Will The Updated GNGE Affect Lincolnshire?
I ask this question because my Crossrail Google Alert picked up this article from Geoff Ford in the Grimsby Telegraph. He starts by saying this.
Have you noticed that most major transport projects are concentrated in the South, the West Midlands and the North West? And then berates the Chancellor for leaving Lincolnshire off the list of those getting big transport projects!
He has a point
If I have a bone to pick with Geoff, then it is that he doesn’t talk about The Great Northern and Great Eastern Joint Railway (GNGE) , that I talked about in this post. But then I hadn’t heard that such a large project with a value of £330million was taking place in Lincolnshire, until a couple of weeks ago.
The project is certainly an unexpected place to bury that sum of cash.
But the project will be completed before the end of the year and will hopefully stop most of the freight trains on the East Coast Main Line from imposing lower speed limits on passenger trains on the line.
People in Lincolnshire, should be asking the question of “What will the GNGE do for us?”
I’ll start with a negative, as all those freight trains will create noise and also increase congestion at some of the level crossings on the route. Lincoln will still be a problem and there are probably a few old British Rail employees, who cautioned against the closing of Lincoln St. Mark’s station and the associated by-pass line in 1985. But hopefully some clever engineers have got an affordable scheme that will help get the endless camels through the eye of Lincoln.
If I was a Logistics Manager for a company that was importing loads of stuff from China, that was destined for my company’s shops in Scotland and the North and I needed a distribution centre, then Lincolnshire is now on the list of acceptable places to build it. Especially, if the site is close to the GNGE and a decent road to the M62. But that is rather hypothetical, until the first company takes the decision and I think I know a lot more about project management, than I do about logistics.
Some things that the upgraded GNGE will offer is faster journey times for both passenger and freight, through higher speed limits, fewer level crossings and much improved signalling. So will these improvements allow more passenger trains up and down the various parts of the line from Peterborough to Doncaster, via Spalding, Sleaford, and Lincoln?
Currently, on the southern part of the line from Peterborough to Lincoln, there seems to be about one train every hour or so, which takes about ninety minutes to do the trip.
Perhaps more interestingly, is that it takes two hours from Lincoln to London if you change at Newark and thirty minutes longer if you change at Peterborough. So if nothing else is done, with judicious timetabling, the upgraded GNGE might even give extra two hour train journeys to London from Lincoln via Peterborough. It might even open up the market for an easier route for a direct train to London from Lincoln, which has been promised for years.
In one area though there may be an improvement. Wikipedia says this about Sunday services between Peterborough and Lincoln.
The line has a regular weekday daytime service but is closed between Sleaford & Spalding in the evenings (due to the high staffing costs associated with the large number of manned level crossings on this section) and has no Sunday service.
So as there will be fewer level crossings, will the line see an evening and a Sunday service?
Going between Lincoln and Doncaster seems more difficult, but hopefully after the line is finished, journeys will all take the quickest time achieved now.
Those that work out the timetables are going to have a complicated problem on their hands.
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