Is the quarry not part of the Preserved line? that may explain why it's being maintained a bit better than might be expected.
I strongly suspect there have been no official discussions on the Tavistock - Okehampton gap. Just gets reheated in the forum every time an IET fails at Dawlish.
For now. It'll come back around, as do all the others.
You surprise me. But then again many restoring your railway applications seem to have had little basis in reality.
Perhaps something of the "three strikes and you're out" variety might also assist in such a matter.
I brought this up in a telephone conversation with a colleague who lives near Newton Abbot recently and he went away saying he would give thought to the matter. He came back to me a couple of days later to say that in his considered opinion, the only case that would best describe this project was "a basket case"
The lack of revision may also be related to having access to the funds to set out the case properly. The grants to 'develop' the business case wouldn't have always bought some of the more, ahem, ambitious projects the time/data/expertise needed to address all the issues.
When evaluating the business case for a rail project on a line that has seen no train service for many years, such as to Tavistock, how is the stated "commuter rail access to nearest city for work" viewed by the decision makers?
When there were direct SWT trains to Plymouth via Dawlish everybody used to change at St David's anyway as the direct trains were overtaken in Dawlish Warren Loop so they could call at Ivybridge Car Boot station without holding up HSTs. They carried next to no passengers south of Exeter which is why they were discontinued.
Yes, the Torbay ones could be quite busy though.
In many ways. The appraisal process considers journey times on different modes and routes, costs, parking and congestion in the city centre, access to a car in the towns, and then calculates values for a wide range of indices. Key points being carbon (several measures), air quality (particulates, etc), accident reduction on roads, and impact of having better access to jobs. But there's a reason business cases run into hundreds of pages - they cover an awful lot of ground.
You might have slightly better luck with Portishead than that, given certain important political hurdles have been cleared (even if some remain).
Or run nice free coaches along the A30 for a capital outlay of £0, on the very infrequent occasions that Cornwall is "cut off".
WebTAG is freely available and you are more than welcome to submit your own proposal, with business case, to the DfT.
Ok- the 'washout' at Dawlish a few years back lasted more than a few days, but a day or even a week of no trains is not 'the end of the world'. Without wishing to be overly harsh- what is Cornwall for, and then how does rail serve that? What might be the maximum travel time to reach a 'railhead' IF it's decided that 'Serpell was right'? We need a dose of 'economic reality' as it seems to be seen in Westminster. There are a mere 6 MPs in Cornwall (that's 1% of the UK total) - all Conservative at present. Hardly a 'wall' of any kind. Sorry.