Dartmoor rail line reopens

[saaby93]

Dartmoor rail line reopens - how much did it cost?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-593164...

[Krikkit]

£40.5m according to the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/nov/08/dar...

I know it'll already have been dug/banked ready, but it seems like good value:

Beeb said:

The work has been completed in nine months, with track operator Network Rail saying it laid 11 miles (18km) of new track, installed 24,000 concrete sleepers and 29,000 tonnes of ballast in 20 days.

Repairs have also been made to 21 structures along the route, including four bridges.

Other infrastructure work has included level crossing improvements and the installation of railway communications equipment.

Vegetation clearance, earth and drainage works and fencing had also been completed, and further infrastructure work would continue to take place to increase the line speed to enable an hourly service in 2022, managers said.

[towser44]

Saw this on the news I think the other day. Excellent news, if they want cars off the road, much more of this is needed and ideally affordable rail travel to go with it.

[Simpo Two]

towser44 said:

Saw this on the news I think the other day. Excellent news, if they want cars off the road, much more of this is needed and ideally affordable rail travel to go with it.

But hang on - we're all supposed to be getting EVs which are Very Good.

Minor railway lines were closed because they didn't make commercial sense - just like the canals before them. Times change, stuff moves on. How long will it take for that £40M to pay back? So re-opening them is all fine and dandy - but there will be a massive cost, and guess who foots the bill? Yep, Hardworking Johnny Taxpayer, who is still paying for his EV and ASHP.

[essayer]

Apparently Motorail used to go there, load up your car in West London then travel down to Cornwall

Beats slogging down the M5, no idea why it wasn't a success. Too expensive back then?

[markymarkthree]

Looks good, i can see a day out coming soon.

Its a shame someone cant get the line sorted between Portishead and Bristol.

[2xChevrons]

essayer said:

Apparently Motorail used to go there, load up your car in West London then travel down to Cornwall

Beats slogging down the M5, no idea why it wasn't a success. Too expensive back then?

It was a success, until cars and roads improved to the point where it no longer made sense. Motorail (to Cornwall as well as all the other services that used to criss-cross the country) was a great alternative when your average family car struggled to top 80mph, had a four-speed gearbox and a Smiths fug-stirrer heater. Would you rather drive an Austin 1300 from London to Cornwall on the old A4, then the Exeter Bypass, then the original A30 coach road, with all its crawling traffic jams, tedious inclines and low average speeds? Or whatabout taking the family Vauxhall Victor to the Lake District via the old A66 across Bowes Moor, or to Scotland jousting with the lorries twisting their way over Shap? Much better to load it onto a Motorail service at Olympia and let the train whisk it off to your destination.

But once you have the main trunk motorways in place and cars can reliably and comfortably cruise at high speeds for hours on end between Little Chefs and service stops, the convenience and cost-effectiveness of just driving all the way becomes obvious.

It's telling that the last MotorRail service was to Penzance, at the far end of a bit of the world still infamous for terrible roads and slow journey times, and it's notable that the service was dropped as soon as the Goss Moor improvements to the A30 were underway, removing one of the last major bottlenecks in the route to the Cornish tourist hotspots.

MotorRail also suffered from changes in BR's structure - first sectorisation (where BR was divided up into semi-independent businesses based on traffic type) because it didn't fit neatly into either freight or passenger business and then privatisation, because the whole service ran at a massive loss and was run only as a desirable public service so it was swiftly canned by the new operators.

A few years ago I wondered if motorail would make a return as a way of overcoming the range problems of EVs - you could even have your car charging while you and it are transported long distances. But the improvements in EV range and battery tech, and the spread of decent charging networks, have rather rendered that idea moot.

Edited by 2xChevrons on Wednesday 17th November 16:42

[sean ie3]

'effin bureaucracy man.

[bloomen]

I did the occasional summer weekend rail journey to here when I presume the track was only used by the quarry thing so not up to scratch.

Think I'd need a chairlift if I was commuting from here as it's a right slog up to the station from town. A very cool development all the same.

[Dogwatch]

2xChevrons said:

It was a success, until cars and roads improved to the point where it no longer made sense. Motorail (to Cornwall as well as all the other services that used to criss-cross the country) was a great alternative when your average family car struggled to top 80mph, had a four-speed gearbox and a Smiths fug-stirrer heater. Would you rather drive an Austin 1300 from London to Cornwall on the old A4, then the Exeter Bypass, then the original A30 coach road, with all its crawling traffic jams, tedious inclines and low average speeds? Or whatabout taking the family Vauxhall Victor to the Lake District via the old A66 across Bowes Moor, or to Scotland jousting with the lorries twisting their way over Shap? Much better to load it onto a Motorail service at Olympia and let the train whisk it off to your destination..

Edited by 2xChevrons on Wednesday 17th November 16:42

Despite today’s traffic jams people don’t realise just how much the roads have (mostly) improved since the War. In the ‘50s my father drove from Guildford to Heysham every Easter to visit his father and aunts. Pre the M1 opening ( in stages) it was a two-day journey. Few towns had a bypass so you had to drive through them and you could be stuck behind an underpowered “heavy” for miles.

[essayer]

I have a Leaf so going to Cornwall is also a near two day affair at 63mph. I’d rather sit on a train. at least I don’t have to change gears

[2xChevrons]

Dogwatch said:

Despite today’s traffic jams people don’t realise just how much the roads have (mostly) improved since the War. In the ‘50s my father drove from Guildford to Heysham every Easter to visit his father and aunts. Pre the M1 opening ( in stages) it was a two-day journey. Few towns had a bypass so you had to drive through them and you could be stuck behind an underpowered “heavy” for miles.

I'm a child of the 80s, but I can remember what an ordeal it was going from Hampshire to Cornwall. This was after a lot of the improvements (no more infamous Exeter Bypass over the Countess Weir swing bridge) but even so some years we got stuck for five hours or more in a miles-long, snaking traffic queue that crawled along at walking pace on twisting single-lane roads through a succession of village. And blackspots like Indian Queen or the Iron Bridge only needed a breakdown or a mild fender-bender to seemingly bring the entire county to a halt.

Similarly, I can just remember going to visit grandparents in Watford before the M3 was finished, or going to Birmingham before the M40. Both are journeys I wouldn't bat an eyelid at now but they took a huge chunk of time back then and seemed to be perpetually on the verge of gridlock (the Hockley traffic lights on the old A33 being one I have memories of being stuck at on a sweltering summer day).

Go further back and look at the Getty image archive or the Pathe YouTube channel to see what are now pleasant market towns choked with cars and lorries bumper-to-bumper, or single-digit A-roads - the supposed trunk arteries of the nation - being twisty single-lane affairs between drystone walls. All with a fraction of the number of cars we have now. Or how all the road traffic between London and south Wales had to either go via Gloucester or take the Aust ferry (or the very sub-standard road-rail service through the Severn Tunnel, to bring this vaguely back to topic).

Just north of where I now live you can follow long stretches of the old A1. There's a railway level crossing - imagine the chaos that must have caused every time a train went past - and just past that the road narrows to a single vehicle-width to cross a medieval bridge before squeezing down the high street of a village and then meeting what was a major east-west route at a crossroads. Until the 1950s all the traffic between London, the north east and Scotland had to negotiate that...and that's a couple of miles of one route.

There used to be hundreds of thousands of these bottlenecks and blackspots. If anything, we're now much more aware of how bad the unimproved bits of the network are by comparison - see how frustrating it is getting around somewhere like Norfolk, or the reputation of trouble spots like the A303 at Amesbury/Stonehenge.

[Earthdweller]

In the 70’s I used to go on holiday in Anglesey sitting in the back of my dad’s cortina from Lancashire

It took two days .. we used to stop overnight near Rhyl

Now you can do that journey in 3 hours

[droopsnoot]

Earthdweller said:

In the 70’s I used to go on holiday in Anglesey sitting in the back of my dad’s cortina from Lancashire

It took two days .. we used to stop overnight near Rhyl

Now you can do that journey in 3 hours

I have similar memories, though our journey was a fraction of that one (from Cheshire to Colwyn Bay area) it would still take a bit of planning when we used to do it in the car, plenty of comics to keep me and my sister occupied. Fast-forward a few years and I'm doing the same journey to pop up and see a mate for an evening out.

[Yertis]

2xChevrons said:

I'm a child of the 80s, but I can remember what an ordeal it was going from Hampshire to Cornwall.

Isn't it still?

[bloomen]

Yertis said:

Isn't it still?

It is notable how painful it is to make progress parallel to the south coast. The trains seem to take forever too.

[aeropilot]

Its odd really.

Back in July, I had to go to Newquay for the funeral of one of my uncles.
Being mid week, it was still too much to consider doing there and back in a day, not interested in that crap at my age.
So I picked one of my cousins up at maidenhead station at 4.30pm on a Tuesday (she lives North London) and even though it was first week of school hols time, and blistering weather, we arrived in Bodmin at a premier Inn with just one 15 min break at just after 8pm.
Coming back from Newquay next day after funeral was equally quick, Newquay to maidenhead with one 15 mins stop was 3.5 hrs.
One of my other cousins and her husband live in East London, and dont have a car, so they travelled down to newquay same day by train, so tube to Paddington, train to Newquay via wherever it is, but, train delays and cancellations meant, it took 4 trains, and their journey from front door to hotel in Newquay was 11 hrs....!!

[Yertis]

bloomen said:

It is notable how painful it is to make progress parallel to the south coast. The trains seem to take forever too.

If they had built the planned extension from Dorchester to Exeter, and BR Western Region had not subsequently closed it, things would be much easier.

[C70R]

aeropilot said:

Its odd really.

Back in July, I had to go to Newquay for the funeral of one of my uncles.
Being mid week, it was still too much to consider doing there and back in a day, not interested in that crap at my age.
So I picked one of my cousins up at maidenhead station at 4.30pm on a Tuesday (she lives North London) and even though it was first week of school hols time, and blistering weather, we arrived in Bodmin at a premier Inn with just one 15 min break at just after 8pm.
Coming back from Newquay next day after funeral was equally quick, Newquay to maidenhead with one 15 mins stop was 3.5 hrs.
One of my other cousins and her husband live in East London, and dont have a car, so they travelled down to newquay same day by train, so tube to Paddington, train to Newquay via wherever it is, but, train delays and cancellations meant, it took 4 trains, and their journey from front door to hotel in Newquay was 11 hrs....!!

I'm not sure it's odd for it to be easier to get to the extremities of the UK by car than by train...

[markymarkthree]

aeropilot said:

Its odd really.

Back in July, I had to go to Newquay for the funeral of one of my uncles.
Being mid week, it was still too much to consider doing there and back in a day, not interested in that crap at my age.
So I picked one of my cousins up at maidenhead station at 4.30pm on a Tuesday (she lives North London) and even though it was first week of school hols time, and blistering weather, we arrived in Bodmin at a premier Inn with just one 15 min break at just after 8pm.
Coming back from Newquay next day after funeral was equally quick, Newquay to maidenhead with one 15 mins stop was 3.5 hrs.
One of my other cousins and her husband live in East London, and dont have a car, so they travelled down to newquay same day by train, so tube to Paddington, train to Newquay via wherever it is, but, train delays and cancellations meant, it took 4 trains, and their journey from front door to hotel in Newquay was 11 hrs....!!

Just to confirm, you managed 250 miles in 3 and a quarter hours that's an average of about 80mph. I am struggling to believe that.