Overhead Line Equipment - ongoing discussion

[whole diary]

[eightonedee]

I can't see anything happening at Oxford until the station rebuild is complete - in any case, the only real advantage would be that 387's could free up 80x.

No, the real advantage would be restoring a proper stopping service all the way from Reading to Oxford, that we haven't had since the introduction of the split service necessitated by the abandonment of electrification beyond Didcot. The lack of direct trains from all stations between Tilehurst and Cholsey to Oxford, all relatively busy stations with reasonably large local populations and hinterlands, is just as much a gap in the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) network as the recently remedied lack of direct Bristol - Oxford services. A number of our acquaintances in Goring and Streatley say that they have given up going to Oxford, either entirely or by public transport, as a result.

See also Marlburian's post early today. We might be a prosperous corner of the country between Reading and Oxford, but it doesn't help encouraging the use of public transport when something we used to take for granted has just disappeared with very little comment or outcry.

Thames Metro, now?

[Noggin]

I can't see anything happening at Oxford until the station rebuild is complete - in any case, the only real advantage would be that 387's could free up 80x.

No, the real advantage would be restoring a proper stopping service all the way from Reading to Oxford, that we haven't had since the introduction of the split service necessitated by the abandonment of electrification beyond Didcot. The lack of direct trains from all stations between Tilehurst and Cholsey to Oxford, all relatively busy stations with reasonably large local populations and hinterlands, is just as much a gap in the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) network as the recently remedied lack of direct Bristol - Oxford services. A number of our acquaintances in Goring and Streatley say that they have given up going to Oxford, either entirely or by public transport, as a result.

See also Marlburian's post early today. We might be a prosperous corner of the country between Reading and Oxford, but it doesn't help encouraging the use of public transport when something we used to take for granted has just disappeared with very little comment or outcry.

Thames Metro, now?

Fair point on the re-instatement of through stopping services and given the battles Oxfordshire seem to be waging against the motorcar, surely there must be a reasonably good case for Oxford North and South stations too?

If that were the case then extending the wires and an Oxfordshire Metro to Banbury would seem very sensible and relatively inexpensive.

Of course the problem is that Labour are unlikely to want to be seen to be spending money on posh southerners ;-)

 

[IndustryInsider]

Fair point on the re-instatement of through stopping services and given the battles Oxfordshire seem to be waging against the motorcar, surely there must be a reasonably good case for Oxford North and South stations too?

If that were the case then extending the wires and an Oxfordshire Metro to Banbury would seem very sensible and relatively inexpensive.

Of course the problem is that Labour are unlikely to want to be seen to be spending money on posh southerners ;-)

Wiring from Didcot through to Hanborough has been mooted a few times over the years and is probably a better bet than Banbury.  Can't see the money being stumped up any time soon though!

Oxford Parkway is a kind of Oxford North station already.  Mind you, you can't really go north from it until East West Rail finally starts up, when connections at Milton Keynes will make sense for some journeys to the north.

[Mark A]

Seeing the 6 and 7 bus service in Bath operated by an electric bus today - and also Flixbus provisioned with an electric coach on the (competitive in price but not timings) run up to London - and a portion of the cars (and bikes) on the road being electric - this was thought-provoking.

I'm put in mind of the nineteen fifties and a steam-operated rail system that was demanding of the people who worked in it, was in retrenchment, struggling to attract staff, running timetables that were sometimes obsolete and not a good fit with changing times, subject to wild swings in political interference, dependent on public subsidy having poured a lot of its strength into the war - with the public increasingly no longer looking to the railway for transport, turning to buses and, if they could, motor cars instead, given a big push at the time with the building of toll-free, free-at-the-point-of-use motorways - this despite the fact that many cars of the time weren't exactly brilliant (and many of said vehicles,  not engineered for continuous high speed cruising, were killed by those same motorways)**.

Long distance trips by train to holiday destinations became long distance trips by car, day or night: perhaps a child in the back seat tasked with care for another new device, the transistor radio, turning it as needed to maintain reception.

I'm wondering how much a similar impression might bite today, when the railway, particularly in the west, diesel-fuelled and operating long distance services using expensive and complex stock whose interior air quality was found at one point to be not particularly brilliant, while many other branch and inter-regional services are provisioned for the foreseeable with the externally very noisy likes of the class 166.

Also, part of the national picture is that HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) has taken a swing at the future, but with the cuts to core pieces of its design, will not fulfil the primary task of capacity enhancement for the national network itself - without further changes, the role that HS2 could play has been to a large extent closed down - and its costs have risen.

Returning to the parts of the railway that are running on diesel, unreliable and unable to provision their timetables, is this industry in danger of imminently presenting as yesterdays mode of transport, running on yesterday's technology?

Thankfully the overall picture is (hopefully) more rosy, but I do wonder about the margins (and in some ways those margins, for the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway), begin east of Chippenham, north of Didcot, west of Cardiff, south of Reading, and there doesn't seem to be a plan to change that, even though the rising cost (& fragility) of the oil-based economy is surely providing a spur.)

Mark

tl:dr - batteries won't do everything, where is the rolling programme of electrification that's clearly needed?

**A friend of a friend who drove... it was either an Austin Devon or Somerset... gave me a lift from Llanbadarn, Aberystwyth, up the road called Heol y Bont to Penparcau. The short trip was... an education, but those weren't cars to which people had great exposure. Many more people will recall what didn't happen very much when the brake pedal of, say, a Morris Minor, was depressed - not much, compared to current vehicles...

(The friend of a friend having dropped me off was heading to Lampeter - sometimes I wonder if he's there yet...)