As others say, amongst other things, I suppose the trouble is that there's not really a suitable rail/road connected port on the English side.

So whilst on one hand a commuters/shoppers ferry from Cardiff Bay to Weston would be a reasonably short trip, getting to the pier on the English side would be a PITA^▸ ('pain in the a**e'), so you might as well do it on a 1h22 train or 1h10 car journey which won't leave you feeling seasick.

Similarly, whilst there might be enough Cornwall to South Wales freight to fill a ferry, I doubt the numbers stack up even time-wise - by the time you've driven your artic to Ilfracombe (or wherever), loaded it, offloaded it etc, you might as well have just left the truck on the Motorway. In modern logistics, predictability is critical.

And if you're canny, your best members of staff too.

By providing fast, reliable transport there is (still) enormous potential for frequent, reliable and affordable rail services to provide people with the education, career and cultural opportunities in the centres of major cities (and the leisure opportunities in the countryside for that matter). This is particularly the case for those who can't drive for age/affordability/medical reasons, but also those with families who often have narrow windows of time during which they can work, making long commutes unfeasible.

The classic example has long been the Welsh Valleys, but there are plenty of even urban places like Lockleaze in Bristol where a railway line runs through but getting into the city centre by bus can take up to 40 minutes in rush hour.

If we took the Bristol example further, an extra pair of tracks between Chipping Sodbury and Bristol Parkway would enable an RER-style service to serve the south of Yate, Winterbourne and Coalpit Heath, not to mention enabling considerable amounts of housing to be built south of the line (whether that is desirable is another question).

And for the true believers, it seems ludicrous that Bristol has a more or less serviceable rail right of way right through some of the most deprived areas in the north east of the city which would be quite feasible to return to rail use (albeit needing some creativity at the southern end).

Remember that First have a *long* experience of quietly playing politicians and civil servants and it's arguable that the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) franchise is one of the better ones as a result of them plugging away at it for over 20 years, making the best of the IET^▸ (Intercity Express Train - replacement for HSTs (manufactured by Hitachi in Kobe, Japan)), coping with electrification, aging rolling stock, lack of long-term investment etc.

I've always suspected that one of First's strategies was to be "The Devil you know" i.e. with GWR, they delivered the goods at an affordable subsidy level and didn't cause politicians or civil servants too many headaches - but they were no-one's poodle and would operate sharply where necessary.

So I suspect the statements around open access and their existing franchises might be a throw of the dice to get a couple more years on their existing franchises - "let us discreetly take care of things for a couple more years whilst you sort out GBR^▸ (Great British Railways), no-one but the trainspotters will ever notice".   

I do Bristol to Sheffield reasonably often and yes, it could definitely be faster but at 2h40ish it's much better than driving and can be reasonably priced if you pick trains carefully and use SplitSave. I'm really not bothered about catering, but the fact that the WiFi is invariably crap and they are built as Faraday cages so have minimal mobile signal is very annoying, not to mention that Sundays quite often have an extra hour added to allow for engineering.

I'd wager that electrification and replacement with 80x stock could make a significant impact on those times in the core, if only by permitting faster acceleration and braking. Presumably when HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) starts there will also be an opportunity to recast the timetables into New Street in favour of Cross Country. 

No quote from the Metro Mayor? ;-)

Thank you for posting the slides Graham. Interesting slides from GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) - I hadn't realised the scale of the Brabazon development and that it included student housing. How the Henbury line won't be an electrified 15 minute service seems crazy!

Part of the "Project Churchill" campaign perhaps?

Thank you for the post. Hadn't known that a version of the XPT was nearly produced for Thailand but the deal fell through. I wonder if that's why they got the 158's.

At the risk of taking this thread off-topic - WECA^» (West of England Combined Authority - about) contributed to a study of whether Bristol TM^▸ (Train Manager, or Ticket Machine, or Temple Meads (Bristol), depending on context) to Parkway could be done more cheaply than previously expected.

WECA elections are coming up now that Mr Norris has a Westminster job - I bet he'd love to be able to announce electrification of TM in the run-up to the elections. Whether HM Treasury and the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) would cooperate is another question entirely. 

It seems likely that the effect of the Valley Lines electrification, new stations between Cardiff and Bristol, proposed extra services between Birmingham and Cardiff etc will push up numbers significantly.

Given that user numbers roughly doubled in the 20 years pre-COVID, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the user numbers could double in the next 20. That would bring the number of users to something like the same as that of Leeds (with half the number of platforms)

He'll be long dead by the time it's opened.

Let's not forget that when the Channel Tunnel was under construction there was a real threat of the IRA blowing it up (and before that, there were nineteenth century fears that a Channel Tunnel would be used for invasion). Despite the incidents involving pipelines and cables in the Baltic, no-one seems to have had an "accident" in the vicinity of the Øresund Straight or the Kiel Canal.

There seems to be a growing appetite for connecting Finland and the Baltic States to the rest of Europe including a rail route across the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/03/08/will-a-bridge-across-the-baltic-sea-to-sweden-give-finland-faster-connections-to-europe

Also, the Finns just completed electrification and upgrade of the cross-border line between Laurila in Lapland and Haparanda in Sweden. It seems like it's primarily for freight (which will still have to be transhipped at this point), but it apparently it's cost effective to haul freight by rail an extra 1700km rather than ship it across the Baltic. 

I think this has been discussed elsewhere, but Quintrell Downs station is about a mile away and given the short distance, there's little sense in adding an extra station between there and Newquay.

Of course what would really make a difference is trams - the airport alone gets 400k passengers/year and has 500 people working around it. If the Duchy could somehow kick that off, even with an electric bus "virtual tramway" - that would surely make a huge difference to the town. 
 

Don't know if this image will show up, if not check out https://www.reddit.com/r/railroading/comments/hye0qn/multi_gauge_track_we_built/.

Test track at Progress Rail in the US with six separate rails!


EDIT - added "width = " into the img tag to stop the picture seemingly expanding all the way from Chippenham to Trowbridge - grahame

Wouldn't that look nice with some overhead electrification and a Stadler unit in GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) green?