Musings On Freight And The New Thames Tunnel On The Goblin Extension
It may seem strange that freight has such a large affect on the Gospel Oak and Barking Line, which is essentially a passenger railway across North London.
But at the Barking end of the line there could be very good connections to London Gateway and the other end has good connections to the main routes to the north. So a container unloaded at the port, which is destined for say the large distribution centre at Daventry, could go on a train up the Goblin to the West Coast Main Line. Other large distribution centres are planned or being constructed, like the one at Radlett, so we will see more trains from the London Gateway taking this route as the port gets larger.
In a few years time, the line will be carrying a lot of freight trains, many of which will be hauled through at night. At least the line is being electrified, so the noisy thuds of the dreadful Class 66 locomotives will hopefully be replaced by smooth electric power.
If a new Thames Tunnel is built between Barking and Thamesmead, this will be a game changer, if it is a tunnel that is capable of taking the biggest freight trains. It should probably be built to the loading gauge of the Channel Tunnel, so allowing any train capable of using the Channel Tunnel to be able to use the new link.
London Gateway is one of the few ports capable of handling the new breed of ultra large container ships. Obviously, this will generate more freight train traffic for the UK out of London Gateway, but will some of these containers be destined for Europe? At present there is a route to get them onto HS1 for the Channel Tunnel, but a new Thames Tunnel might give opportunities for these trains to go along the North Bank of the Thames and then through the tunnel to pick up the North Kent Line for HS1. The advantage is that it avoids sending trains through the crowded North London rail system. Obviously freight going from Europe to London Gateway for onward shipping, could be routed in the reverse direction.
Increasingly, over the last few years there has been a significant stirring of the practice of sending freight trains through the Channel Tunnel. Car components and perishable fruit, are just two of the cargoes seeing an increase.
We will see a large increase in future with exports such as complete cars going both ways on special trains. Although, it’s a common site in Europe, large trains of new vehicles are rarely seen here.
All of these flows will probably be best routed through the new Thames Tunnel and over the upgraded Goblin.
We shouldn’t forget that the main reason for a rail tunnel between Barking Riverside to Thamesmead is to vitalise the housing developments in the east of London, as I outlined in A Divided City.
But could the Goblin Extension be used for extra passenger trains given that it would link HS2 at Old Oak Common to HS1 at Ebbsfleet via the North Kent Line.
During the day there probably aren’t enough paths for an intensive service from the North via HS2 to link with HS1. And anyway, is the demand there for direct trains between say Paris and Manchester or Cologne and Leeds?
But it would allow overnight sleeper services, which might be a better proposition.
On the other hand to run a regular service from Old Oak Common to Ebbsfleet might be worthwhile, especially if it stopped regularly in between, at say Abbey Wood, Barking, Walthamstow and West Hampstead.
The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway
I’ve just watched the latest episode of the BBC documentary on Crossrail call the Fifteen Billion Pound Railway.
Part of this episode told a history of tunneling through the last fifty years, through old film and the eyes of one of the tunnellers, who’s been digging for fifty years, starting with manual methods on the Victoria line.
It is fascinating to see how techniques have improved even over the last couple of decades.
Just as with North Sea Oil exploration, where projects got easier, as cranes got bigger, it looks like tunnelling will get easier, as tunnel boring machines get bigger, more powerful and better designed.
So when they build Crossrail 2 will it be a quick and more financially efficient project? Having spoken to some of the planners of the project on Friday at Dalston Library, I suspect it will be. Especially, as they are cutting out one of the Hackney stations to save a billion and moving one terminus from Alexandra Park to New Southgate stations.
The lessons learned on Crossrail will also effect HS2, where I suspect we’l see even more tunnels, in the final design.
Do We Need Double-Deck Trains In The UK?
You regularly see articles like this one in the Guardian extolling the virtues of double-deck trains. Here’s an extract.
Consultants have drawn up blueprints for double-deckers up to 400 metres long, carrying more than 1,000 passengers, on the network. Supporters of high speed rail say tackling the limited capacity offered by existing lines is crucial.
Greening told the Sunday Times she was excited by the idea of “continental-style double-decker trains that immediately give you more seats and more space”. The trains could have glass viewing ceilings and meeting areas.
Have any of these advocates of double-deck trains ever travelled on one?
They may work on the Continent, but UK railways are different to the rest of the Continent and probably the rest of the world, in that we’re increasingly going for walk-in step-free access to our trains, whereas everybody else has low platforms and several steps up into the train, as I pointed out in this article. In the article I quoted from the specification issued by Crossrail for their Class 345 trains.
Wide through gangways between carriages, and ample space in the passenger saloons and around the doors, will reduce passenger congestion while allowing room for those with heavy luggage or pushchairs.
From what I have read here on First Capital Connect’s web site, the Class 700 might be very similar.
If you’ve ever tried to get in and out of a French, German or Italian express train in a hurry, you will realise that they’re designed to different principles. And they are a total nightmare with a heavy case, in a wheelchair or pushing a buggy. And I’m generally tslking about single-deck trains.
You must also consider the Health and Safety aspects of double-deck trains. If the British public felt they were dangerous and didn’t like the climbing up and down, they would get angry and Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells would get his computer out.
But the biggest problem of double-deck trains is that they need infrastructure clearance everywhere they might go. So if say you might want to run say one of the trains to an important event off its usual haunts, you would have to make sure that line was cleared to accept it.
With normal height trains, like the Class 800, they are designed as go-anywhere trains, that can accept the far corners of the network.
You could argue that the double-deck trains would only stay on high speed or high-density commuter lines, but then for reasons of efficiency trains they must also be able to run on other lines.
Double-deck trains are one of these ideas that look good to politicians, but create more problems than they solve.
A Beginner’s Guide On Opposing HS2
I found this here on Rail News.
Read it and enjoy.
As I’m a simple man, who prefers words of one syllable, my views on HS2 are as follows.
1. The best way to increase the capacity of our motorways is to move as much freight as possible off the roads onto the railways. As there are a limited number of freight paths on the East and West Coast Main Lines, one way to increase capacity would be to create a new high speed railway that is used by the high speed passenger trains from London to the Midlands, North and Scotland. Passenger trains would take HS2, thus releasing capacity on older lines for freight.
2. It is well known that speed attracts more passengers. At the moment there’s a lot of speculation about Norwich in Ninety. Every route from London has a time, that would attract passengers. Perhaps, it should be Birmingham in an hour, Cardiff and Manchester in two and Edinburgh in four. Speed will attract people to use the trains, hopefully freeing up the roads.
3. A lot of our older stations like Euston and Manchester Piccadilly need rebuilding, or are on cramped sites like Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle, so building HS2 with a few well-connected and spacious stations may well make a better railway for every passenger. The network’s Victorian designers didn’t envisage the number and size of trains we are using today, let alone those that we will, in a few years time.
4. HS2 is making us think. In the past couple of months, George Osborne has laid out a plan for HS3 across the north of England from Liverpool and Manchester to Hull. The government has now announced that the existing line will be electrified as a priority. Would a politician have ever thought of this without HS2?
5. I also believe that HS2 should be freight enabled, so that at night, when the line won’t be busy, freight trains can be sneaked up and down the country. Network Rail are experimenting with using Euston in the middle of the night, as a distribution point for retail goods, so could we see that in cities like Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester?
6. I also think that HS2 could be the solution to how we get freight from London Gateway up to the North, if we built a tunnelled link from HS2 to HS1, This would also allow direct passenger and freight services between most of the UK and the Continent. Surely, it would be a better way to distribute Jaguars, Land-Rovers, Toyotas and Nissans all over the Continent and perhaps even further. That is just one example of probably many on how rail freight could be used.
7. I have my doubts about direct passenger services between say Manchester and Berlin, as for a journey of that length, the easyRyans of this would will always be a lot quicker and probably cheaper.
8. A properly linked up high speed rail system, connected to most parts of the country, will open up all sorts of possibilities.
9. Suppose the North Wales Coast line between Holyhead and Crewe was electrified and made into a full-size faster line, would this ease the problem of transporting freight and passengers to and from Ireland? At the present time it take nearly four hours to get to Holyhead from London, so with something like a Class 800 train, under three hours should be possible, even without the sections of HS2 north of Birmingham.
10. South Wales isn’t a problem from London and the South East, as by the end of this decade, Brunel’s Great Western will be making his ghost jump for joy, as trains speed along an electrified railway to Cardiff and South Wales as trains speed along at 225 kph. The line which, I’ve called HSW will probably change the way we think about high speed rail.
11. The main problem of South Wales is getting to Birmingham and the North. But this will probably be solved in the short term by the use of Class 800 running via Gloucester.
12. The Class 800 will have big part to play with HS2, as it will be used as a route extender, as I said in point 9, where it could be used to Holyhead.
HS2 Must Be Right As The C of E Opposes It
This report in the Telegraph and praying that HS2 will be halted. Here’s the first paragraph.
The Church of England has announced its opposition to HS2 – saying the high speed rail line will desecrate graves and shatter peace
This to me proves HS2 must be a good thing as the C of E’s idea of progress seems very much to go in a backwards direction.
The Ugly Duckling Is Coming To The Aid Of HS2
I’ve called the Overground an ugly ducking that is turning in to a swan before and today, it would appear that it is getting the chance to help out the troubled and unloved HS2. A study has been announced on the Global Rail News website entitled Overground Station For Old Oak Common. Here’s the start of the report.
WSP has been appointed to begin the next stage of planning for a new London Overground station at Old Oak Common.
The consultant is to carry out a Grip 3 study of three options with the hope of establishing the best solution to connect Overground services with the proposed HS2 and Crossrail interchange.
An interchange station at Old Oak Common would certainly make it easier for the good burghers of Hackney and other forgotten areas to access HS2 and Heathrow Airport.
But surely compared to the billions being spent on Crossrail and HS2, a simple interchange station, with links to the Overground, would just be small change. Wikipedia says this.
Proposals being considered by Transport for London include a scheme to realign the routes of the West London and North London line around the Old Oak Common site to create a new London Overground interchange station. The proposal envisages diverting the NLL Richmond route to curve around the eastern side of Old Oak Common, and re-routing the WLL to branch west south of the Mitre Bridge before curving north along a short section of the Dudding Hill Line to join the West Coast Main Line. New platforms serving both the NLL and WLL would be built on the southern side of Old Oak Common, adjacent to Wormwood Scrubs. Alternative versions of this scheme also consider cheaper options such as terminating the WLL at Old Oak Common or two separate London Overground stations.
But perhaps the great and the good don’t want to allow the various plebs and hoi polloi better transport links. They may have also noted that a new station would give better access to Wormwood Scrubs Prison for visitors and escapees.
If Old Oak Common is created as a major interchange, then surely the Gospel Oak to Barking services of the Overground, should be extended at least to the new station. And what about the Dudding Hill line, that passes through the area. Could it finally have found a use except for the odd freight train?
All of this says to me that an Overground station at Old Oak Common is a no-brainer, but then politicians don’t do no-brainers.
Fracked Or Fiction
I went to the London Geological Society today to see a lecture called.
Fracked or fiction: so what are the risks associated with shale gas exploitation?
The lecture is described here on their web site.
They will put up a video in two or three weeks, which you can watch to make your own mind up.
My overwhelming conclusion after the lecture was that before we can embrace fracking in earnest, we must collect a lot more information. For example, we don’t know the background levels ofearthquakes and natural gas seepage in this country. So if say it is thought, that fracking had caused a small earthquake, can we be sure that that isn’t one that we habitually get in this country.
A secondary conclusion, is that my engineering knowledge indicated that there are several very fruitful areas for the development of new technological solutions to mitigate some of the possible problems of fracking.
Stopping fracking is probably an easy task for opponents, as it can be portrayed as dangerous in several ways, that appeal to the sensationalist media. And of course the benefits of low gas prices aren’t so obvious, until they actually happen.
You can compare fracking with that other nimby-opposed project; HS2. This can be opposed in terms of noise, vibration and construction and visual disturbance cost, but the benefits of better and faster journeys is easier to understand by the man on the Birmingham train.
Osborne Says Redevelop Euston Before HS2
There is an article in the Standard, where George Osborne says priority should be given to the redevelopment of Euston station, before HS2 is constructed.
I use the station several times a year and compared to Kings Cross, Liverpool Street, Paddington, Waterloo, Marylebone and St. Pancras, it is totally inadequate. It is even worse at the moment, than London Bridge, which is currently a building site.
What makes it so bad, is the lack of connection to the Circle line and the endless dingy walks from the other Tube lines to the station. There is no disabled access to the Underground.
There is a lot of scope to do this rebuilding right. These factors should be considered.
- The effect of the Croxley Rail Link to Watford Junction, which should be completed in 2017.
- Any development at Watford Junction, that could ease pressure on Euston.
- Could Willesden Junction be used to take passengers off the West Coast Main Line?
- Should an Old Oak Common station be built?
Properly planned, rebuilding of Euston,. adds a whole new dimension to HS2. It even questions whether HS2 terminates at Euston!
Could George Osborne’s view on Euston station be coloured, by his own personal experience and those of his constituents?
It doesn’t matter to me, as redeveloping Euston station is good sense, for all sorts of reasons!
More Sense About HS2
The Standard today has this headline on the front page.
Crossrail and HS2 Superhub Will Bring £6bn Boost to North-West London
The article goes on to describe how where HS2 and Crossrail are supposed to meet at the new Old Oak Common station is going to be developed. Here’s the first two paragraphs.
Boris Johnson is to set up an Olympic-style regeneration agency to transform a rundown area into a thriving new district and deliver a £6 billion economic boost to London.
The Mayor wants to use Crossrail links and the planned HS2 route — which will converge at Old Oak Common — to spur the creation of 80,000 homes and 20,000 jobs.
At last someone has seen some sense in how to link HS2 into London. I talked about it earlier, so I won’t repeat myself.
Will We Get HSW Before HS2?
In this post about the BBC’s knocking of HS2, I jokingly referred to the Great Western Main Line as HSW, for High Speed West or High Speed Wales.
But is it that far from the truth?
A high speed railway is defined as one where speeds of 200 kph or 125 mph are possible. The fastest lines run at 320 kph or 200 mph.
So what speed can we expect to see on the Great Western Main Line, after it is fully modernised in 2017?
Currently the fastest trains in the UK are the Class 373 ( 300 kph) used by Eurostar, the Class 390 ( 225 kph) used by Virgin and the InterCity 225 (225 kph) used by East Coast. The latter two trains are restricted to 200 kph, due to signalling restrictions on their lines and because they have to mix it with slower trains.
It is also interesting to note that the Class 395, which bring the high speed Kent commuter services into St. Pancras run at 225 kph.
The new trains for the electrified Great Western Main Line are based on the Class 395 and are called Class 800 and Class 801. These have a design speed of 225 kph, but will be limited to 200 kph on traditional lines.
But Brunel built the Great Western for speed and a lot of the route it is pretty straight and much has four tracks. It is also going to be resignalled to the highest European standards with in-cab signalling. The latter is necessary to go above 200 kph. So it shouldn’t be one of the most difficult tasks to make much of the line capable of 225 kph or even more.
The only real problem on the line is the Severn Tunnel. But as Crossrail has shown, we have some of the best tunnel engineers in the world. So just as the Swiss dealt with their railway bottleneck of the Simplon Tunnel, all we need to do to improve the Severn Tunnel is give the best engineers their head and let them solve the problems, whilst the politicians sit around and watch and wait. After all it’s only a baby compared to the massive twin bores of the Simplon.
As an aside here, I do wonder if one of the most affordable solutions might be to use a modern tunnel boring machine to create a new tunnel alongside the current one.
Conclusion
So I believe that even if it still goes slower on opening, trains to Bristol and Wales will be doing 225 kph before the end of this decade.
If that isn’t a high speed railway like HS1, I don’t know what is?
But whatever we call it, it’ll be here several years before HS2!
I think we need to call for three cheers for Brunel, who got the route right in the first place.
The Anonymous Widower 