Is rail always the answer?

[anti-pacer]

There are, as you'll be aware, many towns in the UK that are not served by railways. Leigh for example, Gosport, Skelmersdale, Washington, Ashington, Portishead, Clevedon as others.

Do they necessarily need connecting to the railways? Let's look at Leigh for example, a reasonably sized town with no rail links, but now on a busway system that links it to Salford and Manchester. Is this an easy cop-out or sufficient enough? Would linking Leigh to the railway network produce enough passenger numbers or are other modes of transport better for such places?

 

[yorksrob]

Given the difficulty in getting heavy rail schemes going in this country, perhaps the question should be "Is rail ever the answer".

 

[moggie]

What's the question?

 

[anti-pacer]

What's the question?

Does rail always have to be the solution for towns that aren't connected to the network, or are other schemes just as good, such as the Leigh busway?

 

[edwin_m]

Buses could be the answer in some places if:

• There was no significant traffic congestion on their routes (for example exclusive roadspace or running in a quiet area but feeding into a train for the journey into the city)
• They were integrated with the rail timetable and fares system
• They were protected from closure in a similar way to train services, so people could rely on them to make long-term planning decisions such as where to live

Bus regulation is necessary to achieve the second and third points above and makes the first easier.

Because of the cost of new rail infrastructure and the many capacity constraints on the existing network, it isn't a question of choosing between proper bus services and new rail, it's a question of putting up with the present mostly unsatisfactory bus services.

 

[Wirewiper]

The big advantage that segregated busways have (whether guided or unguided) is that the buses can also operate on ordinary roads away from the busway. This gives enormous scope for flexibility and for linking areas of low-density housing directly into the busway route, and also saves on infrastructure costs in areas where a segregated route isn't needed.

 

[moggie]

I guess it depends on the demand in terms of numbers travelling, time of day, whether the demand is compressed and likely destination for the majority of people and whether any of those factors are poorly / not served by existing modes? It may also be influenced by a desire to move away from existing modes for example to relieve traffic congestion / pollution (noise and emissions). Any combination of these factors might point towards a rail based solution as the optimum choice.
Then of course there's money.
Unfortunately for Rail, any project such as you describe requires rail to pay for everything lock, stock and pway. Yes most money may come from the public but this is earmarked over a period for all rail related projects which have to bid for their share of what's available.
While Road based solutions often get the capital spend on infrastructure virtually free in that it is provided from separate budgets held by agencies outwith of the project unless vast amounts of new road building is required. It is what it is.

 

[Robertj21a]

I can't see heavy rail being extended other than a very few special cases, probably of short length. Light rail should be much better but we haven't had a good record of implementing them.
The Cambridge - Huntingdon Busway stands out as an extreme success where heavy rail would not have been seriously considered.

 

[Aictos]

I can't see heavy rail being extended other than a very few special cases, probably of short length. Light rail should be much better but we haven't had a good record of implementing them.
The Cambridge - Huntingdon Busway stands out as an extreme success where heavy rail would not have been seriously considered.

As well as the Luton Busway, that is another success story as there was no chance of heavy rail making a comeback between Dunstable and Luton but the busway provides fast links between Dunstable and Luton at a much higher frequency serving more areas then any heavy rail service would.

 

[Ianno87]

The big advantage that segregated busways have (whether guided or unguided) is that the buses can also operate on ordinary roads away from the busway. This gives enormous scope for flexibility and for linking areas of low-density housing directly into the busway route, and also saves on infrastructure costs in areas where a segregated route isn't needed.

This is exactly the case with the Cambridgesire Guided Busway. High frequency on the core section (that heavy rail couldn't even come close to), but then the service is flexible by splitting around various St. Ives/Huntingdon estates, and can access Central Cambridge without any major infrastructure.

 

[kristiang85]

Wasn't the railway purposefully taken away from skelmersdale to stop the residents from going back to Liverpool as part of the regeneration programme?

 

[Bletchleyite]

There are, as you'll be aware, many towns in the UK that are not served by railways. Leigh for example, Gosport, Skelmersdale, Washington, Ashington, Portishead, Clevedon as others.

Do they necessarily need connecting to the railways? Let's look at Leigh for example, a reasonably sized town with no rail links, but now on a busway system that links it to Salford and Manchester. Is this an easy cop-out or sufficient enough? Would linking Leigh to the railway network produce enough passenger numbers or are other modes of transport better for such places?

The Leigh busway was in my view not the right solution there - really, it is crying out for Metrolink. But other countries, particularly Switzerland, demonstrate that regional buses properly linked into the railway network (timed for connections and through ticketing) work very well. I strongly feel that Trawscymru was a wasted opportunity of this kind - and rather than wasting money on giving free weekend travel they could do with spending it on sorting that out.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Wasn't the railway purposefully taken away from skelmersdale to stop the residents from going back to Liverpool as part of the regeneration programme?

I've heard that said, but I don't believe it's true, it was more that one arm didn't know what the other one was doing and it was closed without knowing the long-term plans for the New Town. Though it was believed that New Towns would provide a utopian situation of both living and working there, just like Milton Keynes where MKC station was an afterthought, so it probably wasn't a priority.

 

[Bletchleyite]

This is exactly the case with the Cambridgesire Guided Busway. High frequency on the core section (that heavy rail couldn't even come close to), but then the service is flexible by splitting around various St. Ives/Huntingdon estates, and can access Central Cambridge without any major infrastructure.

St Ives is a bit of an odd case - indeed Cambridgeshire is generally, being a primarily rural area with comparatively high public transport use. But there is another way to provide this as per other European countries - you use buses for what they're good for - connecting you to the station with a single through ticket.

As for going into Cambridge on-road - way not to avoid the traffic congestion!

The advantage of the busway was that as it proved very popular it was easy and cheap to get more buses in to up the service. It does have a curious country-branch-line type feel to it.

I think I'd probably suggest the way to go should have been light rail with bus connections.

 

[Chester1]

The Leigh busway was an improvement but on its own is not sufficient because it only supports local travel. Leigh has sufficient demand to support a parkway station and the Chat Moss could do with extra capacity from a passing loop near Leigh so it would be a good idea. The busway services could start at there instead of at the bus station to provide a decent train-bus link.

I know some people on this site hate it when people don't have blind support for heavy rail but there are places were its neither the most suitable or nor the best value for money. The busway was chosen for Leigh because it was cheap at £68m. Metrolink was too expensive and slower than the busway if done as an extension of the Eccles line. The original heavy rail alignments have been built on and the proposed spur from the Chat Moss line would struggle to be allocated enough paths on a busy and important line.

 

[Aictos]

This is exactly the case with the Cambridgesire Guided Busway. High frequency on the core section (that heavy rail couldn't even come close to), but then the service is flexible by splitting around various St. Ives/Huntingdon estates, and can access Central Cambridge without any major infrastructure.

Exactly the same with the Luton Busway, Arriva is the main operator with services every few minutes with Centrebus and Grant Palmer providing the competition.

 

[randyrippley]

Wasn't the railway purposefully taken away from skelmersdale to stop the residents from going back to Liverpool as part of the regeneration programme?

Same at Haverhill to stop residents getting back to London's east end

 

[Western Lord]

Same at Haverhill to stop residents getting back to London's east end

All of the "New Towns" were supposed to be self contained and little consideration was given to rail provision. Stations, if they existed at all, were almost all inconveniently located (and remain so).

 

[tbtc]

I suppose this depends on what people think the railways are for.

Some people take the view that railways should be a means to an end intended to be as efficient as possible (with some kind of definable objective means of assessing it), e.g. to remove the most car miles up to a certain level of subsidy...

...or whether the railway is an end in itself and is something that everyone should have local access to (regardless of whether the population density/ demand justifies it). And some people seem to have a funny idea about distribution of railway stations - it's apparently important to link a rural settlement with ten thousand people but people turn blind eyes to large urban areas where the nearest station is in the city centre (hence the obsession with places like Devon villages rather than, say, fifty thousand people living in Leith).

I believe that heavy rail is only one tool (and that it's a pretty blunt/ inflexible tool, best suited to the bulkiest flows). Brilliant at what it does best but it's one end of a toolbox that includes trams/ tram-trains/ coaches/ buses/ guided busways/ dial-a-ride minibuses.

Looking at the OP's example...

There are, as you'll be aware, many towns in the UK that are not served by railways. Leigh for example, Gosport, Skelmersdale, Washington, Ashington, Portishead, Clevedon as others

...Washington is the place that I know best - it's certainly a large place to be without a station but it's a difficult place to serve easily given how spread out the housing estates are - one station is still going to be a long way from most people - presumably it'd be on the Leamside line, so on the western fringes of the town - some distance from the Galleries and from Concord - requiring a bus or drive to the station (and Washington residents already have that facility with the Go Ahead 4 to Heworth Metro Station, as well as regular buses directly into central Newcastle).

If opening a "stub" branch into Newcastle then you'd need to offer a very attractive train frequency to get people to head over to the far side of Washington! But if you are opening the Leamside line throughout then it makes sense to put a station in at Washington rather than omit it.

Maybe a Metro extension from South Hylton through Washington to Gateshead would work, since that'd be at lower cost and would provide links to other parts of Wearside (but then you have the problem with that getting in the way of re-opening the Leamside to heavy rail at a future date - would people be happy with this, if it meant that re-opening the Leamside throughout meant paying to upgrade the Metro to Tram-Train?

Ashington and Portishead, on the other hand, are both places with much denser populations so more suited to heavy rail (given that re-opening the old train line will be pretty close to the town centre and also within a reasonable walk of people's houses).

Gosport... tricky one - what train services would run there? You'd have the problem that any medium/long service to Gosport would be at the expense of serving Portsmouth/ Southampton ... and if you are only talking about a shuttle service to Fareham then that doesn't offer much that the frequent bus service doesn't.

Skelmersdale would probably be top of my list since there's an obvious train service that you could extend there, a train service that runs to the destination that would probably be number one for residents - I'm surprised that it wasn't done decades ago.

But I'm not sure whether the New Town stuff on here (e.g. there were deliberate plans to stop people returning to the city they previously lived in) is true or not - as far as I see it, the new towns were being built at a time when rail was out of favour (rather than any conspiracy)

 

[Peter Kelford]

Same at Haverhill to stop residents getting back to London's east end

All of the "New Towns" were supposed to be self contained and little consideration was given to rail provision. Stations, if they existed at all, were almost all inconveniently located (and remain so).

There isn't a conspiracy. Rather, its something called 'stupid town planning'. Even today, new build areas have very narrow roads full of speed humps and extremely narrow pavements. Furthermore, today's new towns don't actually have any rail links...

 

[Western Lord]

There isn't a conspiracy. Rather, its something called 'stupid town planning'. Even today, new build areas have very narrow roads full of speed humps and extremely narrow pavements. Furthermore, today's new towns don't actually have any rail links...

At the time that New Towns were conceived, commuting as we know it today did not exist. I would imagine that in the late forties/early fifties most people who worked in central London lived within ten to fifteen miles of the city and commuting was on inner suburban and London Underground lines. New Towns were never intended for commuters, you were expected to live work and play within the town. Also, in those days, families were far less widely spread and few children in New Towns would have been expected to go to university, so the need to travel was much less than today.

 

[edwin_m]

We haven't discussed Washington recently so I've started a new thread: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/washington.180794/

But I'm not sure whether the New Town stuff on here (e.g. there were deliberate plans to stop people returning to the city they previously lived in) is true or not - as far as I see it, the new towns were being built at a time when rail was out of favour (rather than any conspiracy)

Like much of urban planning from WW2 until the 1980s, this was fundamentally flawed. The structure where everyone in the town worked at the local pit/factory/etc was dying out even then, in particular because of increased mobility by car and because of most couples having separate jobs which were often far enough apart that at least one of them had a substantial commute.

 

[Class 170101]

The commute was also perceived to be by car and not by train. Didn't Milton Keynes Station open many years after the New Town was actually started?

 

[EM2]

Though it was believed that New Towns would provide a utopian situation of both living and working there, just like Milton Keynes where MKC station was an afterthought, so it probably wasn't a priority.

The thing is though, quite often people do need to go somewhere else, for business or pleasure!

 

[edwin_m]

The commute was also perceived to be by car and not by train. Didn't Milton Keynes Station open many years after the New Town was actually started?

That was the other part of the bad planning - an assumption that all future journeys would be by car. Completely ignoring the fact that historic large cities can't exist in modern form without public transport, and new large cities would end up sprawling over huge areas like most of the ones in America.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The thing is though, quite often people do need to go somewhere else, for business or pleasure!

People lived much more locally back then than they do now, I'd say. And Wolverton and Bletchley were considered to be enough - you'd simply drive to them (or use the "dial a bus") if you needed it.

 

[Bletchleyite]

That was the other part of the bad planning - an assumption that all future journeys would be by car. Completely ignoring the fact that historic large cities can't exist in modern form without public transport, and new large cities would end up sprawling over huge areas like most of the ones in America.

To be fair, the original envisaged size of MK with all the single carriageways dualled does work with primarily car transport - there actually is enough road capacity and parking, and congestion is nothing like other similar places even now it's got bigger still. The design is actually very effective, and when people start mucking around with it (e.g. damaging the grid concept) is when it fails.

But of course MK is actually intended to sprawl like US cities - it is very low density and intentionally so. This does give it some of its upsides, such as so many nice green areas near where people live.

What was missed, though, was the environmental and social issues that design caused. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the car was the future, bus users were a failure (thanks, Maggie), rail was old hat and nobody thought about such things.

 

[EM2]

People lived much more locally back then than they do now, I'd say. And Wolverton and Bletchley were considered to be enough - you'd simply drive to them (or use the "dial a bus") if you needed it.

But if you were a business with customers in other places? A family who had moved to MK when other parts of the family (grandparents, aunties, uncles) didn't? Did they really believe that no-one would ever have to travel anywhere else?!

 

[Mutant Lemming]

Gosport is only a five minute ferry ride from it's nearest station

 

[yorksrob]

The Leigh busway was an improvement but on its own is not sufficient because it only supports local travel. Leigh has sufficient demand to support a parkway station and the Chat Moss could do with extra capacity from a passing loop near Leigh so it would be a good idea. The busway services could start at there instead of at the bus station to provide a decent train-bus link.

I know some people on this site hate it when people don't have blind support for heavy rail but there are places were its neither the most suitable or nor the best value for money. The busway was chosen for Leigh because it was cheap at £68m. Metrolink was too expensive and slower than the busway if done as an extension of the Eccles line. The original heavy rail alignments have been built on and the proposed spur from the Chat Moss line would struggle to be allocated enough paths on a busy and important line.

Or alternatively, don't destroy the good heavy rail links to the area via the Atherton line.