Sorry Tim, that's a view that the railistas have pushed over and over again, but the UK subsidises to a far greater extent than the rest of Europe.
For example - Swiss rail, 97% punctuality record (to tighter standards than the UK) - subsidy is rated at 0.02 BigMacs per km, UK 0.145 BM/km.
number of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. F'rinstance, it took me a while to understand what was meant by "Kantoally".
The case could be made that railways are a waste of time - a mode of transport that flourished for a while, because it was the first mode that allowed high (-ish) speeds and comfort of transport compared to the relatively poor alternatives: horse and coach.
Once roads got better and road transport motorised, the writing was on the wall for railways, although Beeching kept things going for a while longer. Roads form a truly integrated transport infrastructure (unlike railways), and don't need the level of maintenance that the railways do. No mode of transport has an inherent right to exist; the problem we have in the UK is the large number of railway anoraks who like playing with large train sets.
TGV-style willy-waving is keeping them going for longer, except for really long-distance such as the French have, fed by cheap nuclear volts.
Personally I like travelling by train, but when I needed to go the Glasgow from Cambridge for a day-long meeting a few years ago, I couldn't justify taking the train: the unsubsidised plane journey was a fraction of the cost of the heavily subsidised train journey.
I don't use trains very often, but I used one today. It goes from a station near where I live (walking distance) to the middle of a large population centre where the traffic is likely to be appalling.
Trains are actually pretty good at moving large numbers of people and/or heavy goods over a small number of routes.
Andy
Good, wasn't he?
Quite.
If we run out of cheap petroleum, it will be a train renaissance I fear.
And that seems extremely likely. However fast routes to Birmingham are NOT what we need. We will need coverage, not speed.
I don't believe I've ever lived that close to a railway station.
Thass possibly quite true. Routes like Cambridge - Newmarket should prolly get the chop, however.
Hopefully a return to steam locomotives :-)
Proper ones using lumps of coal fed into it by a fireman...
Season's greetings!
Excelent, both funny and accurate in his observations, particularly of the dim mentality that thinks that shaking your tailbone and having your lady bacon photographed in high resolution is more important that rising to lead a political party and then the country.
It shouldn't be promoted as a line to Birmingham. It's a line to Glasgow with intermediate stops.
It is intersting to note that high speed lines are being built all over Europe - not just in France.
Aeroplanes and carbon footprint do not match. And who says they are unsubsidised> No duty (tax) is paid on aviation fuel.
I do think they're pretty good, yes. Although my main experience is of the suburban services round London.
'Pre Beeching' they suffered in the same way as many other UK industries - lack of investment.
In article , Tim Streater scribeth thus
Err No. That route could be upgraded or the one North of Ely to Newmarket to carry a lot more bulk freight than what it does. I was at a location near Bury the other week and a train went by One diesel class
66 pulling a large number of containers so much more sensible for long distance haulage..It will change when we don't have so much of that very useful Oil around. Unless someone is going to invent a new power source for a HGV..
They are good at medium distances. Note the passenger loads carried by the lines to London from Cambridge packed all the time. Tim S alluded to a journey from Cam to Glasgow not quite so good for that but can be done in a day, not that much time at the other end..
Well especially in France they are a lot more open with land than the crowed south of England...
Commuting into large cities in general and London in particular is a special case; you can't extrapolate it to "medium distances".
Besides, on average, those trains stand empty most of the day.
OK for coal or aggregates, but otherwise how you're going to assemble the freight train in a sensible time? I've already reported that the office I used to have overlooked the southern end of Cambridge station. There was usually a freight train waiting there *all* *day*. Not sure what for.
All I ever saw on the Cambridge-Newmarket line was a single-coach diesel railbus jobby. Could be replaced by a bus. That line is so underused, there are crossings where you operate the gates yourself.
I would have loved to have gone to Glasgow via Edinburgh on the LNER trains, even taken the extra time as holiday, but I couldn't justify the expense.
Presumably because investors didn't see making any money on them. Things like that are wasting society's resources.
IF the - or even SOME - of the kings cross trains or Liverpool street trains that terminate at Cambridge went through to Newmarket, there would be a lot of people commuting to London from that line. On the other hand, perhaps we don't want london commuters anyway./
nuclear powered trucks? Running on nuclear decay heat..
I think we need a lot MORE railways. And actually they will in the end get build along current ROADS as we cease to be able to find fuel for cars.
Probably a mixture of urban and very rural light railways - trams essentially - and normal lines for longer distances.
I also think there is mileage in the idea of small BEV's that can be driven onto trains and charged in transit. For longer trips than the BEV can manage.
A no-oil nuclear electric society is an interesting thing to sketch out.
I am definitely of the opinion that physical packets with bar coded postcode headers and mechanical routers could create a very handy hi-tech 'parcelnet'.
Right up to shipping containers.. if the whole thing was computerised, anyone transiting a physical package could get paid per hop length and per volume. you could stick a priority header on for 'fastest transit' or for 'least cost routing'.
Energy usage splits naturally into heat/mechanical power, fixed location stuff, which can be served by direct electrical installation, transport which can be served by fixed route direct electrical, and short haul 'last 5 miles' served by BEV, and industrial processing - things like iron copper and steel smelting - where you need to be a bit inventive to achieve oxide reduction without using carbon feedstock.
Recycling takes care of a reasonable amount of that. Coal for the irreducible residue, one supposes.
It is not an inconceivable project though. (Unlike 'renewable energy' and 'sustainable growth')...
Actually the main cost of a train is the track. So that's not as cost inefficient as it appears at first sight.
Well, most track stands empty most of the day. How does the load factor compare to a motorway?
I think the answer there has to be - as I posited earlier - a really integrated and highly automated marshalling yard.
For example, a train arrives. the last wagon(s) on it belong to 'your station' and are automatically decoupled and allowed to run into a covered siding.
There automatic equipment unloads all the packages and sorts them using bar codes into local depot positions for onward transit by road.
In the reverse direction as the next train arrives, ALL packages are placed in a wagon or wagons, and tacked on the end of the train which is a PICKUP train only. That goes to a large central hub where ALL the packets are unloaded and sent for sorting.
So the actual stop time of the trains is very very low.
At the hubs the WHOLE train is loaded or unloaded and reloaded with sorted parcels.
To be honest since the population is so dispersed if you can drive to the station you can drive further.. So long as diesel is cheaper than trains, people will drive.
Time is something I suspect we will all have a lot more of, in the future.
especially if you want to go somewhere that the train journey is inconvenient. eg I want to go to the theatre in Woking. I can either drive there, and park in the adjacent car park, in 25 minutes or I can walk to the station (10 minutes), get on a train to Guildford (20 minutes), wait for train to Woking (up to 15 minutes) and get on that train (10 minutes) and then walk to the theatre (5 minutes).
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