No way to run a railway
Today's essential reading from The Guardian. It reveals the full horror story behind the West Coast Modernisation, starring everyone from the Adam Smith Institute to Halliburton. Nobody comes out of this story with any credit, least of all the Tory government that privatised the railways, and the Labour government that failed to tackle the problem.
As for how this affects me personally, the five month blockade from Cheadle Hulme to Crewe doubles the length of my daily commute, adding an hour to my day. Over five months it's 100 hours of my life I won't get back.
(Link from Transport Blog)
Posted by TimHall at April 01, 2004 10:28 PM | TrackBackSad reading.
Oddly, back in about 96 / 97 I can remember talking to folk at the MRC about the capacity crunch on the bottom end of the WCML, at the time.
We were thinking that it would be a lot easier to build a new high speed line from (for instance) Watford to Rugby (then probably Birmingham after that) to take Virgin's new wonder-units (just think, they could have been built for faster speeds as well, 145mph is a bit tame these days) and once that was built (with little disruption to the existing route) that would free you up lots of capacity to rebuild that, keeping the current fast lines as 100/110mph lines for mail and semi-fast passenger services which then allows more freight paths and more commuter paths, depending on time of day.
It's a shame, as they are now saying we could probably have had that working by now, for less than the present mess will have cost...
Posted by: Martyn Read on April 5, 2004 10:24 AMI wish there was some way to reboot the world and restore from a backup taken in about 1990.
Posted by: Tim Hall on April 6, 2004 10:09 PM