Cotswold Line redoubling: 2008 - 2011

[whole diary]

[willc]

One driver told me that whenever he's on time leaving Moreton he gets the train up to 90mph and then coasts for about 3 miles before braking for Kingham. The slight downhill gradient means the trains speed only drops to about 80mph and so only a few seconds are lost and an on time departure from Kingham is easily achieved and 3 miles worth of fuel is saved. Sensible driving I say

Quite agree. The thing is, I sometimes get the feeling that some drivers are more confident about their knowledge of the route than others. It may be unfair, but my impression is the Bristol HSS^▸ (High Speed Services) link drivers and the Oxford crews (for obvious reasons of local knowledge) are happier than those from Reading or London, who seem to prefer belting up and down Brunel's magic carpet to getting fully to grips with one of his more testing creations, where technique and the kind of skill and knowledge you describe play an important part in punctual running.

If I'm on a Hereford service (Bristol crewed) that's five minutes down at Moreton in the morning, I'm pretty confident it will be back near time at Oxford, unless checked at Wolvercot, whereas on other workings, even with three or four minutes of timing allowance built in, no time is clawed back.

[Worcester_Passenger]

Can anybody tell us anything more about Aston Magna curve - I'd always assumed that this was a fix for a landslip problem on the previously-straight(er) alignment, but I've never found when the fix had to be done.

[willc]

No, it's an entirely original section of the line. I think Brunel just found that it was the best thing he could do in the situation, as the rising ground between Moreton and Aston Magna means the line is forced up above the floor of the valley of the Blockley Brook here and the position of the village pushed him against the hillside, which pretty much dictated that the curve would be tighter then he would normally have liked.

I suspect he wasn't overly bothered, as every train on the line stopped at Moreton, so trains would either be starting to slow down or accelerating after the stop and in the days of steam locos 40mph probably didn't seem too restrictive.

[Worcester_Passenger]

I'm surprised to learn that it's original. Always seems to me (as you go past) that there's a widening of the formation at the two 'ends' of what I'd assumed was the deviation - at grid references 196362 and 200355.

You can look at the 1:50000 OS^▸ (Ordnance Survey) map at http://www.multimap.com/maps/?qs=aston+magna&countryCode=GB#map=52.02065,-1.70849|15|4&dp=904&bd=useful_information&loc=GB:52.01938:-1.71329:14|aston%20magna|Aston%20Magna,%20Moreton-in-Marsh,%20Gloucestershire,%20England,%20GL56%209 (wow, that's a link-and-a-half!)

What's the linear water feature at 197358, on what I'd assumed was the "straight" alignment?

Good photo of the curve at http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/68385.

[willc]

The wide formation is partly a legacy of the old Aston Magna siding, which served a brickworks next to the line until 1957. There was also a small signalbox on the opposite side of the line until the mid-1940s. The linear feature may well be something left on the site of the brickworks. Next time I'm passing that way, I'll try to have a closer look.

[Btline]

It looks as though the track is more on the inward side in that photo. They should be able to fit the new track on the outer radius.

[IndustryInsider]

It looks as though the track is more on the inward side in that photo. They should be able to fit the new track on the outer radius.

Yes - I think that there's room throughout the curve for an extra track (including the road bridge at one end), and so hopefully double track 70mph running can retained. Whether the 75mph and 100mph sections can be retained, and even enhanced, after the additional track is added is less certain from what I've seen.

[Chris from Nailsea]

Thanks, chaps!

Please excuse me for being a bit of an amateur here, but if that curve is original (as in, built by IKB^▸ (Isambard Kingdom Brunel), I mean), would it have been designed then for broad gauge - and thus there is room for doubling now?

[Btline]

Cotswold line was not broad gauge as it was built by the "OWW^▸ (Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton)" - Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton railway (aka Old Worse and Worse).

[Worcester_Passenger]

It looks as though the track is more on the inward side in that photo. They should be able to fit the new track on the outer radius.

If the track has been slewed across the formation in order to ease the curve, then you'd expect it to be on the inside at that point. It probably slews back to the "other" side as it straightens out - which would mean that you couldn't maintain the existing speed limit with double track.

[willc]

Cotswold line was not broad gauge as it was built by the "OWW^▸ (Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton)" - Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton railway (aka Old Worse and Worse).

It certainly was built to broad gauge, or, more accurately mixed gauge. The clearest evidence which remains today, apart from the wide, flat-arch Brunel bridges spanning the line, is the spacing of the platforms at Moreton-in-Marsh. Although the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) rebuilt them later in the 19th century, their position remained unchanged, so there is a far wider gap than usual 'four-foot' between the tracks through the station.

Only one or two broad gauge test trains ever ran on the line, and one got all the way to Wolverhampton. This epic trip began from Oxford at 11.30am on Maundy Thursday 1854 - after a row at Oxford station which saw Brunel banned from travelling on the train. It reached Wolverhampton at 6.30pm. Due to missing a broad gauge crossover at Bilston, the train was then propelled by the locomotive all the way back to Evesham before it could be moved to the front of the train (the broad gauge facilities were somewhat skimpy apparently). They finally returned to Oxford at 5am on Good Friday! The only regular broad gauge services on OWW tracks were GWR trains between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, which used the short section from Priestfield to Wolverhampton Low Level in the 1860s.

For an account of the shenanigans over the gauge of the line, see John Boynton's book The Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, published by Mid England Books in 2003, which draws on Michael Hale's Brunel's Broad Gauge in the Black Country, published in 1997.

The road bridge at Aston Magna predates the singling of the line, so no problems fitting double track through it.

[Btline]

None of the line between Oxford and Wolverhampton was broad gauge/ mixed. It was not GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway). Perhaps some was engineered that way in case, but I expect money ran out/ there were arguments.
 
There is no way the line was broad gauge - take a look at Rainbow Hill tunnel at Worcester (and a lot of the other bridges, tunnels and platforms I dare say).

There was a broad line from Oxford to Wolverhampton, but it went via the Cherwell Valley and Birmingham.

Broad gauge never reached Worcester.

I have a book with a map with the gauges (including mixed gauge). Cotswold was standard only.

[IndustryInsider]

A couple of quotes from Wikipedia to try and clear up the confusion...

The line between Oxford and Worcester was constructed under an 1845 Act of Parliament and opened in 1851 as part of the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway.

The Act required the line to be built to Brunel's broad gauge (7 ft 0^ in / 2,140 mm) but delays, disputes and increasing costs led to its being completed as standard gauge (4ft8^).

The Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton railway was a company authorised on 4th August 1845 to construct a railway line from the Oxford and Rugby Railway at Wolvercot Junction to Worcester, Stourbridge, Dudley, and Wolverhampton, with a branch to the Grand Junction Railway at Bushbury. This would be known as the Oxford-Worcester-Wolverhampton Line.

The company was overseen by the Great Western Railway (GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway)) from the start, and was taken over by West Midlands Railway not long after the line was completed, which in turn was amalgamated into the GWR in 1862.

So, in some respects you're both right, though Will has the edge on accuracy I think!

[Btline]

That makes sense!

Clearly Morton was built before the cash ran out, and Rainbow tunnel after! It would be Worcester that gets the c**p track layout!

I am very confident that no Kidderminster - Worcester section is broad gauge. Neither Shrub Hill (there are gaps but these were for four tracks once), not Foregate Street are broad.

The map I spoke about should mention the fact that broad gauge construction (even if no broad track was laid) got as far as Morton.

Is Aston Magna broad or not? What about the other stations.

[willc]

I don't want to labour the point but I am not making things up. The account I gave of the broad gauge test train was published in The Times on April 17, 1854.

The OWW^▸ (Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton) was authorised as a broad gauge line in 1845, but in the following period, after fallings-out with the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) (which had agreed in 1844 to lease the OWW for 999 years), the directors began to favour standard gauge.

The GWR eventually went to court and the outcome was a ruling in 1852 that the line should be "formed of such a gauge... as will admit of the same being worked continuously with the said Great Western Railway" but added that this did not prevent the OWW laying other rails of a different gauge.

When the southern end of the line was finished in 1853, there was a single, mixed-gauge track throughout from Evesham to Wolvercot, over which a broad gauge GWR inspection train made a return trip from Oxford on June 2, 1853, carrying Board of Trade inspector Captain Sir Douglas Strutt Galton. When the OWW laid a second track between Evesham and Honeybourne, to standard gauge only, the Board of Trade got a court injunction forbidding its use from March 1854 until March 1855, when the OWW backed down and made the second track mixed gauge as well.

The inspection train and the train to Wolverhampton and back at Easter 1854 are thought to be the only broad gauge trains that ever ran on the route. The OWW never owned any broad gauge stock itself and the railway and the GWR came to an agreement in 1858 that the broad gauge rails could be removed. An Act of Parliament in 1859 removed clauses from the 1845 authorising Act about broad gauge.

That there is little evidence north of Worcester today isn't surprising, as the GWR rebuilt many of its stations in the late 19th century and did move platforms, eg at Evesham, but Boynton's book includes pictures from the 1960s of Brierley Hill, Priestfield and Tipton Five Ways stations, all with the same wide gap between tracks as at Moreton. North of Worcester was always intended to be mixed gauge, as the 1845 Act spelled out.

The precise situation at Aston Magna appears to be that it initially opened with a mixed-gauge single track and this area and the route throughout from Chipping Campden to Charlbury was doubled in 1858 as standard gauge only - but Brunel had engineered the entire trackbed to allow for broad gauge, double track, eg the clearances at the bridges, Campden tunnel - it was the OWW's finances which dictated that some parts were only given a single track initially.

At Worcester, the Hereford & Worcester line (Foregate St and Malvern) was built to standard gauge.

And don't trust Wikipedia too much - the only bit of OWW open in 1851 was the Worcester loop, actually opened in October 1850, which was being used by trains between Birmingham and Bristol. Worcester-Evesham opened in 1852, Evesham-Oxford 1853. And relations with the GWR remained fraught for some years. For example, through coaches to London went via Bicester and Bletchley to Euston from 1853 until 1861.

If you want to know more, buy John Boynton's book, which is a thorough and well-researched account of the line's first 150 years.