Virgin Trains Glasgow Services
Inevitably in the last couple of weeks, I’ve ended up on some of Virgin Trains services that have started at or are going to Glasgow. If I take Day 21, where I went from London to Milton Keynes and then from Crewe to Lancaster for Morecambe, before going from Lancaster to Carlisle, all on trains going to Glasgow. The early train had plenty of space, although, a lot of people use it to commute to Milton Keynes, but the other two were very overcrowded. I didn’t have a seat reservation on either leg and although I got a seat from Crewe to Preston, it was stand up for the rest of the way.
It almost seems that there is a division, where trains are bearable south of Warrington, Wigan or Preston, but often unbearable to the north. More capacity is urgently needed, both on the Pendolino and Super Voyager services. I think the problem is compounded, by the fact, that the trains get used by locals, travelling just one or two stops. I met one guy commuting from Lancaster to Carlisle.
There are a few TransPennine services from Manchester Airport to Glasgow that use the route, but they are short 100 mph trains, which at best add a few seats to the route and at worst make it more congested. I experienced one going south and detailed it in this post. Perhaps, there is a case for a couple of High Speed Diesel Trains to replace the small Class 185‘s on this route until the line is fully-electrified and electric multiple units arrive.
It has been announced that extra Pendolino trains will be available soon, but some seem to have been put into store, rather than service. Surely, if the sums added up four years ago, and we’ve had an increase in passengers since then, that they are better earning revenue rather than getting rusty.
Remember that my particular expertise is resource scheduling. I just think, that someone’s objective function is not comprehensive enough or there are some dark politics involved. If nothing, adding extra seats to the Glasgow services might encourage people to use them rather than flying, which would reduce our carbon footprint.
Given the overcrowding, something should be done as soon as possible.
At present all I can advise, is make sure you have a seat reservation when you travel anywhere between Warrington and Glasgow.
But the real problems of the West Coast Main Line are historic, as Wikipedia states.
Because of opposition by landowners along the route, in places some railway lines were built so that they avoided large estates and rural towns, and to reduce construction costs the railways followed natural contours, resulting in many curves and bends. The WCML also passes through some hilly areas, such as the Chilterns (Tring cutting), the Watford Gap and Northampton uplands followed by the Trent Valley, the mountains of Cumbria with a summit at Shap, and Beattock Summit in southern Lanarkshire. This legacy of gradients and curves, and the fact that it was not originally conceived as a single trunk route, means the WCML was never ideal as a long-distance main line, with lower maximum speeds than the East Coast Main Line (ECML) route, the other major main line from London to Scotland.
And this still means that for long distances north of Crewe, that only a double track is possible. So this limits the number of paths available, which means that running say a slower connecting service from Warrington to Carlisle, is just not on, even though it would remove the one or two station travellers.
And then you have the freight trains!
So perhaps the problem is not actually about trains, but is more about tracks and paths. The only way then, to get more through, would be to increase the size of the trains from nine to eleven coaches, for which many of the carriages have been built and are in store.
But at some point, the West Coast Main Line will have to have extra tracks, especially if more and more freight trains need to run to and from Scotland from the south. As I believe has been shown around Ipswich, the more freight trains you can run, the less trucks use the roads and you get greater capacity for cars and coaches.
I add the latter, as there is now a London to Glasgow coach service with sleeping berths.
Raising Motorway Speed Limits
There is a lot of talk and argument about raising the motorway speed limits to 80 mph. Read about it here in the Independent, where they say that the limit will rise, but with lots more 20 mph zones in towns.
No-one is raising the fact, that more and more container traffic is being taken off the roads and put on the rails. This will decrease the congestion and increase the speed of the traffic. But they do need to selectively spend some money on rail junctions and road/rail terminals.
The Solution’s Behind You
The BBC were interviewing Ed Balls today at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. He was pontificating on the solutions, that he would do to could Britain out of the financial mess, that largely his party got us in.
Who is right or wrong on the solution is a matter for the future.
Butb I think, that the solution to our problems was behind Ed Balls in his BBC interview. But then politicians never look behind themselves, except to see where the knife is coming from.
Over the last twenty years or so, Liverpool has been transformed, from a basket case, to one of the most vibrant cities in the world, by developing the city in a professional and quality manner. Liverpudlians will point to the European City of Culture in 2008, as a catalyst for a lot of the change, but in some cases it just gave developers a reason and possibly an excuse to invest.
London too, is changing and has been greatly improved over the last few decades. The development of Docklands started it and now the Olympics is pushing the city to new heights.
You could also argue, that Manchester got a kick start from the 2002 Commonwealth Games, but just as with Liverpool and London, the process was going to happen anyway and perhaps these events were just advertising for the place on a wider scale. Wikipedia says a lot about how the Games got Manchester moving after the 1996 IRA bombing. One might even say now that Manchester’s driving force is football.
Liverpool is getting a lot of publicity over the next couple of days, and how many will think about going there for a weekend break? When I was there last, I met a plumber who had come to the city for the day to ride his bicycle along the Mersey. Liverpool is almost becoming a seaside resort!
These three cities have benefited from a process that could best be described as Infrastructure for All.
I could also add how Newcastle has benefited from the waterfront developments along the Tyne. Other cities, like Leeds and Birminghamhave also been improved to everybody’s benefit.
I should also ask, if Glasgow is seeing the benefit for the 2014 commonwealth Games yet.
We must do this more in our run-down cities and districts.
Even on a local basis, Dalston has improved a bit in the year I’ve been here, mainly because of the opening of two new railways, that got built early because of the Olympics. But even if the Olympics hadn’t happened, they would have still gone ahead.
So we should look at all the infrastructure projects on the stocks and do those that are most valuable as soon as finances allow.
Priorities should obviusly go to those that give the greatest benefit. I would start with.
Housing, which would provide homes for our ever increasing population. It should be energy efficient and hopefully built, so that people who live there, don’t need to own one car per person, as we must wean ourselves off our own personal travelling spaces, they cost everyone else dear.
Selective rail projects, to remove bottlenecks and level crossings, improve stations and add a few new ones. In Suffolk, they are adding a new loop at Beccles so that more trains can run from Ipswich to Lowestoft. How many more Beccles-like problems are there out there, that need urgent removal. Many of these projects would have positive knock-on effects in other areas. Some level crossings, like the one in the centre of Lincoln, would have enormous benefits to road traffic, if they were removed.
Rail freight projects, which remove trucks from the roads. This would mean a few more interchanges such as Radlett, but the benefit to roads like the A14 and M1 would be high.
Personally, I would add a better bus network, with much better ticketing and disabled-friendly, information rich two-door buses, like you have in London. I have a free pass for buses, so why do I have to be issued with a ticket when I use a bus in Cambridge. It should be just touch in on all buses.
And of course, it’s important that we create interesting places for people to go. Some sports clubs have been trying to build new grounds for years and this process should be speeded up. And we don’t want any more stadia, like Coventry, Scunthorpe and the Rose Bowl designed solely to be driven to. They should be built near the transport hubs., which in itself would probably make them more financially viable.
You will notice, I’ve missed out new roads.
In many ways they are not infrastructure for all.
Some may need to be built or widened, but our priority should be to get unnecessary traffic off the roads.
I believe that we are seeing a drop in the number of trucks from the roads, as more and more container traffic is diverted to the trains. But this process needs some selective action at rail junctions, and it also needs more rail-based distribution centres near large conurbations. But the Nimbys don’t like these. Some also object to freight trains passing through at night.
There has been talk for years about taxing foreign lorries in this country, just as the Swiss do. The last time I drove the southern part of the M25, it was full of trucks registered aboard. We have the Channel Tunnel and goods to and from Europe should go through it on container trains, just like most of the freight goes in and out of the ports at Southampton, Felixstowe and Liverpool.
Every truck removed, is an increase in road capacity.
We also need better interface between the roads and rail. How many cities build large car parks in the centre, when perhaps building them on the outskirts and providing a tram or rail link to the centre? Cambridge was very much derided by doing this with a guided busway, by many including myself, but they now seem to be making a success of it.
The Return of the Deltic
I have posted about this before, but on BBC News this morning, they had a film about how the 50-year-old Deltic locomotive, Royal Scots Greys is hauling freight again in the North East. There are some good pictures here.
What A Way To Run a Railway
GBRf is a rail freight company in the UK and it has a shortage of motive power.
Could this be in part to what I saw last Thursday, whilst sitting outside a pub outside Thurston station in Suffolk, where in a brief period of perhaps forty minutes, three long freight trains trundled along between Felixstowe and Peterborough? I’ve done this many times before and never seen one. So as I’ve reported before a lot of heavy freight is now going by train.
So I was surprised to see that they are hiring in a 50-year-old Deltic locomotive, Royal Scots Grey, to move freight in the North East. It must make commercial sense to both companies involved. It is rather a tribute to the Deltic, but surely with better planning a few years ago, instead of scrapping these wonderful locootives, they should have been properly stored. After all one my most memorable train trips was behind a Deltic.
We sometimes decry the quality of engineering in this country. But the list of things we should be proud of keeps getting longer and the Deltic has just got itself added.
Along the Regent’s Canal to the Angel
I’m about a five or ten minute walk to the Regent’s Canal and today, I walked along the canal to the Angel as it was starting to get dark.
I can remember some of this area in the 1970s and to say it has improved is one of the biggest understatements, anybody can make. I even saw a Norwich City supporter enthusiastically spinning for pike.
This is the third time, I’ve lived near this canal.
In the 1970s C, myself and our young family lived in St. John’s Wood, just north of the canal and we would cross it by the London Zoo to get into Regent’s Park. You used to see the occasional narrow-boat or pleasure craft, but I don’t think there was any easy access to the tow-path. It would probably have been deemed to dangerous anyway to take three small children alongside the water. So when we decry Health and Safety for ruining our pleasure, there must be many more examples like the Regent’s Canal towpath, where different interests coexist together in complete safety.
And then, a few years later when we lived in the Barbican we would often walk up to the Angel to shop walking right past the City Road Basin on the canal. But sadly we never explored.
It is often assumed that canals like this ceased to be commercial arteries, when the railways appeared, but the Regent’s Canal was still busy with freight until the Second World War. It also has another purpose in London’s infrastructure in that under the tow-path for quite a way is one of the city’s main electricity distribution mains. Believe it or not, but the cables at kept cool, by using water from the canal.
40 Out and 34 In!
Changing trains at Ipswich gave me a chance to see how rail freight works at first hand.
I have commented before about how the amount of container traffic on the A14 appears to have dropped. The reverse seemed to have happened at Ipswich, where within minutes a 40 box train went towards London and a 34-box train went the other way towards Felixstowe. When I used to catch trains to London from Ipswich, you might see the odd small train, but not ones as large as these.
There was also a lot of shunting about going on at in the sidings towards Norwich, as engines attached themselves to the other end of the train to get to and from the Felixstowe branch. All this will be a thing of the past, when the Bacon Factory Curve is built to take trains directly between Stowmarket and Felixstowe.
The engine sidings by the station, were also full of Class 66, 70 and 90 locomotives waiting for trains.
I do think this is all moving in the right direction.
Felixstowe Sets a Record
In the week of the 26th September this year, the Port of Felixstowe handled a record number of 10,764 containers or about 1,500 a day. A quick calculation says that moving those boxes by road would create a queue of trucks nearly 40 miles long every day.
So that may be contributing to a perceived reduction in trucks on the A14. There are now upwards of twenty container trains a day to places like Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham.
When the Felixstowe to Nuneaton freight upgrade is completed in a couple of years time, we should see even more.
Are There Fewer Container Trucks on the A14?
Today was the first time, I’d been along the A14 during the day and especially on a Saturday for some months. I may have been in a bus, but I couldn’t help thinking that there were very few container trucks on the road. It could either be the recession or perhaps more and more are going by rail to and from the Midlands and the North. After all the latteris what the work in Boxing Clever is all about. When I returned, between Bury St. Edmunds and Newmarket, we only saw three in pehaps twenty minutes!
Comings and Goings at Ely
To get the train to Scunthorpe via Peterborough on Saturday, I got to Ely just before nine in the morning and I was totally surprised at how busy the station was.
There were passenger trains going to Stansted, Kings Lynn and London.
Trains to All Points at Ely
The town will get more important if and when Thameslink opens to Kings Lynn.
The freight importance of the station was also emphasised, as a very long train passed through from Felixstowe to Peterborough and the Midlands and the North.
Lots of Boxes at Ely
There will be lots of changes in the next few years at Ely, what with Thameslink, freight and perhaps many more trains to Norwich and Ipswich. In the case of the latter, there could be substantial passenger improvements following on from the capacity upgrade for freight, with perhaps a new station at Soham.
Ely lives in interesting times.
The Anonymous Widower 