Whilst the ferry connections might justify an Intercity type train every 2-3 hours, and we could probably do with some more summer Saturday trains, does electrification of circa 100 miles really represent a good use of money when the combined population of Holyhead, Bangor, Llandudno, Rhyl and Prestatyn is about 100,000? We have so many missing links and stubs with bigger populations.
It's less about population and more about the fact that burning dead dinosaurs has to stop. But if you are willing to restrict to a dedicated fleet, then it could be discontinuous electrification.
One thing we will have to wait and see (and it's going to be hard to predict) is if the majority of passengers value retaining/reinstating a through London service in the long term, or if post-HS2 everyone will just switch to HS2 at Crewe, as it's so much quicker, and in that case it might be better to run something like an hourly Holyhead to Birmingham via Crewe and Stafford, which could be wholly TfW operated, alongside the Liverpool and Manchester services, and those could all use dedicated battery fitted EMUs?
Here's an idea: once HS2 is open between Euston and Crewe, divert the ICWC Holyhead services via Birmingham (hopefully the massive recast brought about by HS2 will allow an hourly path for a Pendolino or pair of 805s (shame they're only 5 coaches, there aren't enough of them to run it hourly as pairs of units) Euston-Birmingham-Wolverhampton-Stafford-Crewe). Since changing onto HS2 would be a quicker of getting to London anyway, there will no longer be a need to run the Holyheads via the Trent Valley route and north Wales would gain fast services to Birmingham instead. That way, there should still be plenty of people using the service - it's just most will be using it for trips to/from Birmingham instead of London.
You could of course just drop the London workings altogether and give the fast Birmingham route to TfW instead, but politically it would retain a through London service even though hardly anyone would use it as such.
Exactly this. Electrifying North Wales seems an odd choice in a world where there are no wires across the Pennines, along the Chiltern line, the Birmingham Snow Hill routes, half of the Midland Mainline (and many more) would seem rather odd.
All of those need to be done, they are all recomended for electrification in Network Rail's TDNS (including the North Wales coast to Holyhead and Llandudno). In fact, the Snow Hill lines are shown green with dotted pink (which I think means electrification recommended but alternative traction would be feasible) whereas the North Wales coast is solid green (core electrification) along with the MML and most of the TPE network (York-Scarborough is an exception which has the same green/pink as the Snow Hill lines).
Yes, Holyhead is (rightly, probably) going to be a far way down the list of most people's priorities alongside things like TPE and MML, but it needs to be done eventually.
Caernarfon? It really, really isn't.
Really? Huge castle, medieval walls. Not to mention the steam railway.
And a potential gateway to Snowdonia, with Sherpa buses to both Beddgelert and Llanberis. Snowdonia has a real problem with cars; car-free tourism would be a huge boon for the area.
Whilst I am not sure Holyhead route is highest priority for electrification, can somebody please explain why the Conway tubular bridge cannot be electrified.
We don't know if it
can't be electrified; I very much doubt it is completely impossible unless the vertical clearance is so tight you couldn't even raise a pantograph in there (and if it was, I think somebody in British Rail might have noticed back in 1981 when a rolling programme of electrification, including Holyhead, was recommended).
It's not the bridge. It's one person who thinks the local NIMBYs would be chaining themselves to the rails across Conwy Cob because of a few masts* and a bit of wire they may not even notice.
* I concede the GWML scheme is overengineered and horribly ugly, but you don't need to use massive girders for it, there are nicer looking options for a section with a very low linespeed, look at some of the French low speed stuff, or cast iron tram catenary masts.
There are nicer-looking options than the GWML stuff even for fairly high linespeeds. A quick Google image search for HS1 has mostly returned pictures featuring far less-obtrusive OHLE than the GWML monstrosities. Indeed, with a suitable design single track cantilever, the ugliest bit can be the actual wires (mainly because it isn't just the contact wire, there's a load of other 'knitting' involved in OHLE as well for some reason).
