Great Western Coffee Shop

What are the chances of this one happening?


Applying the Squirrel Formula, I reckon that's 50 miles x ^10 million/mile = ^500 million. And both terminal points are alreay rail-connected. But it has to be said that the 'via England' route is a very long way round.

Slim to non-existent in my opinion.

Slightly better than that as it would be the Welsh Government funding it - and they've more money than the UK equivalent. Still slim though, I agree

That's my view - without the Welsh angle, it would be on par (sic) with Padstow. But there are politics here - you can't get from South to North by rail without going via England as things stand, which makes Wales look like two countries not one.

As the promoters are Carmarthen based, it's natural for them to look on the route from their town.  How about the alternative Builth Road to Moat Lane Junction - much shorter and you might get a link from the Cambrian coast back up to Bangor too for about your 50 miles.   Reconnecting Caernarvon (pop 10,000) to the main rail network, and joining all three of the railway sections in Wales.   

Yes - these all very long, speculative shots.   "Not in the foreseeable future", but then who would have foreseen 30 miles of railway coming back to Galashiels, pop 12,500, when the Waverley route was closed?

The borders route will go to Edinburgh which is a massive centre of employment and should enable commuting to work within an hour for all the stations on the route.  Are Aberystwyth or Carmarthen a similar draw for the commuting population?  No.  And Swansea/Cardiff would be too far away to commute to.  So, if you don't have a large commuter base you're relying on tourists and day trippers to make up the numbers.  I don't see enough principal settlements or places of interest on the route to provide either in the numbers that would be required.  Are there really enough people out there that would use such a link to justify finding half-a-billion pounds (using Red Squirrel's estimate) to build it and then find more money to subsidise operating it?

From the "This is South Wales" article:


It may be that some of the potential passengers use the frequent Arriva bus service between the two locations, which despite being rather slow on a long and winding road, takes considerably less than 6 hours. Perhaps connectivity could be improved with better value for money to the taxpayer with a few well-targeted road improvements. If there is public subsidy available, perhaps a properly specified bus or coach service which operates as if it were part of the rail network could be contracted?

I agree that even with the generous Welsh Assembly this is an unlikely re-instatement.  The engineering obstacles begin at the buffer end of the platforms at Carmarthan (a river). 

Similarly, having recently visited the Bangor/Caernarfon area, I noted how much of the old track formation has been built over and major deviations would now need to be built on just that short stretch.  I must admit that the thought of mixed gauge track between Dinas (formerly Junction) and Caernarfon along the Welsh Highland formation in order to connect down to the Lleyn Peninsular brings a smile to my face.  :D

Highly unlikely as you will need to make some modifcations ot the current route as the trackbed is too twisty and slow so Carmarthen - Aberystwyth is likely to take 1 hour 45 minutes at the very best.

The high cost is also another resason why such a link is unlikely to go ahead


Plus in order to keep journey times as low as possible I suspect there would be very few stations along the route which agan may put off some people using the service if they have to drive a good distance to the nearest station.

Of course if new settlements etc were built as part of the line re-opening with perhaps an hourly service to Carmarthen and Swansea perhaps it could be justified.

Hopefully soon Arriva will pull the plug on their Aberystwyth - Carmarthen Cymru express service which doesnt seem to be doing to well. Hopefully then the Welsh Government will put on their TC1 service which would have run hourly from Aberystwyth to Carmarthen/Swansea from 6am til around 10pm.

In truth there are no reliable processes or analyses that can predict the effect of opening a railway. It's a punt, and always has been.

What we do know is that most of the places that the railways were built to serve grew as a direct result, whereas places bypassed by the railways didn't grow. I think we are also pretty sure that whereas a good train service attracts investment, a good bus service doesn't - because a rail service shows commitment, whereas a bus operator can up-sticks in an instant.

Out of interest, does anyone know of a re-opening project of the last 30 years that has not exceeded its passenger and revenue forecasts?

Sadly, no chance.  Much of the trackbed is still there but it should not be forgotten that the line was closed in advance of the Beeching cuts because it was flooded at Llanilar and part of the track/embankment was washed away.

Most is now part of the Ystwyth Trail cycle track.

^500m ish to create a railway that would serve two communities the size of Carmarthen and Aberystwyth is in cloud cuckoo land territory. You'd be better off using the interest payable on the loan required to build the link (let alone worrying about paying off the capital) to provide a free frequent high quality non stop coach service, which could do the journey in 90 mins (source theAA.com). 

Except that a bus is not a substitute for rail - that is the main thing Beeching got wrong.

I agree that no-one is likely to sanction an investment of this size unless it met a political aspiration, or was linked to development - Lampeter New Town, anyone?

Builth Road to Moat Lane is about 35 miles.  Still be a circuitous route though!

Ashchurch for Tewkesbury is an obvious example, although many (myself included) believe that if you provided a more regular service to the destinations passengers would actually like to travel to (ie Birmingham), then the figures would rapidly improve.

Walsall-Wolverhampton (direct) - Passenger services axed mid 1960s, reintroduced late 1990s, axed again late 2000s. Re-opening intermediate stations would probably have helped, while cutting the service back to a shuttle in the final years (it had previously extended to Wellington) probably didn't.

Melksham is a possible, but whether it strictly qualifies I don't know. I do know that BR originally wanted to offer more than the sparse re-introduced 1985 service they started with, but never went all that much further.

As we all know, opinion is divided on whether the genuine 2001-2006 attempt to run a multi-purpose service along the TransWilts corridor via Melksham was a success, with passengers/campaigners tending to be in the "yes" camp, and civil servants/rail executives tending to be in the "no" camp.

The overall lesson seems clear though - the more you frame your service offer towards what passengers actually want, the more successful your reopening project is likely to be, as obvious as that sounds.

There were two others I wondered about ... Corby and Sinfin.   Wikipedia tells us about Corby


And to complete that history, re-re-opened 2009, passenger figures in 3rd complete year 0.215 million ticketed journeys.

Sinfin, it turns out, falls outside your "30 year" request as it re-opened in 1976.   There were two stations on the branch, one only with access to factories, and the other primarily for factories although with a public footpath access available.


I'm going to suggest that the original Corby was a success initially, and that Sinfin was a special case.  In neither case do I have access to the forecasts made at the time they re-opened; did Corby fail not through lack of passengers but through lack of a long term funding strategy?


It sounds obvious, but is still a point well made and to be considered. And leads to the question "what do people actually want?". That's were we've done a lot of (local) studies in our area - and we still are doing to keep our data up to date - and we've asked questions wider, little straw polls on the form, reading Passenger Focus reports and much much more.
* Trains at times that people want / require to travel; that includes alternative trains when plans change
* Reliability, with reasonably good timekeeping and connectional reliability too
* Information about services
Factors such as facilities at stations, levels of fares, ease of use, presence and welcomingness of staff, overall journey time, etc, also come in to the equation, and many of the factors interlink.  But the main make or break tends to be "a reliable journey when you want it" for which people will move up or down by an hour during the day, or half an hour at peak times, for what I'll describe as regional journeys.

Going back to the original question:


You are asking about comparatives, so that's as much about the quality of the forecasting.  And there's a whole new can of worms in there.   If a hundred people in a survey say "I will use a service", how many really will?  And what adjustment factors should the forecasters use on such responses?   And how do you reach your audience for such a survey?   You can online sample, but then you get just the connected and informed parties replying, so you need to take a whole load of other forecasting techniques such as population and habit mapping and draw from that too.

The final part of your question was passenger and revenue.  And there you're looking too at predicting what the average fare each passenger will pay. Estimating journey types, and the mix of reduced rate to full rate, peak to off peak fares, what level the operator will set for unregulated fares, how many fare dodgers you will have [[your revenue protection regime]]

With advances in techniques, modern forecasts tend to be more informed, although I would hesitate to use the word "accurate" as there are some biasing factors ("optimism factors") that float around in official decisions which will tend to give a lower figure than actually achieved.   But then factors and forecasts - unless they model in huge detail - will assume the other issues I mentioned as key factors above are got right;  if you have a connecting 165 / 166 pulling out just as a 125 pulls in with passengers who wish to connect, you're not going to do as well as if there was a 5 minute, cross-platform change.

I understand that, but we're looking at two populations each of less than 15,000, separated by 50 miles. So the passenger volumes would be negligible, and rail journey times probably no better than a non stop coach service, thus it would be more cost effective to provide a completely free bus service than spend the money to reopen the railway and then run it at a thumping loss. 

Unfortunately Arriva's current service (complete with inadequate hours of operation) is commertial. They introduced this when the Welsh Government (via one of the local councils I believe) issued a tender to run an improved bus service with brand new Optare Tempo buses with wi-fi. Rather than compete for the tender and risk losing the route, Arriva went commertial and blocked the upgrade.

Indeed, there seems to be a very different attitude to buses compared to rail. Rail patronage has been growing (hopefully involving a fair amount of modal shift from cars) but bus travel doesn't seem to have the same appeal. Personally, I think that attitude needs to be challanged, and I think the TrawsCambria X40/X50/550/704 (Aberystwyth - Carmarthen, Aberaeron - Cardigan, Aberystwyth - Synod Inn & Synod Inn - Cardigan and Newtown - Merthyr), were starting to do that with their Optare Tempos (these routes all showed strong and/or growing patronage).

However, TrawsCambria is now dead. The Aberystwyth - Carmarthen service was supposed to be upgraded and rebranded as TrawsCymru TC1, with wi-fi and a 6am to 8pm service. Instead, Arriva introduced their own CymruExpress service, using Pulsars, and WAG might now have diverted the new buses ordered for that service to Cardiff Airport. The first bus from Carmarthen on Saturdays now doesn't reach Aberystwyth until gone 11am and in the other direction the last through service is 17:15 from Aberystwyth.

I think a decent bus service would be a wiser move than a rail link, but if Arriva continues to stand in the way of a decent bus service then WAG should be exploring other options rather than ignoring this corridor completely.

I agree, I think there have been two petitions to the National Assembly for Wales petitions commitiee since I discovered it and the petitions committee response was that the train was even slower than today's bus service. North of Lampeter there is a straight bit though, so some 90mph running there coupled with a tunnel to miss the twistest section south of there might make a useful link, but at high cost.

Aberystwyth and Carmarthen are the principal settlements for the area. Aberystwyth station has over 0.3million passengers per year on a 2-hourly service to Birmingham, a 2-hourly direct service to Cardiff would be useful if a suitable line existed. Approaching Aberystwyth from the south in the morning during the school term the road is solid traffic at about walking pace right back to Llanfairian. The old TrawsCambria X40 had the largest passenger numbers of all TrawsCambria routes.

I do wonder whether a rail alignment could be constructed from Llanfairian to Aberystwyth and used (initially) as a bus-only road until replacment by rail if and when construction of a Carmarthen to Llanfairian route is feesible. This would allow buses to bypass the morning traffic jam and encourage modal shift to bus.

Personally, I think a Moat Lane route is a better idea for linking north-south than Carmarthen - Aberystwyth but the latter by itself would be an important strategic link. If the goal is north-south, I've heard roumors that Wales would be owed a Barnet consequential of arround ^1bn if the HS2 'Y-Network' goes ahead. If so, I'd suggest using that ^1bn for a Welsh-equivalent fast 'Y-Network'. This would have a maximum linespeed of 90mph rather than 200-odd, feature some upgraded track (on the Cambrian lines) rather than purely new-build and have some single-track sections. This would consist of:

Trunk

• Merthyr - Brecon new route (roughly following A470) - electrified as part of the ValleyLines
• Brecon - Builth Road (about 50/50 new route and reopenned line)
• Builth Road - Rhayader reopenned line
• Rhayader - Llanidloes new route
• Llanidloes - Moat Lane reopenned line

West Branch

• Portmadog - Bryncir new route
• Bryncir - Caernarfon - Bangor reopenned line

East Branch

• Welshpool - Oswestry - Gobowen reopenned line

Going on a ^9.8million per-mile rate derived from the Scottish borders railway project I guesstimate that you would just about get all 101miles of new railway from that ^1bn (the Cambrian upgrades and some of the tunnels would probably edge it over the ^1bn mark though). North of Brecon I would envisage an hourly service from Brecon to Newtown extending in alternate hours to Wrexham and Bangor/Holyhead.

From the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-26670962):

Sure it would be to have this line re-opened but I think it would struggle to justify the cost of re-opening especially with the route being pretty slow compared to the roads.

Of course if a business case can be done for it and the linespeeds improved then by all means re-open the line a hourly service to/from Swansea  I think would be popular

Yep, the speed is an issue. Also, your comment of an hourly service to Swansea highlights another issue, the range of detinations at the Carmarthen end is poor.

In my opinion, it isn't worth building a new or reopened railway unless:

• The route proposed can give a journey time of 1hr 30mins or (prefrably) faster AND
• An hourly express service between Carmarthen and Cardiff, taking 1hr 25mins MAXIMUM, is introduced, with a programme of linespeed improvements planned to reduce the time further

The former makes the line itself time-competitive and the latter widens the potential pool of destinations to include major trip generators such as Cardiff. My idea then would be to extend that hourly Cardiff express to/from Aberystwyth every two hours (in the other hours it would extend to/from Milford Haven instead and Aberystwyth would have a service to/from Swansea).

From the Carmarthen Journal

http://www.carmarthenjournal.co.uk/Hopes-90-minute-Carmarthen-Aberystwyth-rail-link/story-25883713-detail/story.html?

There are a few major obstacles to a new line actually, from the south end north:

• The Gwili steam railway, and a very slow, twisty, section of the former route just north of it. This would probably require one or more new tunnels, as far as I can tell from a map
• Llanfarian village, which appears to have built extensively on the old line
• One house, seemingly bang on the trackbed, at Rhydyfelin
• Penparcau, where a substantial hill would probably need to be tunneled through (the old route into Aberystwyth has been built on, and along with Llanfarian this seems to account for most of the 3% of lost track bed)
• Park Avenue / Boulevard De St Brieuc, which as far as I can see would require a new level crossing (hence my interest in the Portishead debate)
• and, maybe, London Bridge (yes, really)

A possible solution to the last 5 has been proposed here (http://oggybloggyogwr.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/making-tracks-in-west-wales.html), taking a very different route and approaching Aberystwyth from the east down the Vale Of Rehidol rather than the from the south. I'd be very supprised if you can do that without a really long new tunnel.

Reading the posts it seems to me that much I would like to see new/reopened lines in Wales the only really pratical one is Bangor - Caernarfon. Which would give access to the National Network for Caernarfon residents and a great tourist route incrporating the Welsh Highland and Ffestingiog giving roud trips from from the North Wales coast.

Also how about an all year round diesel railcar service on the WHR and FR? For locals and winter climbers. 

Caenarfon like Galashields would need a run round. Capacity might have to be increased on the Llandudno - Bleanau Ffestiniog Line.

Otherwise I agree with the comments tha it is no good just reopening a line you have to run a train service that people want to use which is morning trains to big town to arrive before 09:00 and connections where apprriate to London/nearest city. Off peak trains for shopping and early evening ones for entertainment. Return journies between 16:00 and 19:00 for workers and city connections plus late evening for entertainment and city.

A question from a member of the audience at the Aberystwyth TrawsLinkCymru meeting was whether a light-rail or guided busway could be alternatives to a new Carmarthen - Aberystwyth heavy rail line. My first thought was that there would be no point, given my opinion (as stated above) that the journey time would need to beat the car in order to justfiy the large investment in building the line. However, given that I cannot see a way to do the rail project in phase, I have started to wonder whether you could build parts of it as dedicated bus infrustructure. Then, if you ever completed the entire route, you could convert it to a railway. There are a number of open questions relating to that:

1. which is cheapest to build: road (which would be bus-only), rail or guided busway?
2. which would be easier to convert to a railway at a later date, road or guided busway?
3. are there any advantages of a guided busway over a dedicated, bus-only, road?

Some guesses to answers.  I know nothing much about these things, so these are foolish passenger guesses!

Don't know, but I suspect rail v bus depends on what you're starting from.  Busway always most expensive?

Road, BUT you only ask "easier". Neither would be easy.

a) Potentially it attracts serious EEC and other development / experimentation funding which a road does not
b) In the event of a political change in the future, it safeguards the route for a limited vehicle set
c) It gives you more publicity than you would get from building a road

Certainly not guided busway if Cambridge is anything to go by!


Probably not much difference unless you engineered the busway as slab track ready - still very expensive though!


Not that I can think of.

However....

Busways are only normally proposed in urban or other areas where congestion make car journeys very slow.  Now although the standard of roads in West Wales may make car journeys seem slow, I don't recall congestion being a major issue (unless you count being stuck behind a tractor).  

The idea of a bus-way bus only road in such a location will never stack up on any cost benefit analysis.  Based on Cambridge costs a bus-way would cost over ^600 million. If the money is spent on roads is will be for piecemeal improvement of the A487 which could achieve similar journey time improvements at a fraction of that cost. That would have no option of conversion to railway.

No either set out to reopen the railway or not.


Again these arguments would only really work in a congested urban area.

Thanks for the answers so far, but other's views are welcome too.

A busway sounds rather pointless so far then, except perhaps stopping somebody openning the route up for cars in future. A road being only for buses is may generate some agrument from motorists and therefore possibly some extra publicity.

Does walking-pace traffic for over a mile and a half along the A487 count? Hit Aberystwyth at the wrong time on a school/college morning and chances are you will see just that. There are lorries to get stuck behind too, lots of 'em.

^600m for how much busway? The whole distance from Aberystwyth to Carmarthen? If so, that's similar to what has been guestimated for the railway and if not, then the railway is a clear winner.

The 1.5mile section of the A487 that I mentioned above is rather boxed-in by houses, no room to dual it I strongly suspect. Thus, it would require an all-new alignment for bus-road/busway, which could in theory be designed as a future rail route (I've mentioned my idea for a bus-only road on just that section on this fourm before now).

Couldn't agree more


In places like Bristol the whole city is gridlocked in the peak.  Its a different scale. In Swindon some of my colleagues drive 5 miles to work.  Off peak it can be done in 15 minutes.  In the peak it takes over an hour! It is nearly as fast to walk! That is congestion.  Oh and the bus would go 10 miles, involve changing buses, taking even longer and still leave a 10 minute walk from the bus to the office!


The Cambridge busway was 15 miles and cost about ^200 million. Carmarthen to Aberystwyth is 49 miles I simply multiplied by three!


If that is the only really congested section then sort that.  Once it is established as a bus lane that serves local buses I think it would be very difficult to persuade people that it should be converted to a railway. 

Perhaps if a new corridor is created for a bus route then the corridor should be wide enough to incorporate a railway at a later date?

1. which is cheapest to build: road (which would be bus-only), rail or guided busway?

The Cambridge busway did indeed cost getting on for ^200m to build, and an alarming list of recently found defects might add up to another ^150m to the bill. That's for a 12 mile route that is guided where it doesn't need to be (in open country) and unguided where it should be (into the city centre).

Ultra Light Rail is a possibility and there is track that can be laid at an estimated ^350k per route kilometre. ULR suffers from lack of examples - the Parry system at Stourbridge does not seem to count, and there are new stye units in development that bridge the perception gap more effectively between tram and train. ULR badly needs a test case to prove its worth.

2. which would be easier to convert to a railway at a later date, road or guided busway?

Having a guided busway does mean that the trackbed is preserved - as would asphalt I guess - but the busway comes with the added environmental aspect of concrete, I think Cambridge has 100,000 tonnes of it in 12 miles.

3. are there any advantages of a guided busway over a dedicated, bus-only, road?

I don't know the route you are talking about, but I would have thought for a rural operation, the answer is none. A busway does allow for rapid passing, but it has scant operational flexibility (each busway is a groove that you can only get off of at designated points where the speed has to be reduced at about 10mph). It also has a nasty habit of attracting vehicles trying to drive on it

I think the key point is what will attract more traffic - bus or train (whether it is ULR or heavy rail), and the answer to that is surely train?

Some more background that may help those who are not convinced by the guided bus hype.The text below was provided by our group CAST.IRON - the people who opposed the Cambridge busway - to the local media in response to a recent question about busways:

We still do not believe there is any tangible evidence of the ^success^ of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway scheme in terms of it being a proven, better alternative than coordinated train and bus services appropriate to any given area. The constant stream of passenger number statistics doesn^t tell us anything because it doesn^t analyse journeys not made on the guided sections. The statistics cover Peterborough to Trumpington but between Cambridge station and Milton road, and north of St Ives, the buses are the same as any other.
 
In short, we don^t accept that the guideway is what is driving the passenger numbers; and we believe much wider benefits would have come with reinstatement of the railway.
 
The problem with the Cambridgeshire scheme is that it obliterated a viable rail route on an alignment that makes geographical sense as a railway, not as a bus route; for buses to derive benefits from the segregation of the guideway they have to travel well over a mile along congested streets in the wrong direction. Meanwhile a route that could be part of the local, regional, national and international rail network is lost.
 
The minimum journey time from Cambridge station to St Ives on the busway is 42 minutes subject to congestion in Cambridge. The same route by railway would have been less than 20 minutes.
 
CAST.IRON does not have a particular view on the viability of guided busways elsewhere although we did do some detailed work on the construction side of things and showed that the volume and mass of material required (for the guideways) is many times greater than for a railway with a much lower potential for maximum passengers carried. This is one of the reasons why there have been such serious construction and maintenance problems on the Cambridgeshire scheme.
 
We believe guided busways generally offer poor value for money compared with integrated rail and bus schemes. Unfortunately for Cambridgeshire, the only money on the table was for an exclusive busway.

==

Note that last comment about money - there was a lot of government ringfencing going on to get what they wanted - a substantial busway

More background info at www.castiron.org.uk

Following up on an old post (but on a thread / topic that's been very much live), I came across extra comment on the Sinfin branch:
http://www.railchronology.free-online.co.uk/Sinfin%20branch.htm

On Corby, the closure of the initial 'trial' even with good numbers because of - it seems - the lack of a longer term solution in those days has provided us on the TransWilts with a warning example that even with passengers standing 6 days out of 7, we need(ed) to have an eye forward to 2017.  I am clearly relieved by the 23.3.2015 announcements, though there remains a need to ensure continued good ridership, local support, and to have a benign and co-operative on things to ensure nothing becomes disconnected in the even of delays / upheavals, as so nearly happened when the West Coast Franchise got "pulled" and everything else was put on hold ...

From the Daily Post (http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/watch-reopening-caernarfon-bangor-train-7590688) - an answer to a question  upthread:

From the Cambrian News (http://www.cambrian-news.co.uk/article.cfm?id=106255&headline=Railway+line+reopening+plan+may+hit+the+buffers&sectionIs=news&searchyear=2016)


As a more general comment, I wonder how many other schemes will be set back (or stated to be set back)  because of the vote.

Hmm......were there any *physical* plan or just still on the wishlist? Had Grip3 been done?

At the very earliest stage of the wish list.  I'd describe them more as dreams than plans at this stage.

so not really delayed at all....

And I will eat my hat if they ever get beyond the 'dream' stage, whatever the financial state of the nation!

I think you mean 'if it ever gets built'. They've already had a scoping study done and obtained a grant of £2500 from Aberystwyth Town Council to get footage of the line from the air, which sounds to me like it is slightly beyond the dream stage.

Yes, I would agree with you there.  Alter the word 'dream' to 'GRIP 3'  ;)