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Beyond the myriad organisational issues that people have discussed, the UK is trapped by the oldest railway infrastructure. Tunnels, cuttings and the like built by hand have left us with the smallest standard-gauge loading gauge in the world. Indeed Japanese cape gauge railways typically have...

I am no longer convinced that the complication of first class provision on the railway is really justified by the extra income. Personally I wonder if it worsens the issues with the railway by allowing a substantial part of its customer base, an influential portion, to avoid contact with the...

The vast majority of the traffic on the corridor is contained on the corridor itself or gets dumped a single location in the city centre. A very large fraction of the buses on the corridor run to Piccadilly Gardens as it is. The 8x buses, the 111, the 42/43 and 142/143 buses. Beyond that there...

Living near the corridor as I do I have spent an awful lot of time considering this problem. It's not an easy problem to solve, which is why personally I tend towards an urban ropeway solution to the Oxford Road challenge. It's only 800m but there is no easy way through, its very tightly...

That is at the very least debatable. Manchester type tram infrastructure has proven capable of absorbing 30 trams per hour per direction, and using double (or triple) length trams it could swallow up the majority of the Oxford Road traffic comparatively easily. With standing a double tram...

Perhaps you are right, although I am not entirely convinced given how tone deaf many of their publications are. I have amended the previous post to make it somewhat less strident.

Well the RDG's position seems to be that noone needs to be convinced of the value of rail and unconditional public and political support is assured. They brush aside complaints by saying that the complainant is wrong and the Railway is clearly amazing in every respect. That leads to production...

Ultimately because the spectacle of a Eurostar rushing across france at 186mph before trundling through Kent was embarassing for the powers that be. By the time HS1 was greenlit the idea of mass travel across the channel by train was dead. It was dying before Eurostar even started, killed by...

And, in the long term, they may even allow feeder stations to operate in parallel, flattening the load and allowing further increases in utilisation for the overall infrastructure.

Heritage railways would amount to a small number of trainloads per year for the entire country. There is unlikely to be sufficient output in any commercial coal facility to make that market worse serving. Heritage railways are likely to convert to biomass or to oil firing, or stop operating...

Even there patronage has been falling since about 2014 (even ignoring coronavirus). THere was growth for a few years when the congestion charge briefly reduced traffic in London and allowed increased average speeds, but that effect has now disappeared.

It might help but it won't save us from the UK obsession with double deckers with a single narrow staircase. I'm not convinced any road based public transport solution can ever be truly attractive to the population.

The problem is we don't have decades to sit around hoping battery electric HGVs with practical operational and economic characteristics will appear. Decarbonisation has to be well under way by 2030, not starting to get started! And what happens if they don't? Waiting to be bailed out by future...

Why? The vast majority of motorways are not constructed in ultra rural environments, and the low load density from allowing lorries to be drawing power for the majority of their operational life will reduce peak demand considerably. A lot of eHighway substations would likely draw power from the...

Well operation of the pantograph system, which is capable of moving around independently of the vehicle, is under the control of an onboard computer rather than the driver. If the driver attempts to leave the lane the system will automatically retract with no further driver action. Maintenance...

The lines would be analogous to trolleybus practice and would consist of ~750V (the German trials are at 670V nominal) circuits with both out and return. The required clearances for such cables in UK tramway practice are mechanical, in an electrical sense they are zero (in essence, don't let the...

Well there are lots of high intensity bus corridors in the UK. And double deckers are so slow to load and unload that a tram may still have lower operational costs even with fewer people aboard.

The problem with that is that you end up with arbitrary termination points to services, which ends up negatively affecting the whole. For example, discussions of Metrolink tram trains to Marple or Rose Hill Marple only (even though Strines station is in Greater Manchester), leaving this awkward...

It was 2,000 job losses, now it is 1,300 at risk? I assume the 700 are already gone?

Fundamentally we have a problem in that we have two (and at one end three!) parallel railway lines, both of which have to offer stopping services with deleterious capacity and service frequency impacts. Two parallel railways that are in large part only a few hundred metres apart is far from ideal.