it.

     There had been very heavy government expenditure prior to the 1992 election, partly to counterract the early 1990s recession, partly in anticipation of the election. Government finances were in a poor state and the forecasts at the time were even worse than the eventual outturn. Moreover, replacing the poll tax could have been costly for central government. In this context, BR privatisation was largely driven by a need for cash.

     This explains the priorities of Graham H’s hands in his explanation. It also explains the form that privatisation took and why other possible structures, including Graham’s, were rejected.

     Incidentally, there is an article on rail privatisation /renationalisation in the FT by John Kay (he’s not my bête noire, really – a lot of his stuff is good) (link below – registration required) and a leader. Professor Kay’s article is full of misapprehansions and would ideally be responded to by Graham H. If not, and I find the time, I will.

     http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d192b1b4-458b-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22.html#axzz3jS3Q3I8f

181. since both Thatcher and Ridley (according to wikipedia) were against it

     But I don’t think they were ideologically against it, just they recognised the practical problems and the fact that it would almost certainly be a massive vote loser. It is always said that one of the reasons John Major went for it was to make his mark and establish his position by doing something even Mrs T was unwilling or unable to do.

     I knew I was right to be nervous, digressing onto this.

182. @ PoP – here are some numbers from the 2014/15 TfL business plan for your 3rd point.

     LU £m
     2014/15 – 2413 (R) 211 (T) 2078 (O) B = 546 of which 254 is spent on smaller projects
     2020/21 – 3371 (R) 195 (T) 2290 (O) B = 1276 of which 47 is spent on smaller projects

     TfL Rail (includes Crossrail) £m
     2014/15 – 326 (R) 14 (T) 405 (O) B = -65
     2020/21 – 1336 (R) 51 (T) 1019 (O) B = 368

     R = Revenue
     T = Third party revenue
     O = Operating expenditure
     B = (R+T) – O

     I have not included the capital investment spending lines above as your general point is correct. There is insufficient surplus generated to cover all capital spending. One exception does happen post Crossrail which is that in 2020/21 London Rail’s capital investment is £142m meaning an overall surplus of £226m. I believe Crossrail has to earn a surplus to help pay down some of the project funding. Crossrail’s contribution to the London Rail numbers is not shown separately but you can rest assured that it makes a huge contribution to revenue because the totals soar after 2019.

     One other thing is that there is a massive upswing in the contribution from LU’s revenue towards capital investment. There’s an approximate £600m increase in surplus that is directed towards funding investment needs. The latter remain broadly stable throughout so it’s all about pushing up revenue and stripping out large amounts of operating expenditure. Opex numbers do increase in the budget but not with inflation so this implies an underlying reduction of base cost. This may explain the unions’ concerns which are causing the current round of strikes. You don’t need to look very far to see what may be coming in the near future in terms of the operational side of LU.

     There is an obvious note of caution to make – these are all forecasts and many things may change between the point at which those forecasts were adopted and when services open to the public. We have the Overground concession being relet, a spending review to come, a Mayoral election and who knows what will happen to the economy.

183. @PoP….Forgive me for asking this, but what exactly did Railtrack do that went well? ? I can’t think of a single thing!

     @answer=42/Graham H….So they had such poor faith in the economy recovering (as it did post ERM exit in 1992) or that railway traffic might start to increase again (of which there were plenty of early signs in IC and NSE from the late 80s onwards) that they felt it better just to flog off the whole thing for as much as possible with very little regard for the future? ?

184. Anonymously,

     Sorry I should have been clearer. I meant both the public and private sector can do well but equally both can do badly and intended reference to Railtrack and Network Rail to show that both the public and the private sector doing the same thing can mess it up. Although generally I am impressed with Network Rail when speaking to project managers and others involved with individual projects it is clear that at the top there is, or was, a lot to be desired.

     Actually Railtrack did a lot of things well, just none of them were railway related.

185. @anonymously
     Well, as you say, there was clear evidence in the late 1980s that rail traffic was increasing. The increase in rail use was wiped out by the early 1990s recession, then by the transition to privatisation.

     Although the evidence for a turning point was there for all to see, I would not say that that it was strong enough to convince those who wanted to believe in the decline of the railways that this was no longer the case.

     @PoP, take your point, although it might be an ex post justification. I’ll leave it there, as such a discussion would need the historian’s touch.

186. It always looked to me that the then government selected the privatisation model which required the maximum fragmentation of assets and systems, thereby making it practically impossible for an incoming government to renationalise and reintegrate swiftly. This was accompanied by an exodus of the people who actually understood the railway and had the “soft” knowledge of assets, obligations and procedures which don’t appear to have been documented anywhere. Or maybe the new guys could’t allocate any resources to reading the necessary documentation. If in doubt, just get rid of it.

     It also strangled the indigenous rolling stock industry.

187. answer=42, the FT article you linked to earlier is also freely available on John Kay’s own website.

188. @answer+42 – Not being a subscriber to the E-FT, I am unable to read Kay’s article, alas. I’ll leave you to do the biz! (Since noticed JA’s post and will now read).

     Not sure whether further comment on privatisation will be classed as thread drift, but on the offchance that it won’t be, here are some points in relation to those just raised.

     – The work we did in the late eighties was not intended as a prelude to privatisation; if anything it was an alternative designed to reduce the railways expenditure profile and hence lower its political temperature (and to turn up the temperature on the Scots to Gas mark 5, amongst other things).

     – rail privatisation had been to cabinet at least twice in the ‘eighties and each time, Mrs T had rejected it. Her words on the second occasion were “There are two privatisations I do not wish to see brought forward: one is the Post Office and the other the railways.” She foresaw both as being in the politically too difficult basket. Mrs T was much more of a pragmatist than many give her credit for. Ridley was a loyal supporter and tended to keep his ideological views (which were actually somewhat to the right of the Adam Smith Institute) to quiet asides to civil servants in the margins of something else. I seem to recall that the prime mover behind the two ’80s attempts was Keith Joseph.
     – Major certainly wanted to make his mark by pushing privatisation but lack the intellectual and political clout to control what he unleashed (his preference was to bring back the Big Four – alas, BR, in a colossal misjudgement, persuaded the Treasury and the Department that because freight flows were so important and crossed so many regional boundaries that the “regional option” wouldn’t work).
     – the late eighties growth was seen as blip (despite the disjunction between that and government economic policy), partly because it was difficult to explain at the time. The factors affecting growth in volume became much better known during my time at NSE but before about 1989, the relevant research was badly out of date.
     – I have a suspicion that had growth not been on the agenda, privatisation might well not have happened – difficult to sell a dead dog. The work I did at NSE, which involved producing the first ever strategic plan for coping with growth, presented Ministers (as we intended) with some uncomfortable choices: they had to choose or trade off between quality, price and investment; you could constrain any two, but not all three. (BR2 and John Welsby persuaded me – as a gimmick – to reduce the key choices to a matrix on a credit card sized piece of cardboard that we issued to all board members to remind them, too, that they had choices to make when discussing Board strategy). As with the water industry’s investment requirements, the government response was to kick the investment problem into the long privatised grass instead. A fat lot of good it did them.

     – once the form of privatisation was settled, the cash hounds at the Treasury were keen to identify and flog off any thing that might raise a bit of cash – hence some real barrel scraping to find and split out the most trivial of things that might be saleable- one unfavourite, because it didn’t work despite attracting a certain amount of management time, was the photography unit, another was the sleeper-creosoting works (nobody at DfT noticed that creosote was fast becoming a no-no substance…)

     @Nameless – just so. the redundancy terms were good enough to ensure that the most experienced staff walked. (Many of them are spending their retirement happily advising and operating certain preserved railways; others left the country and found less controversial train sets to run….)

189. Have now read the Kay article – it isn’t all wrong, but for the most part it simply repeats bar room tropes. Not only was there not a continuous decline in passenger numbers (as noted above) but the actual increases, although substantial have not been as much as he appears to think. This because a passenger journey comprises a trip on a single TOC; change trains to another TOC ( or even just another TOC’s “flow” ) and it becomes another trip – difficult to estimate the scale of this overcounting but probably of the order of 10%. Yes, there have been heavily discounted fares, enthusiastically bought up – hasn’t Kay heard of operators buying volume? BR really didn’t impose a dead hand on management innovation – it certainly stopped managers wasting money, as you would expect any half-decent management, private or public, to do – but technically and commercially it was prepared to take risks as with APT and, indeed, InterCity itself. My experience of working with TOCs at the coal face is that they are especially risk-averse, having a sack of bankers, egged on by compliers of risk registers such as me, round their necks. [There is the myth – widespread in the Treasury and amongst academics – that the private sector loves risk; it hates it, unless it can manage it or hedge it, and the same goes, more importantly, for its financial backers].

190. There’s another point Kay misses: although GB rail use growth has been higher than generally on the continent, it is still at a much lower level per capita. This despite the presence of London, an inevitably rail-dependent city.

191. @answer=42 – Kay might like to have considered some actual examples of TOC results. The most interesting is WC. WC is reasonably close to what it was in 1994, in terms of routes. Over the last 20 years, volume has nearly doubled, train mileage has doubled I understand, but revenue has risen only about 50% in real terms. In other words, despite all the brave words about yield management, the TOC has had to work much harder to earn less per passenger km. Nuts commercially. Sell Bransons (if only we could). …………

192. Graham H,

     We are always happy to see genuine insight as to what went on behind the scenes even if strictly way off topic. We just need to watch it carefully to make sure it doesn’t develop into a political debate.

193. @PoP – indeed, I was a bit embarrased to write as I did, but since others (easy to blame) had done so, I followed suit in an ovineish (?) fashion.

194. @Graham
     I like your WCML analysis. Is your revenue passenger receipts only or inclusive of subsidy? If pax only, I suppose that getting ratio subsidy / pax revenue would be ultra-difficult. Fare levels have increased generally above inflation; is there a simple relation to revenue?
     There is a reason why Virgin Group stopped being a public company …

195. @answer=42 – revenue only. Subsidy/pkm would be a good measure, but given the constant changes to non-regulated products and their availability, it would be very difficult to construct a robust series. One of the things that makes me incandescent with rage (must try new anger management courses) is the way in which the industry admits to enormous headline fares increases then goes off and heavily discounts them – an entirely self-inflicted wound. It hasn’t been in DfT’s interest to collect and analyse the data, of course.

196. @answer=42….One major reason I suspect for fares increasing so much (as well as a larger subsidy from HM Treasury) is that the rail industry is so much more complex and expensive to run, due to the multitude of different companies all interfacing with each other.

     *Removes bandage and returns to bloodied wall to bang head*.

197. @Anonymously. It’s something of a misconception that fares have ‘increased so much’

     No doubt some unregulated fares – principally open returns – have increased a lot, but not many people use these, particularly since the widespread take up of advance fares. More pertinent to London are the prices of regulated fares, ie season tickets and off peak. Since 1994, these have, on average, risen broadly in line with inflation with a few ups and downs on the way.

     By contrast, in the 10 years before 1994, the average fare rise in London and the South East was 34% above inflation, ie RPI+3% compound. And given Graham H’s comment above, this could have been expected to continue.

     There is, however, no arguing that subsidy has increased. Although the reasons for that are many and complex, and more suited to a PhD thesis than LR.

198. @Sad Fat Dad, 22 August 2015 at 11:51
     More pertinent to London are the prices of regulated fares, ie season tickets and off peak

     For many longer distance journeys not involving a peak leg in or out of London (although not Cross Country where the 09:30 rule applies everywhere) off-peak returns are the default fare any time of day and usually offer very good value, with plenty of flexibility and the return valid any day within a month and even allowing overnight break of journey. Some flows also offer super off-peak, and together with off-peak these correspond to the good old BR saver/supersaver or white saver/blue saver offerings. The super off-peak return fares are also valid a month, have no quota but have more onerous time restrictions usually, and have not been regulated, so those fares have typically crept up in price compared to the normal off-peak fare.

     Many passengers purchase these non-quota controlled fares together with free reservations, from online booking services when the lower quota controlled allocations have been exhausted (if they ever existed in the first place!). Often they may not realise they have tickets that could have been bought on the day. The reservations issued for free can lead people to believe the tickets are only valid on the trains so booked, whereas all the reservation does, in that case, is to book a seat on the particular train. Offering free reservations with long distance flexible tickets whether full open or off-peak leads to the problem of unoccupied reserved seats where people who are very well aware of the flexible terms use them to the max without any monetary incentive for then to cancel a reservation or not book one in the first place where they had little intention of using it.

199. Fares inflation is quoted by TV news programmes without qualification or discussion. For example both Meridian and BBC South today screamed the other evening that prices had increased by 25% over the last 5 years. Apart from the certainty in their voices prompted by their auto-cues was supported by not a shred of evidence,

     This item of course resulted by fares only rising 1% this coming January.

     Whilst both the South Coast local news channels are also quick and strident to condemn any failings on the part of either SWT or FGW. They are noticeably less vocal on the failings of the State sector (Network Rail, ORR or DfT) or indeed the Unions.

200. @Mark Townend/SFD/theprinter – given the everchanging kaleidoscope of fares types, it is virtually impossible to conduct a reliable index of fares in recent years; using an aggregated measure such as yield per passenger kmis probably about as close as we can get,although projecting that backwards to a (fairly recent) time when pkm were derived from ticket sales produces an unpleasant circularity….

     In the all the usual noise about fares rises, it’s important to ignore the usual propaganda from ATOC who talk about “most fares” not rising by inflation. What they omit to say is that there are about 25000 fares (eg Luton to Rye o/p. Bedminster to Berney Arms any time, and so on) available, some of which are hardly ever sold, and their claim makes no allowance for weighting by sales volumes for individual fares.

     @SFD – the point about the cost of the privatised railway is neatly illustrated by an exchange I had with the NSS in c1996 (forgive me if I repeat myself). As company secretary to everything, I was asked to fill in the NSS returns for each of our subsidiaries; I was not asked for the consolidated BR Group figures. The sum total of turnovers for the aggregate of the subsidiaries came to around £ 7bn,compared with a BR Group figure in which the subsidiaries accounts would have been consolidated (basically,with double counting and wooden dollars eliminated) of around £3.5 bn. I pointed this out to NSS at the time and their reply was that they would have picked this up anyway; they couldn’t – they never asked and they had no information from BR or any one else on which to do so. So,the net result was that the NSS survey of economic activity reported the GDP as growing by £3.5 bn when it hadn’t. That equated to around 1/2% of the national GDP and was also the total growth reported for the economy in the year in question – widely trumpeted by the government of the day. As to the causes of this, I suspect this isn’t the right thread on which to hang the discussion, but you will notice that the big step change took place when the industry’s sharp end switched from cash to accrual accounting.

201. GrahamH, I was surprise to read that there are some 25000 ticket combinations. I reckon that number is understated by a couple of orders of magnitude. There are about 2500 stations in UK there are therefore “a lot” of combinations of origin and destination (GrahamH identified some unlikely ones). I have forgotten most of the maths I learnt over 40 years ago, but I reckon that 2500 squared is roughly the number of possible individual journeys, and for each journey there can be multiple fares. For my local journey to London I counted over 23 individual fares – not counting season tickets.

202. 100andthirty,

     Yes, but stations are grouped together for fares purposes. This has been the case for many years but I think it is even more the case nowadays. A classic is Dorking North/Dorking Deepdene/Dorking Town. Remember the nonsense about Dorking Town having around 50 passengers per year because they all got allocated to two of the other stations. In that case – the Dorking Stations group – it was clear from the ticket they were treated as one. Sometimes it is not so obvious and you will get a ticket to just one inidividual station. Nevertheless nearby stations are actually the same fare because they are in the same group.

     On that basis 25,000 sounds quite plausible.

203. For long distance fares the groups can be quite big as well.

204. Understood how the number of fares is a smaller number than might might be thought from the number of stations. Thanks for clearing that up.

205. @PoP – it’s true I may have understated the quantum of individualfares products – it’s many years since I read the fares manual (sad, I know) but there have been many changes since I did so, not least I suspect the fragmentation of the industry and the allocation of flows to individual TOCs may well have led to composite products so that the mythical Bedminster to Berney Arms trip* may well be builtup from two or three shorter flows now. The anti-ATOC point remains,however, the number of regulated fares products is a small proportion of the unregulated ones,and amongst the latter many are either heavily discounted products or constrained by other factors such as high fares elasticities. Weighting by volume of products sold (or by their total value) would produce a result in which the bulkof fares revenue rose faster than inflation, but most fares products didn’t.

     *I confidently expect a tsunami ofcontributors who do make the Bedminster to Berney Arms trip if not daily (difficult) then at least several times a week…

206. Graham H
     Bedminster to Berney Arms
     … once upon a time it was: “Alston-Dalston”

207. @Greg T – even the Board talked internally about Yarmouth to Barmouth

208. Amazingly there are 18 fares from Bedminster to Berney Arms.

209. Blimey! Well,clearly, 25000 is going to be an underestimate… Or perhaps B to BA is a much hotter trip than anyone could imagine. [One wonders how much effort goes in to devising the differentiation,let alone how many are actually sold]

210. @ PoP In view of your above comments on this East Coast Mainline routes and branches topic (and you once told me that Dorking was outside the scope of LR), How much would a ticket from Dorking North to Dorking Town cost if both are in the “Dorking Stations Group”?

211. @Graham H, 23 August 2015 at 12:26

     I have a dim and distant recollection of a claim that in Germany it had been estimated the average commercial overhead for all the fare setting and ticket sales activities over the national network (at least a decade ago) was equivalent to about 5.00 GBP for every ticket sold, before you even start factoring in fleet, operations and infrastructure expenditure. I think that claim arose at the time in context of a proposal to make all rail travel free in Belgium (a country so small I doubt any fare exceeded that figure anyway!).

212. I am left wondering how many different fares there are from Teesside Airport to Reddish South …

213. Castlebar,

     No idea. But clearly you have to consider the possibility that people want to travel within a station group. Incidently it was believed that this is how they got their stupidly low figure for Dorking Town. It only accounted for tickets specifically to Dorking Town.

214. @ Ronnie MB – 5 adult full fares and 5 child fare equivalents. There are also 10 privilege fares and 10 railcard discounted fares for your “hardly ever used” station pair. Surely it’s largely a “no brainer” that TOC pricing managers will establish fares from their areas both within said areas and to elsewhere in the UK (whether individual or grouped stations). You can, of course, get route based price variations too. All this can be dug up on the brfares.com website.

215. Pre-Beeching on the GWR it was “Marazion to Westbourne Park” to save money

216. Pedantic of Purley: “Actually Railtrack did a lot of things well, just none of them were railway related.” – You’d have thought there should be a clue in the name! Oh well …

     Whether there are 25000 fare combinations or more there are too many. Complex fare structures make for unhappy passengers when they find they’ve been overcharged*. Whatever happened to cost-per-mile charging?

     * unsurprisingly you don’t tend to hear complaints from people who discover they’ve been undercharged. Odd that …

217. @Castlebar – rather like the alleged cheapest way of qualifying for a Network Card was to buy an annual season fron Ryde to Ryde Pier Head?

     @AlisonW – and as my comments on another thread about Virgin’s financial results after 20 years of massive tinkering with yield management show, introducing a plethora of fares hasn’t actually improved financial performance one jot. As in other matters, railway commercial managers have bought into the “trains are like planes” story without understanding the differences. [Moreover, as you imply, not having fares based on mileage prevents the simple introduction of discounted travel for regular-but-not-daily commuters, whose needs could be met with kilometre-banks as in Switzerland. There are,in any case, very good arguments in regulatory theory for monopolies such as commuter and many IC railway services aligning prices with costs, not with yield management objectives -how strangely silent the CMA becomes at this point.]

218. @ Alison W

     Strangely, I have yet to find anyone who has been undercharged

     With one exception

     A few years ago, a friend purchased a ticket from Ealing Broadway (at that station ticket office) to Manchester. An official on the train tried to surcharge her for a wrong ticket, yet it was hardly her fault.

219. The plethora of fares introduces resentment. I always feel I’m paying a £5 surcharge for the time spent researching the best option, and I don’t like the stress of worrying that I’ll catch the start of the 12 week window for Advance fares, or missing my exact train and being stung with penalties. Air travel is expensive and rare enough to pay attention to both, but I never felt train travel should be.

220. @John B
     It is also much easier to accidentally get on the wrong train – security, check-in etc make it very difficult to do that on a plane, but getting on the train that is actually at the station at 12:34 instead of the one scheduled to be there is a very easy mistake to make.
     Most operators use the train ID e.g 2A34 to identify their services. Only in the UK do we call a train the “0831 from Waterloo to Waterloo” (which is, of course, known as different things at each station it calls at)

     @Graham H
     “rather like the alleged cheapest way of qualifying for a Network Card was to buy an annual season fron Ryde to Ryde Pier Head?”
     Nothing “alleged” about it – apparently Island Line has lost a nice little earner now that the Gold Card Area has expanded to embrace Lichfield – the cheapest eligible annual ST now being between that city’s two stations.

221. PS
     it was not Ryde Esplanade to Pierhead, which is £252pa, but in the other direction to St Johns Road, which is £168. Lichfield City to TV is £144.

     But as Ryde is part of SWT’s franchise you also get six free tickets for use anywhere on SWT’s network at weekends, which may well be worth more than the £24 difference.

222. the 25000 fares combinations do disguise some very wierd anomalies. Why, for example, is the anytime return from Canterbury to St Albans (via London) little more than half the anytime return fare from Canterbury to London terminals?

223. @timbeau – even in Chris Green’s wildest dreams, I don’t think he imagined NSE reaching Lichfield!

     @Quinlet – only God knows and He doesn’t travel by train much these days.

224. @Graham H
     Not many people would consider Exeter (or Kings Lynn) to be in the south east either, but they were in NSE from the start. maybe if the Exeter line had remained under Western Region auspices things might have been different.

     Never mind Lichfield, the Network Railcard is now valid on some Abellio Trains Wales services (albeit not actually in Wales!)
     http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/content/routemaps/Gold_Card_scheme_area.pdf

225. @John B – I have to say I was very impressed with VT when I arrived 20 seconds after the gates had closed, very breathless, with an advance ticket for Brum in my sweaty little mitt. Resigned to having to pay full fare, I found my ticket immediately endorsed, without even requesting it, for the next train.

226. @timbeau – as you know, mere accidents of history. None of the boundaries between the passenger sectors was “naturally” defined – IC v OPS was settled by which services could be thought to become profitable – hence the Norwichs went into IC and TPE didn’t ; same with IC v NSE – Gatwick yes, Stansted, no. As to the possible options that were examined for Exeter-Waterloo when the line wasn’t electrified, I think this would tempt the moderating shears rather too obviously…

227. Graham H
     “trains are like planes” story without understanding the differences..
     Somebody PLEASE tell Eurostar?
     Oh & “Yarmouth-Barmouth” – also Thurso – Truro (!)

228. I really do wonder what ‘plethora’ of rail fares everyone is talking about…

     As I understand, we have:
     – Seasons
     – Peak
     – Off-Peak
     – Super Off-Peak
     – Advance
     – Sundries

     The middle three are not fixed to a particular train, but with flexibility (i.e. which train you can use) diminishing in proportion to the price paid. These then come in varieties of single, return (i.e. return valid for a month) or day return (out and return trip valid on same day).

     Sundries are non-rail elements, such as vouchers for the buffet car, PlusBus, car parking, etc.

     Advance tickets are constructed – as far as I recall – as a % of the full fare. Within the LENNON (Latest Earnings Networked Nationally Over Night) database, which records all ticket sales each TOC is allocated 7 advance ticket price categories, ordered from cheapest (AP1) to dearest (AP7). The individual TOC yield management systems set quotas available for each ticket category, with the default assumption that once the cheapest quota is sold out, the next-cheapest one is shown as available. Were these to be sold out, the inter-available tickets are shown only.

     To the best of my knowledge, this is how the LENNON database has functioned since its inception in 2003. If archived sales data were to be obtained, it would be pretty simple to plot all sorts of changes in ticket prices for any origin-destination pair. Of course, this data is held by ATOC (Association of Train Operating Companies) and I think that if you would like to do some proper analysis on changes to Advance ticket prices over the last decade you probably have more of a chance hacking into their systems than getting this information off them in a legitimate manner.

229. @Straphan

     Indeed, but then you get differences in availability of the various off peak fares – so for instance off peak to London has more restricted hours than off peak across London, making it cheaper to buy a ticket from Southampton to Finsbury Park than to Waterloo. And you have off peak tickets between the same points with different depending on whether the outward or return half is “to London”.

     You will also find different Advance fares available, depending on which TOC you are travelling on (e.g Cross Country, Trans Pennine, East Coast or Grand Central on the same route), or even on different trains by the same operator.

     This is how they keep the “average fare” down – numerous individually-priced bargain fares for the various crack of dawn services running on wet Wednesdays in February (provided you book in November), but only one extortionate fare available if you need to make a mercy dash to a relative’s deathbed at five minutes notice.

230. @straphan – a piece of work I did for ABTA a while ago revealed that there 84 different fares between London and Carlisle. If that isn’t a plethora, I wouldn’t recognise one if it came and sat next to me in Standard Class.

     I agree with you about ATOC’s coyness in disclosing data, that’s why I suggested using such indicators as average yield per km and so on.

     @timbeau – yes, that is precisely my point about the basis of ATOC’s oft-repeated lie about average fares

231. @ Straphan / Timbeau – and then on top of the ticket structure and the availability codes you then get the Routeing Guide which seems to be changed on a fortnightly basis. How frontline staff (selling or checking tickets) are supposed to keep up I don’t know. To be fair the guide can provide flexibility in some cases if you can get your head round the info but in others it can restrict people for no good reason. Oh and then you get easements – some of which are logical but others can be daft to the layman’s eyes.

     Finally don’t forget smartcard based fares and products which can differ in some cases from the cash paper ticket and then throw in London with its Oyster / Contactless complications.

     I used to understand BR ticketing but now I find it ridiculously complicated even though by the wonders of the internet I can search for fares and routes and restrictions from the comfort of my settee.

     And just to hang on to something approximating to Thameslink and ticketing it seems TSGN have released an updated map for validity for “The Key” Smartcard.

     http://www.thameslinkrailway.com/download/10537.8/key-map/key_map.pdf

     Take a look at that and marvel at the nonsenses of TOC based smartcard deployment! Why would passengers bother given the nonsensical “boundary” issues that arise?

232. My favourite concept from the Routeing Guide is that of the “negative easement” : Humpty Dumpty and Orwell would be proud!

233. The references above to Network Railcard availability are confusing the Network Railcard and the Gold Card. The Gold Card availability has been extended on London Midland, Anglia and Chiltern mainly, but the Network Railcard remains tied to the old Network South East network.

234. @Purley Dweller
     My apologies – I hadn’t realised the boundaries were now different. Further confusion!

235. And the boundary between those zones appears on the map as a grey line ( I think )

236. The grey line also shows the end of the area where you can use all lines (if not all trains) as Cross Country have not signed up leaving some blank spaces.

237. @Walthamstow Writer:

     I’m a regular commuter between Cambridge and Meldreth on GN. They’ve installed ITSO validators on Foxton, Shepreth and Meldreth stations in the last few weeks (see picture: https://twitter.com/mrpj100/status/631511675879981059) , so I guess the reasons for restricting the initial launch to Huntingdon and Royston is because Peterborough and Cambridge stations are managed by different TOCs. AGA are due to introduce ITSO on the West Anglia route in the new year, so I suspect the GN service will extend to Cambridge once AGA are ready.

238. @Purley Dweller
     “The grey line also shows the end of the area where you can use all lines (if not all trains) as Cross Country have not signed up leaving some blank spaces.”

     So it seems you can use XC only within the grey line, but have to jump out at Banbury. Virgin West Coast is conspicuous by its absence between Euston and Milton Keynes, and there is a former NSE-only service excluded (between Huntingdon and Peterborough).
     Less surprisingly, because they were never part of NSE, SWT’s services between Salisbury and Bristol (and the proposed ones via Frome to Yeovil) seem to be excluded too.

239. @timbeau and Graham H: With regard to different peak/off-peak definitions: fair enough. That is a bit of a bother. With regard to different TOCs selling Advance Purchase tickets between the same two points, a bit of spreadsheet analysis would allow you to determine the average fare weighted by the sales of tickets by each TOC. That eliminates the issue of having to take into account the £1 super-gizmo-fare for a wet February Wednesday. If nobody buys it it doesn’t make it into the database.

     Sure the number of actual fares available between stations is large, but the structure and mechanism is not that difficult, except where you have differing peak/off-peak definitions and cross-London fares. Arguably, though, that only affects a portion of travellers, particularly since not very many make cross-London trips (yet).

240. @Straphan – yes, that is precisely my point, that average ticket prices should, when talked about by ATOC (and the politicians), refer to a figure weighted by volume (or value ) of sales, not simply by reeference to the number of products.

241. @Graham H: …and my point was that this would be reasonably easy to calculate using LENNON data. But – again – you hit what I like to call the confidentiality wall.

242. Work has started on demolishing the unused platforms at Finsbury Park next to City North London.

243. I’m not sure it’s a purposeful demolition. They are preparing to install a crane to service the work to install lifts.

244. Quinlet – you asked:
     “Why, for example, is the anytime return from Canterbury to St Albans (via London) little more than half the anytime return fare from Canterbury to London terminals?”
     I can’t answer the question directly, but where are you finding these fares?
     Canterbury to St Albans (I assume you mean City, not Abbey) – there is no anytime return fare; standard class anytime DAY return is £58.10, set by Southeastern, Any Permitted route (so either High Speed or old main lines and Underground).

     Canterbury to London Terminals, NOT via HS1, standard class anytime DAY return £55.50, anytime (month) return £61.40; Plus High Speed £66.30 (day) or £71.60 (month).
     Anomalous, yes, but not “little more than half ” as you say.

     I shall let the SE pricing manager know (in case he doesn’t read this himself) 🙂

245. @Kent Railman
     Interestingly, these prices have been changed in the last two months. In July I paid £35 (or close thereto) for a return to St Albans from Canterbury travelling at peak time and fares at about this level had been available for many years. It was a well known anomaly and even conductors on the trains promoted tickets to St Albans as very much cheaper than a ticket to London, which, as you say was between £55 and £62.

     Come September and the fares are precisely as you quote now. I suspect that somebody else has alerted the SE pricing manager to this. Not surprisingly, there have been significant complaints.

246. There are sometimes anomalies as a result of off-peak fares being available for cross-London journeys at times when they are not for journeys to a London terminus. As break of journey is always permitted on a cross-London journey, it is perfectly legit to throw away the Kings Cross to Finsbury Park (or Waterloo to Vauxhall, as the case may be) part of such a ticket. And of course you get a tube ticket (two for a return trip) thrown in as well.

247. Fares appear to be a bit steep to an outsider. I must buy passes prior to visiting UK

248. @alan blue mountains
     “Fares appear to be a bit steep to an outsider. ”
     They do to the locals as well. When it’s cheaper to buy, tax, insure and fuel a cheap secondhand car for a trip from London to Newcastle than to buy a train ticket, something is wrong.
     http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1479878.stm

249. 10:52 Edinburgh Waverley to London Euston, changing at Crewe, £13.20 with Senior Railcard on Sunday 22 August. £20 for the 2/5 of the Festival Fringe returners who had yet to reach the age of 60. Beat that!

250. @Alan Griffiths
     Well, yes – if your journey can be planned well in advance and miss the peak times and commit to a specific train you can get bargains. But the idea that long distance rail travel can be used as a turn up and go service went away a long time ago.

     And it is laughable to pretend that only business users pay the obscene full fares. Expenses claims are scrutinised for anyone not using advance fares. And business meetings can be planned – unlike a mercy dash to be at the bedside of a dying relative. Are our relatives supposed to give us twelve weeks notice of their death?

251. @timbeau. The specious argument put forward by Auto Express just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The open return tickets quoted are the type you might buy when you are making a short notice journey. How can you compare that to the cost of a car journey that involves going to a car auction, which may not be taking place for several weeks. A motoring magazine can hardly be considered impartial and I would be surprised if it didn’t spend time researching car auctions to find one where prices are depressed. I notice that they don’t say where the car was actually bought so it was probably nowhere near London. The National Rail website quotes a return fare from London to Newcastle leaving on 10 November and returning on 12 November (i.e. 2 weeks ahead, which seems a fair comparison to finding and buying a car at auction) of £180.00 for 2 people without railcards (actually 2 x singles). So the train is cheaper. As for the Editor’s assertion that ‘the car is more comfortable and more civilised than the train’ that really is risible. Who would really prefer to spend more than 5 hours driving to Newcastle in a car of uncertain pedigree with 130,000 miles on the clock?
     No doubt timbeau’s mercy dash to be at the bedside of a dying relative would be delayed only by the need to find a suitable auction, nearby and actually happening at the time.

252. @Anonymous
     Obviously it takes a little longer to buy a car than a train ticket, but for many of us we wouldn’t have to buy a car because we have one already. AEx of course had an axe to grind (and advance fares are now available much cheaper than they were when the article was written) but for Inter City operators to pretend that turn-up-and-go is value for money on their services is now just risible.

253. I cannot ever justify the train for long distances as it is too expensive. I find this upsetting because comfortable as my car is, nothing makes me want to sit on the M25 or M6 really. Even booking in advance for 4 it is difficult to find tickets and I really would rather have flexibility to leave earlier or later than planned. London to Newcastle off peak return with 2 adults and 2 children is £219.50 with a family railcard. Petrol, tyres and the fine for going over my allowed mileage still only come to about £150. The extra 70 quid makes a difference!

254. Many car owners might like to use the train for long journeys if it made financial sense. Except for one other factor which should not be forgotten. If you travel there by car, you have the car available to use while you are there. Trips to the shops, days out, whatever. Many Londoners, in particular, can be disappointed by the public transport on offer elsewhere for such purposes. (Of course this does vary a bit depending on where “there” is).

255. Last month I had to go to Lincoln for the day.
     I took the train – admittedly using a geriatric’s railcard.
     Much cheaper than driving & I did not have to worry about tiredness ( 300-mile round trip in a day, nor did I have to worry about beer consumed in Lincoln, either.
     ( It was for a morris-dancers wake, so I was knackered by the time we’d finished … )

256. @Greg
     You are a very brave soul to risk that journey. I visit Lincoln frequently as I have family there, and on the rare occasions when I do go by train I always regret it.

     No direct train unless you want to arrive after supper and leave again before dawn.

     Dreadful connections.

     Grossly overcrowded connecting services

     A desolate interchange station at which you inevitably spend longer than you bargained for, because connections are never honoured.

     I am planning a group trip there just after Easter. We are staying and working within half a mile of the station. But the train timetable back to London on Sunday evenings currently has a gap of three and a half hours – and that will become over four in December, which has scuppered any prospect of using the train.
     We will not finish what we are going there to do in time to catch the retimed 1710, and by the time the next train leaves Lincoln (2126), those going by road will have already got home to London.
     Indeed, by the time the train gets back to KX the last Tube will have gone.

     That’s why I have a car.

257. It all comes down to individuals’ personal value of the cash / time / convenience equation. My parents live 125 miles away, with a reasonable train service almost to their front door.

     When the kids were small I wouldn’t dream of taking the train, as even though the train was much cheaper, and the M1 / M6 invariably painful, we had too much to carry, wanted the option to stop when we wanted, and needed the car up there. Notwithstanding the M1, the car is usually quicker too.

     Now the kids are older we sometimes take the train, as the need for convenience has reduced.

     Everyone will have slightly different values of cash, time and convenience, and thus the propensity to take the train varies for each. Anyone strolling up to Kings Cross expecting to ‘turn up and go’ and get a seat on the 1600 will find it very expensive, and a seat unlikely, which rather suggests that there are sufficient people out there for whom that cash / time / convenience equation still makes the train best value compared to the alternatives.

258. @timbeau, 26 October 2015 at 18:40 (and various subsequent posts). Point taken; maybe the Auto Express article wasn’t the best example to have quoted. SFD is right that it comes down to an individual’s personal values but I think it also depends on an individual’s personal capability. Newcastle is possibly as far as many more mature drivers would want to go in a day. I regularly make a trip from Berkshire to Gleneagles (not for golf, my daughter lives there). Door to door by train is 7 and a bit hours. Flying is no quicker in overall journey time and a lot more expensive. Driving is undoubtedly cheaper but the journey time is around 8 hours, more than I can comfortably do in a day (my wife can no longer drive since she broke her shoulder) so now we would have to factor in an overnight stop. So for any normal, pre-planned journey the train wins. Of course, if there was a family emergency then it might be different , depending on circumstances.

259. timbeau
     This WAS a Sunday (!)
     Fortunately, the first connection N worked & just for once (Engineering works) everything was going to North Gate from Lincoln ….

260. Re 313’s I heard that … [several fairly improbable rumours snipped: if you have a believable source for any of these speculations, please repeat the suggestion including the source, or at least an indication as to its credibility if you cannot give a name. We prefer to avoid dealing in rumour. Malcolm]

     Also why did the government waste money on building new tunnels when the old York Road tunnel is there

261. @Anonymous@17:35

     Single track, with no useable station.

262. + on a horrendous curve with insufficient headroom for OHLE.

263. + it starts on the wrong side of the ECML, and in any event has long since been converted to other use.

264. Both the York curve &, even worse, the Hotel curve were tight fits for short-bodied Quad-Art stock – & deep smokey holes with it!
     Even if still unobstructed, you would never, ever have got a 20-metre coach round them, apart from the lack of headroom.
     This VIDEO shows the last loco-hauled trip ( Brush type 2 haulage ).
     At short notice, I can’t find a picture of a N-2 starting up the bank …
     As you can see, it was very, very tight.

265. @Greg

     The video was great and illustrated the low slow tortuous nature of the route. And there was a platform along the very tight Hotel Curve so you often had to start from rest on a rising gradient. Also it captures the early days of GN electrification when the 313s were running to Moorgate but diesel still ruled supreme at Kings Cross, yet to be remodelled.

266. N2 at York Road:
     http://mikemorant.smugmug.com/keyword/kings%20cross/i-PqQRSR3/A

     Class 31 diesel emerging from the tunnel at Hotel Curve: https://www.flickr.com/photos/82097736@N00/8564849341
     Very tight clearance by the looks of it.

267. @ Greg – thanks for the video link. Most interesting and on part 2 the run through Dalston Junction and down to Broad St shows the massive contrast with today’s ELL overground route. I had no idea at the time, being hundreds of miles away, that these crazy tunnels and loco hauled workings existed. Kings Cross was clearly a vastly different place, in terms of suburban services, to the one it is today. Also odd to see 313s looking new when I saw one today that seemed to be held together with masking tape and filler. Looked horrendous. It’s also slightly ironic that facilities abandoned in 1976 reopen in a different way in 3 years time and that Broad St has gone, half of Moorgate is closed and we’re still using 313s today with no replacement stock announced (yet).

     I also loved in the video the lady trainspotter complete with headscarf and the rather relaxed BR way of handling enthusiasts – on the tracks, beside the tracks, down the platform ramp and not a hivi in sight. These days there’d be security railings, police with dogs and so much officialdom you couldn’t move.

268. Jeez, that’s a tight fit! I wonder what they would have done with the links and the City services if LT had kept the Northern City line (i.e. if all the Northern Heights extensions had been completed as planned)? Even with third-rail electrification, keeping them in use into the 80s and beyond would have been a tall order….

     Look at all those people (including the cameraman!) risking life and limb leaning out of the windows……ah, those were the days. ?

269. Also, how were diesels allowed into Moorgate station once it was built over in the 60s/70s? There must have been some almighty extractor fans to remove all those nasty exhaust fumes……are they still there?

270. Plus Part 2 shows the fabled Canonbury curve!

271. And just for the sake of it for those who may have missed Greg’s link to Part 1, here is Part 2 referred to above:
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvadOyyRM3s

     Recalling those days (and a few faces I recognised), coming from the electrified third rail territory of South London as I do, it was hard to realise from such trips that North London had any proper suburban services on the ‘main line’ at all and those that did exist appeared shabby, smelly, run down, ignored, void of decent platform shelter and on their last legs. Of course, there were South London stations in need of improvement but those clips demonstrate the all-pervasive dampness and gloom that seemed always to be present then whenever I explored. That’s what made it so exciting and interesting.

272. Anonymously @ 02:56
     Nope…no extractor fans….it just stank.It was noticeably bad.
     Much like Liverpool St when it was diesel,in fact.

273. @anon
     ” I wonder what they would have done with the links and the City services if LT had kept the Northern City line (i.e. if all the Northern Heights extensions had been completed as planned)? Even with third-rail electrification, keeping them in use into the 80s and beyond would have been a tall order”

     An interesting “might have been!” Tubes to Hertford and Welwyn seems unlikely, even if the tracks could have been segregated – and remember Hadley Wood and Potters Bar were only quadrupled in the fifties: maybe the tunnels would have been done to Tube dimensions.
     More likely is that Kings Cross suburban would not have been reduced to just two (later three) platforms, and/or greater use of the Canonbury Curve to Broad Street.

     On one evening late in 1975 I did manage to use the Canonbury Curve, York Road platform and the Hotel Curve, but at the time no evening trains ran in service beyond York Road so I never got to use the actual tunnel. (Too lazy to get up in time for the morning services) I also remember going out very late one night (Silver Jubilee night, when the Tubes were running late enough to get home again) for the novelty of a direct train from Blackfriars to London Bridge (little did we know that would be a several-times-an-hour occurrence ten years later!)

274. @Slugabed…Oh dear. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were records of health problems in those working in (or even just travelling through) the station in the 70s…as we have seen from VW exhaust scandal fallout, those diesel exhaust fumes aren’t exactly clean.

     This definitely wouldn’t be allowed now though, right? IIRC, the only reason they electrified Paddington to Airport Junction was to avoid diesel traction into the Heathrow tunnels.

275. @Graham Feakins….Pretty much every rail-related photo or video taken in the 70s that I’ve ever seen seems to be much as you described! I can only be thankful I wasn’t yet born then….

276. @anonymously
     I don’t think combustion engines would ever have been contemplated in the tube tunnels for the Heathrow extension, any more then they were for, say, the GN&C – which intended to switch between steam and electric traction at Finsbury Park.

     However, The CWL terminal platforms at Moorgate were open to the sky, certainly at the east end, until at least 2013
     https://150greatthingsabouttheunderground.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/img_7318.jpg

     https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3401/3634880211_26c9af48f0_z.jpg?zz=1

     I can find no pictures of the west end except the two at the end of this item, taken nearly thirty years after diesels last appeared there, (and, indeed, a few seconds after the last electric train!)
     http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/m/moorgate/

277. @Anonymously – you will be surprised to hear that as late as the mid-80s, DfT scientists discounted the polluting effects of diesel particulate emissions. (I happened to be in charge of “Energy Conservation” for a bit around then, and there was a very strong push to get people to use diesel cars “because they were less polluting” – not even with the benefit of hindsight, I could not understand at the time why NOx emissions weren’t worth worrying about, but my attempts to put an end to the bias were overriden in the interests of the British motor lobby. I was glad to get rid of that portfolio.)

278. Graham H
     The conspiratorialist part of me thinks that HMGs reluctance to “count” NOx and SOx as “pollution” might have had something to do with our (at the time) primary fuel for electricity generation…especially the brown stuff imported from Poland to…I’ll stop now,eh?

279. @Slugabed – yes, there were several vested interests, not least British Leyland who produced only gas guzzlers… Tax policy was skewed for a generation just to prop up a failed manufacturer.

280. @timbeau….ah, my mistake. I have only seen those platforms whenever passing through on the through Tube lines, so from those angles I never realised the buffer ends of th platforms were open to the sky.

281. @anonymously
     I can’t find those light wells on Google Earth, so Crossrail work may have removed them some time since 2013 (the date of the latest photo I found – the 150th anniversary display is a clue!)

     Of course, many of the trains to Moorgate up to 1975, and all of them between then and 1982, were dmus, (mainly classes 105 and 127) with exhaust pipes distributed all the way down the train.

282. GF
     And it you think it was bad then, think of a few years before, when the Moorgate services were hauled by N-2’s from the ex-GN lines & Fowler 2-6-2T’s on the MR ones.
     Of course Moorgate hadn’t been built over then, but the Hotel curve in particular was very sulphurous & King’s Cross “met”, though “open” wasn’t much better.

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