This is fascinating. It's easy to see where gaps in the coverage are - for example choosing Aberdeen it's obvious that there are no direct services to anywhere in North West England but there are to Devon and Cornwall which are a lot further.

It's also quicker to get to London from the Gare du Nord in Paris than it is to get to Boulogne-sur-Mare or Calais Ville...

This is going to be a real time waster....!

This whole debate hasn't really moved on since the oil price shock of 1973 following the Yom Kippur war.

At the time there were calls for houses to be better insulated,; it was predicted that car use would fall as costs rose and so on and so forth. In the event people adapted to the new prices and cars became more efficient (anyone remember the motor manufacturers emphasising the new low Cd values of their latest models...?) Building regulations have made the modern UK^▸ (United Kingdom) house much more energy efficient that the 1960s and 70s equivalents - why else does so much modern construction have such undersized fenestration?

For the last 100 years the new growth of towns and cities has been based on the use of the motor car and the organisation and spatial arrangements are largely no longer suitable for people to do most of their business within walking distance. Towns are now zoned for industrial or commercial or leisure or residential uses separating these various activities.

Without a fundamental re-organisation of built-up areas calls for people to walk or cycle more, or use the buses or trains (which for most towns up to about 100k inhabitants have little or no relevance for intra-town journeys anyway) will be ignored as these alternatives are simply not relevant for most people's transport needs.

A case in point. Until a way is found for the local corner store 10 minutes walk away can supply goods as cheaply as a supermarket 10 minutes drive away, the supermarket will continue to be preferred.

Thank you for the reference, it's nice to see some of my opinions/observations/prejudices confirmed by others!

I would just add that elsewhere I have read that one of the reasons for sameness are the design guidelines for access for refuse collecting lorries and their swept curves with the result that all roads are the same.

It's happening near me at Shinfield, just south of Reading in the Loddon Valley. Spread-out sprawl with the buses to Reading being caught up in the traffic and it's really far enough away for a light rail/tramlink to the town. But comparatively easy to reach the M4 so I fear that nothing will happen.

Hmm! In view of all the modern planning, measuring and control techniques now available, is it likely that Network Rail installed so much new track in the 'wrong' place?

And, if necessary, it shouldn't take long to check the track positioning with relation to any critical points - a laser scanner on the front of a train ought to be able to get up and back within the hour. Add a day for evaluation - and Bob's your Uncle!

Ah! That's a point I hadn't considered - fewer trains being counted.

Does that mean that there will be no numerical published results for the FfL services in future? We'll have to make do with 'Good Service' or 'Delays' as classifications...? 

I know this example is regularly trotted out for comparison, but in my defence I have to say that I first came across it in reality when I lived in Belgium and my wife and I went out for a drive one Sunday.

Search a large scale map for Baarle-Nassau or Baarle-Hertzog on the Belgium-Dutch border just north of Turnhout in Belgium, for example <https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Baarle-Nassau,+Netherlands/@51.4367821,4.8532009,12z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x47c6a5342570ab1d:0x808696d1e9939744!8m2!3d51.4451366!4d4.9295231>

There the exclaves have exclaves...!

Ouch!

Thank you for all this work - statistics beat anecdata any day of the week!

Looking at the numbers it would appear that the 'new normal' has a close similarity to the 'old normal' for the longer distance trains. Having said that the reduced numbers of IETs^▸ (Intercity Express Train) available have clearly had a strong influence on the results.

For the London and Thames Valley services is there any evidence that longer trains have had an influence in reducing boarding delays compared to the shorter Class 165/166 operated services? The 9 coach long Crossrail trains must also have had an effect even if they are not directly included in the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) statistics.

Thank you for the reference. A very informed and informative article.

My reading of the Williams-Shapps Plan is modified by profound doubts about the real reason for the document...and this reflects in the requirement for a new headquarters for Great British Railways.

A few senior civil servants in the Department for Transport (DfT^» (Department for Transport - about)) have mentioned in the past that it has been asked to adjudicate on matters that really should not be in its remit, for example, decisions on the type and number of coffee cup holders in a new, or re-built, fleet of trains. This type of activity does not sit well with the DfT's overall job of setting strategy and funding for the railways and, reading the runes, my interpretation is that the senior management of the DfT would like to hive off the 'day-to-day' railways functions performed within the DfT. Essentially these are the activities concerned with monitoring and control of the Train Operating Companies whether as franchises or state controlled operators; details of the infrastructure side have generally always been handled at arms length.

I see it as a move to reverse the decision to wind up the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA^» (Strategic Rail Authority - about)) made by Alastair Darling in 2006 which transferred the franchising functions (after the 1993 Act initially performed by the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising) to the DfT. The effect was that more and more of the minutiae of railway operation required decisions to be made at the centre.

Not all of these were advantageous - think of the West Coast franchising fiasco; setting the frameworks for franchise bids but failing to check that the infrastructure could cope with the results; setting the rules for franchising the East Coast Main Line in such a way that it was uneconomic to run, not once but twice; trying to transfer so much risk to the potential train operators that most UK^▸ (United Kingdom)-based companies decided the game was no longer worth the candle; making timetable specifications part of the franchising contract and not being able to make quick decisions on contract changes which was part of the reason for the 2018 timetable melt down; having no plan fixed in advance for what it wanted out of the Great Western Electrification programme[1]; I won't mention the Intercity Express Programme...  

As the body politic finds it so very hard indeed to say that it made a mistake I read the whole thing as a way for the DfT to get shot of the rump activities of the SRA so any future less than optimal decisions will not directly reflect on the Secretary of State. After all one of the main considerations in the Civil Service is 'Don't embarrass the Minister' and in future any awkward questions can be passed off to Great British Railways — 'Not me, Guv, try over there...'

So, basically, the train operating specifications and the infrastructure strategy will pass to the new body. Infrastructure is already devolved and day to day train operation always has been devolved for the past 180 years. So Williams/Shapps has in effect recreated the Railways Executive/British Railways and the top level organisation, the British Transport Commission/British Railways Board running trains, infrastructure, ships, hotels, workshops and a staff of half a million people, operated out of the Great Central Hotel at 222 Marylebone Road for many years.

Ships, hotels and workshops and most of the workforce are long gone - so all we need to look for is a smallish office building within walking distance of a station.

If the financial benefits being brought to a new location are seen as significant, then the headquarters staff is too big.


[1] This was in fact a logical decision as the National Audit Office strongly criticised the DfT's programme plan and handling of the West Coast Route Modernisation so it decided not to give another hostage to fortune and not have a plan at all for the Great Western.

Under what statute law, planning regulation or local government policy?

The problem here is that most intra-European freight transport uses semi-trailers or, at the most, swap bodies. Containers are almost exclusively used for deep-sea transport as they are designed to be stacked some 10 high on the big container ships. This increases their tare weight so making them less efficient for simple road or rail transport where they are not stacked.

The cost of operating transfer stations and the delay in the transit they would cause makes it very difficult to justify their use. A two hour delay in movement would see a lorry 100 miles nearer its destination - it may well have arrived at its destination before a similar container has even left the depot. And there will be two such transfers on each journey. This is quite apart from the need to identify and build suitable transfer sites - the land requirements will be quite large which in itself is not eco-friendly.

In spite of considerable work by various parties on the continent such road-rail-road transfer only occurs in a very few cases - mainly for trans-Alpine transits where special considerations apply. Even with the German government tipping the playing field towards the railways by banning all heavy goods traffic from the Autobahnen on Sundays[1] nobody has yet found a more efficient way[2] to ship goods than by HGV.

Much as I would like to see more freight traffic on the railways one has to appreciate that the current arrangements for moving freight have evolved over many years and adequately meet the requirements of the parties involved - which include the end consumer. Any changes which come about through carbon taxes and similar will be evolutionary - not revolutionary.



[1] With the exception of perishables but including all international transit traffic.
[2] 'Efficient' is a figure of merit for a combination of speed, reliability, flexibility, ability to make very quick changes in originating and end points as well as routing, reduction in pilfering, financing costs of goods in transit, and so on.

Attached is a photograph I took (while my wife was driving  ) in May 2019 of a test length being constructed on the A1 near Lübeck. The autobahn is normally three lanes but the nearside lane was closed while the wires being put up.

The published idea is to reduce the quantity of diesel fuel being used for goods transport. As Germany is also a transit country which adds to the number of heavy vehicles the road freight traffic levels have to be seen to be believed. By electrifying the trunk haul the idea is to reduce overall emission levels, leaving the HGVs with their diesel engines for off-motorway work and for working around obstructions.

There is no intention - as yet - of putting the wires up on other types of road as the design, planning and installation issues are too great. The advantage of wiring autobahnen is that the road design is consistent and allows a technical solution based on standardised components to be used.

The trouble is that distribution, whether for Morrison, Tesco or Amazon doesn't work like that.

The big 'warehouses' are not really warehouses, but sorting centres ('fulfilment centres') for goods which come in by the lorryload from many points of the compass, in the case of the supermarkets the items are picked and placed in 40 tonne trucks for delivery to one supermarket and in the case of Amazon the items are then picked and placed in vans for local delivery. Each of these vans will make probably about two delivery runs per day. The whole operation is very efficient in terms of speed of stock turnover, capital invested, reliability and flexibility and will be even less polluting at the point of use when the delivery vans are replaced by electric vehicles.

As for sorting items on a train - the Travelling Post Offices went years ago and the idea will not return. Modern sorting/picking centres are computer controlled, almost fully automatic and are very fast - just the boxing up is manual. The selection of the final local distribution run is done at this point and the items are scanned to monitor their progress through the system. Manual sorting no longer exists.

There are NO concentrated flows from one point to another in this business model for which rail is suitable, with the notable exception of a few well publicised long distance flows for supermarkets.

As for the 'straw man' argument one has to ask oneself 'Where do the '500 packages' being loaded at Paddington for the West Country come from?' There is little or no manufacturing or container 'break bulk' facilities anywhere near Paddington which could supply such packages — and certainly no company will put goods on a lorry or van and deliver them to Paddington through a Low Emission Zone when in the time taken to reach Paddington the truck could be west of Swindon.

Drones are an irrelevance – look at the requirements on, for example, this government website: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/drones-are-you-flying-yours-safely-and-legally

If I have correctly understood recent reports in the railway journals, front runner for the rolling stock for this line will be a small number of the Class 196 units being constructed for West Midland Trains.

It has always been intended that hand-me-down or second hand stock would be used for the initial section Oxford - Bletchley - Milton Keynes in order to keep the capital requirements to a minimum.

If we need to get to a decarbonised society as soon as possible then I suggest writing to Mr Xi and Mr Modi urgently...

The railway will never be completely 'decarbonised' - there are too many situations where the power of diesel engines will be needed where no external electrical supply is possible. Heavy civil engineering work comes to mind for a start.