Great Western Coffee Shop

From The BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50230931)


It looks like we have a general election in December.

Whilst I think the main topic touted by various parties and acting as a differentiator is likely to be the future relationship of the UK with the European Union, each political party's plans for transport, and each individual candidates views, are likely to be aired.  Transport issues are tied with environmental issues - climate change, clean air, congestion of resources, etc.

As well as national, international and worldwide concerns, there is an opportunity to raise more local matters with candidates during the next few weeks.  What issues should we raise at all (geographic) levels?  What are we looking for in our new chosen MPs?  Will the issues even get a look in, or are we in for a fight that looks at the very specific relationship between us and our neighbours to the exclusion of both worldwide and local issues?

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My quotation at the top is a brief one.  We are, though, going to have a choice in various places between Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Brexit Party, Green, Plaid Cymru, and others.  I am on dangerous ground here listing parties, but each of the seven I have named seems - in my view - to have a chance of winning a seat which includes a station / service operated by GWR or is near to one.

I suspect that Brexit will crowd out other important issues such as transport.
The environment and climate change might get a look-in with each party promising various reviews and studies and perhaps making rather vague long term promises that avoid having to do much in the near term.

At the very least I want to see acknowledgement that both bus deregulation and rail franchising have been ideological failures.

Public transport should be publicly managed, be that at national and/or local level. There are no reasons I can see that should prevent models based on what occurs in London being used across the UK.

All that the privatisation models currently used nationally have done is see profits privatised and losses (aka subsidy) nationalised.

Brexit will black out everything else.
I expect to see plenty of allegiances and tactical voting this time for people to get their idealist Brexit outcome

Was it Corbyn or McDonald who memorably promised to electrify to Penzance in the first term of a Labour Government, at the last election ?

Leaving ideology out of decisions, whether favouring private or public sector, is generally the best policy.

From the Manchester Evening News (https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/could-tories-poised-promise-new-17218291)


The Northern Powerhouse is the SnTB for the north of England.  Is this a regurgitated promise or a new one, and if it's a new one, might we expect announcements for Western Gateway, South Western Peninsular, England's Heartland and  Transport for the South East? Will these plans materialise into real, opened, new rail facilities should the Conservatives win the election?

I hear the Tories are pledging to invest in a £500m 'Beeching reversal fund' to revitalise towns cut off from the country (= 'England & Wales'? England?)'s railway network. How many miles of track and/or new stations would that equate to?

 

One maybe?  ;)

Station or mile?  ;)

I tend to avoid politics on social media like the plague, especially when there's an election on.  But I think it is a bit rich for a party which has cancelled electrification all over the place, sat on a Network Rail proposal to improve capacity in Manchester for 2 years, and dithered about how much of the Trans Pennine route to electrify for a similar length of time, having bigged up the Northern Powerhouse,how many years ago, to start promising £500m to open a few branch lines.

Borders railway was about £10 million per miles (35 miles, £350 million) but that's 2012 prices and I have seen it said that there were relatives few major obstacles on the way.  At a guess £500 million today might get you 40 miles of new railway, plus or minus a few.

Now ... Skelmersdale, Wisbech, Skipton to Colne (though than may not add any towns back to the network), Tavistock, Portishead.    Ashington - Blyth - Newcastle also mentioned, although that's open for freight so may not be quite so expensive (some hope!).   Report in Daily Mail pictures "The Worcester to Derby Main Line Railway between Stourbridge and Burton" and says "Tories hope they can woo disaffected Leavers in the Midlands and the North", which ain't us ...

Back in 2014, £875m or so was being quoted as the cost of reinstating the inland route from Exeter to Plymouth. £90m is now being quoted for the Bere Alston-Tavistock section of that route alone, and the estimates for a Portishead reopening are in the region of £115m....

£500m spread right across the country would maybe leave GWRland with just about enough to relay the track from Carne Point to Fowey. Whether or not it would stretch to reopening the halt at Golant is, however, doubtful.

£655 million could get you a new front door for a tube station... https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/09/16/new-photos-from-london-undergrounds-bank-station-upgrade/

Even I consider that to be a bit pessimistic !
I would expect at least a dozen miles of track and a couple of small stations for that much.
Allowing not just for construction costs but also for newtsanbats inquiries

Half a Reading reconstruction and associated works at 2015 prices, I reckon

There are a lot of posts around at the moment / questions as to funamentals such as who should run the railways.  A combination of the election campaign, perceived problmems with the franchising system and inquiries for the likes of the Williams report have brought this to the fore and there's all sort of stuff on social media.  From my feed at https://www.facebook.com/philvr/posts/2758701990841447 shared from https://www.facebook.com/966163353563533/photos/a.966174170229118/1280990762080789/


Yeah, right ...

The pacer trains in current service were built in 1985 rather than 1980 (classes 140 and 141 were withdrawn by 1997) and were built new using new components to the same design as bus components - not (as far as I know) recycled pieces from buses. It is true that they have lasted nearly twice as long as was originally intended - so have many other trains; if it ain't bust, dont fis it. They are not (never have been?) in used in London and the South East, in Scotland, or in Northern Ireland - so not really "across the UK". And I can't think of any journey that could be made on a pacer which could be made by air, even before we start doing a price comparison.

Vienns to Budapest ... cheapest fare £39, I believe,  Please check, but that new figure comes from the follow up comments on Facebook, which the original poster has admitted may be the cheapest fare (though online I can find other intermediate figures).  Vienna to Budapest is avout 250km - about the same as London to Cardiff, which I can buy in advance for £35.50 (many fares at around £40, occasionally £27.50)

I would rather suspect that members here wouldn't be very happy about having a pacer run a scheduled London to Cardiff services, nor would something like the trains used from Paris to Zurich be suitable for the Barry Island to Aberdare service. Th epost compares apples to hamburgers!

So - having concluded that there are some errors and inaccurcies in social media posts such as this one, what would a balanced comparison look like?  I found a (2017) comparison at BCG (https://www.bcg.com/en-gb/publications/2017/transportation-travel-tourism-2017-european-railway-performance-index.aspx) (not sure who they are, but data and methods smell good)  They look at:



I'll leave forum mambers to read that report ... which puts the UK at the top of "tier 2" (of 3) - 8th out of 25 countries looked at.

After reading the above posts, it’s clear to see why we don’t see much in the way of reopening stations and lines...it’s so jolly expensive!

..and I've just realised that the £500m will just be for consultants' fees for preparing the planning applications ;D

BCG are Boston Consulting Group. The thing that immediately stands out from that graph is Tier 3 is the ex-socialist countries of Eastern Europe (plus Portugal and Ireland). They've pursued various paths of rail privatization since and probably don't have much in common (particularly with Portugal and Ireland) other than a generally lower GDP. It could be as simple as that.

Good to see the BCG report has GB near the top on safety. We should not have to choose, but if we do that is the one I would have as a priority. Interesting the take on intensity of use when we know so many of the issues  about our railways are capacity constraints. 

An interesting quote from the BCG (https://www.bcg.com/en-gb/publications/2017/transportation-travel-tourism-2017-european-railway-performance-index.aspx) Report that Grahame refferenced is of relevance to party policies and the General Election:


(https://boston-consulting-group-res.cloudinary.com/image/fetch/w_1240,q_auto,f_auto/http://image-src.bcg.com/Images/European%20Railway%20Performance%20Index_ex04_tcm-151893.jpg)

So - looks like you get what you pay for.

From Railway World (https://railwayworld.net/2019/11/29/railways-and-the-2019-general-election/)


I am going - at the risk (!) of being a bit selective


Speculation - might this be something to do with two constituencies ...

Lancaster and Fleetwood. (Held by the Conservatives to 2015 then Labour more recently)

Walsall North. (Held by Labour until 2017 when it went Conservative)

Further down, talking of all the parties


North Somerset - Conservative, strong majority
North East Cambridgeshire - Conservative, strong majority
Wansbeck - Labour, strong majority

That's an interesting one, grahame.

In terms of the current MP, Dr Liam Fox: he is indeed in a secure seat.

However, in our recent local council elections, the Conservatives were absolutely annihilated - the deputy leader even lost his seat (to spend more time with his helicopters, perhaps) and there is not one Conservative on the new executive.  ::)

The impetus to restore the Portishead branch line to passenger service must be maintained, however.  :-X

From the Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/labour-rail-fares-cut-trains-peak-tickets-seasons-guards-strike-a9228621.html)


If implemented as described - examples

Peak single, Melksham to Paddington down from £88.50 to £28.23 (or £18.91)
Peak single, Melksham to Swindon down from £8.60 to £4.26 (or £2.92)
First figure - current peak single.  Second - a tenth of current 7 day season. Third - that will extra 33% off

Will the trains have sufficient peak capacity for extra traffic generated?
Where is the extra income stream to make up the difference?
Who will buy weekly seasons in the future - does this rocket the number of transactions?

Ooooooooooo's gonna pay for it?  :)

I think that's the colloquial form of


 ;D ;D


Of course, not all reductions would be as spectacular as the peak single examples ... but still (with 33% general reduction) I would expect the typical fare to halve.    More than double the number of passengers and you'll be back to the same income level, though I expect you would have some (understatement) overcrowding issues - especially in the peak as the financial persuasion to travel off peak would be much reduced.

Even by the standards of this election campaign, that fares pledge by Labour is extraordinary.  The industry simply isn’t ready, willing or able to cope with the fallout from it.

But unfortunately if the industry tries to explain the fallout, they’ll just be portrayed as causing the problem.  Difficult to see where a realistic response to this comes from...

Paul

More from the ever growing magic money tree https://road.cc/content/news/269151-labour-pledges-ps50-head-active-travel-spend-get-england-cycling (https://road.cc/content/news/269151-labour-pledges-ps50-head-active-travel-spend-get-england-cycling) 
As one of the comments says, like here, how much would get siphoned off before its supposed destination.

That would come to about £3.25 billion, assuming "per head" includes children, non-UKers, etc. So I don't know where they get the £7.2 billion pa figure. Or is it just my arithmetic? (Quite likely.  ::)) Anyway, £3.25 billion sounds immense but at 10% of the total transport budget, it's still tiny compared to the amount that gets spent on roads and indeed railways. https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/year_spending_2019UKbn_17bc1n_6065#ukgs302

I see that article mentions "the £17 per person per year, rising to £34 annually by 2025, called for by campaign groups belonging to the Cycling & Walking Alliance" (a group I've never heard of). In practice, in the event of a Labour government being elected, I'd be amazed if the figure even reaches £17 by 2024. I'd be pretty surprised if it reached that even with a Green government tbh.

£1.5Bn/yr extra subsidy - 1/3 off fares or 750stkm/yr  (c233 route miles)  of electrification?

OTC

Quite. That's the problem with promises to cut fares or make them free- they are never funded properly and inevitably end up coming out of maintenance or investment budgets.

I find myself looking at all the furriery at fare rises and inequalities, with everyone saying the system should be sorted out, but everyone who could sort it out if frightened to so.   On the basis that the winners will soon forget and the losers will remember at the next election.    But here's a thought - reduce the fares not by a third but (on average) by a sixth (on average) to sort out the inequities, and use the other half for 100 miles of electrification - catching up on things that have been postponed and where it can make a big capacity difference.   Of course, it won't happen, because the high (pence per mile) prices are to and from the more affluent places, and the party suggesting the fare cuts won't want to give benefit to the "rich places" rather than their "poorer" heartland.

I don't like the sound of 'furriery' - it sounds a bit like people making gloves and hats out of my close relatives. Did you mean 'furore'?

Red Squirrel in furry fury at furore in furriery!

For f***s... we'll stop right there. grahame is a wonderful provider of the witchcraft that is the interweb, and I shan't level criticism at him for his occasional typo.

Use him or loose him.

Sound advise, Tony.   ;)

Yes, I did ... right word got stuck in the smell checker on my computer as I posted (bad workman blames his tools, mind - I do have trouble smelling sometimes).

Is the promised fare reduction in addition to the free unicorn* for every child, or instead ?
*vegan alternative under discussion.

While we are in pedantry mode-


Advice, I think!

Apologies for coming late to this party but in my genealogy project I've been trying to track down a great great grandfather, and its started to get a bit like Captain Ahab and Moby Dick...

I am always very cynical about anything that a politician offers in a manifesto, and more than ever with this one because you cannot just go arouhd reducing rail fares in isolation. If it were to happen (a big IF of course) then what about the Law of Unintended Consequences:

1. Increasing demand. The railways are hardly coping with the demand they've got in the peak at the moment.

2. Potentially even more long distance commuting. In my view (and who knows broadgage might agree with me :) ) commuting is the elephant in the room when looked at in relation to CO2 emmissions. When I was a kid, nobody commuted much further than from the suburbs to the centre of the same town or city. I spent a working life deliberately not commuting - the longest commute I ever had only happened between April and December 1980 between Chipping Sodbury and Chippenham, and then only because it took that long to sell one house amd buy another closer to my new job. When my employer changed its base in Chippenham in 1997 my commuting time quadrupled - from two minutes to eight...

3. If long-distance commuting did increase we may see an increasing number of pleasant market towns and villages turning into ghost towns during the day as most of the working age population clears off for the day. This would also probably see increasing house prices in those towns and villages, and yet more pricing younger people out of the housing market. These people also have a habit of driving to stations - more pollution then...

3. Are employers going to be as "generous" with future pay rises if they know their staff's travel to work costs have gone down by a third?

There is an old joke/ wry comment in my extended neck of the woods. "At 8am every weekday, half the population of Cheltenham get in their cars and commute to Gloucester. At the same time, half the population of Gloucester get in their cars and commute to Cheltenham."

What are we doing it for???

I've seen the opinion polls, and I think I know how this election is going to pan out (more or less) - but something rather surprised me today. I drove along the A370 from Weston to Bristol, looking out for political signs and posters. I'd normally expect to see dozens of 'Vote Conservative' signs here, but I saw none at all; just two Lib Dem signs and an EU flag.

Interesting times.

I offer you some suggestions

a) I've heard suggestions that the Conservatives aren't pushing to get lots of posters out there in order to show their core voters that they need to vote - that the election is not a foregone conclusion

b) as an alternative, I've heard there might be a last week short / sharp postering campaign to help surge the Tory vote

c) You need to be far braver in this election than in previous ones to put up a sign.  We put one up and have been vandalised for the first time in 20 years in Melksham.  At first we thought "local twits" but then others reported vandalism too - similar 'signature' and a long way from being on someone's way home from the pub!

d) Many families are split and can't agree within their household

On your point 2 ... long distance community into London is already being actively encouraged.  New "Superfast" trains - initially in the peak - will should whisk people from Chippenham none-stop to London as from 16th December, in the process nearly doubling the maximum peak hour gap between trains from Chippenham for the shorter commute to Swindon.  A new train at 05:23 from Trowbridge and 05:33 from Melksham will provide an interchange at Swindon for a London arrival scheduled by 07:00, and the final train back has been pushed from a London departure of 19:00 to 19:12 last year (Monday to Thursday) and 19:48 from 16th December.  Still too early for taking in a show or leisure activities in Swindon - but great for the London commuter.

Large numbers of new homes are being built in Chippenham, Melksham and Trowbridge, and there's even a new station proposed at Ashton Park just south of Trowbridge in an area to be covered with houses.  This suggestion cm not from the community wanting a station, but left field from a local government / LEP study looking ahead at rail development across the area.

I will admit to liking commuters, mind you.  Without them, we could not have got even close to the target passenger numbers during our 2013 - 2016 trial service period, let alone coming in with twice the requested numbers.

Fleetwood has been more damaged by its removal from the fishing industry than by disconnection from the national railway. It is now connected to Blackpool by the modern light railway that replaced much of the old tramway, and will soon be connected directly to Blackpool North station as soon as the Wilko store in the way is gone.

(https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7884/46209047495_751d974ef1_b.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2dpkrVr)2019-02-16 019 (https://flic.kr/p/2dpkrVr) by John McCarthy (https://www.flickr.com/photos/140404710@N06/), on Flickr

I have it on authority that discussion is moving forward quite smoothly on rebuilding the former Fleetwood rail line as an extension of the light rail system from round about Fleetwood Football Club to Poulton-le-Fylde station. There, it will deliver passengers to the ultra-modern 25 KV AC railway. Further plans are afoot to extend the North Station spur to Victoria Hospital, and to run trams to Lytham St Annes alongside the existing heavy rail line to Blackpool South. In both cases, there is plenty of former industrial land upon which new houses could be built, to add to the benefit offered by greater connectivity. My source, btw, is a conservative town councillor, who is so mad about trams that he moved house to be able to see them more.

Had the conversation with my barber today. We both came to the conclusion were on the fence in multiple directions. Our incumbent MP only ever tows the party line. She blocks anyone from social media that so much as questions her on anything she can’t answer in the party line.
The Lib Dem bloke is a well known local advocate and does a lot of community work, but could we vote for Lib Dem’s, is it a wasted vote here when it’s a Tory Labour two horse race pretty much

I'm not so sure ... I look at the numbers and see it as one horse ... but if that horse should stumble, there are two other horses quite close behind it.    From the last general election:

Unicorn for every child now cancelled.

After I had cornered the market in Unicorns as well  ;) ;)

"Wicked fat cat privateers corner the market in unicorns and thereby profiteer at the expense of needy children. If elected, the labour party will ban profiteering from unicorns, by introducing statutory price controls, and will set up state unicorn farms, to be run by workers co=operatives for the common good, without private profit"