Reinstatement Of The Bury-Heywood-Rochdale Lines
This is one of the successful bids in the First Round of the Restoring Your Railway Fund.
This article on Rochdale OnLine is entitled Successful First Step To Restore Rochdale-Heywood-Bury Railway Line.
The work can now begin to fill out what is possible, with the award of funding from the Government to go towards a full study.
The funding was welcomed by Tony Lloyd, the MP for Rochdale, who is quoted as saying this.
Metrolink services and the rail service from Rochdale to Manchester provide transport to the city centre, but it does not provide the kind of connections we need to get around the city region, in particular, from Rochdale and Heywood to Bury.
“The current public transport offering between Heywood and Manchester city centre is provided by bus services but during the busiest times of the day this journey can take more than one hour, limiting the borough’s residents’ access to the many jobs located there.
What will the new rail link look like?
In Rossendale Reopening Prospect, I gave my views, based on an article in the February 2019 Edition of Modern Railways, which had the same title.
Summarising the other article, I can say the following.
The Track
I described the track like this.
The plan envisages reinstating the route between Rawtenstall and Castleton Junction on the Calder Valley Line.
The section between Rawtenstall and Heywood stations, via Bury Bolton Street station is the heritage line of the East Lancashire Railway (ELR). It is best described as predominately single-track with passing loops.
The route is about twelve miles long.
The Services
These are given as follows.
- Manchester Victoria and Bury Bolton Street
- Bury Bolton Street and Rochdale
- Bury Bolton Street and Rawtenstall – Peak Hour shuttle.
It is suggested that the third route would be run by the ELR.
The Stations
The following stations will be on the route.
Most will need updating, but Heywood would probably be a new station.
The Trains
The original article suggests Class 230 trains, but several others are possible. The proposed battery-electric Class 331 train is surely a possibility.
Conclusion
This could be a very sensible scheme.
A Train With A Geo-Fence
This article on Rail Advent is entitled New Train For Wrexham to Bidston Line Begins Testing.
The testing of Vivarail‘s Class 230 train for Transport for Wales, is taking place along the Cotswold Line, prior to entering service.
This is the most significant paragraph in the article.
The train is also geo-fenced so that the gensets are never used in stations or sensitive areas, although, the batteries are extremely quiet anyway.
From personal experience of battery trains, including Vivarail’s prototype in Scotland, battery trains are very quiet.
New Zinc-Air Battery Outperforms Lithium-Ion Battery On All Levels
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Interesting Engineering.
This is the introductory paragraph.
There’s a new battery in town and it’s a game-changer. The novel battery, is cheaper, safer and significantly longer laster-lasting, than lithium-ion batteries reports Recharge.
It does seem that Zinc8 is getting noticed.
I wonder, if the web-site gets read in Cambridge, where I was once told that use of the word Interesting, is very much to be discouraged.
The Anonymous Widower 