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> Having said that, my preference (with 60-year-old hindsight) would have been to mothball the loss-making routes, rather than tear them up completely. Even tw
by gsnedders 11y ago
> Having said that, my preference (with 60-year-old hindsight) would have been to mothball the loss-making routes, rather than tear them up completely.
Even twenty-five years ago when the privatisation of the railway was happening there was an expectation that passenger numbers would continue their downwards trend—certainly no though that it would end up with passenger numbers quickly increasing throughout more of less the whole country.
It's worthwhile pointing out that much of what was got rid of was duplicated routes: unless you have any expectation of the surviving route reaching capacity, what's the point in keeping a parallel alignment free? In the vast majority of cases, that rationalisation made sense, even in hindsight.
- teh_klev 11y ago> what's the point in keeping a parallel alignment free? Freight, which has seen a huge growth over the past 10-15 years, especially inter-modal traffic.
- Someone 11y agoAlso: redundancy. If a road gets closed because of a traffic accident, people take a slightly slower detour, and get home. For trains, there often is no alternative that isn't at least twice as long, and includes a switch between trains with a waiting time that is long because the time schedule wasn't designed for that weird switch.
- madaxe_again 11y agoRedundant, you say? Tear it up! Amazing how that word is contronymic, yet not.
- takno 11y agoLines like the borders line from Carlisle to Edinburgh and Birmingham to Cheltenham via Stratford were closed as "parallel alignments", and I sure everybody in the borders, along with anybody from Stratford trying to get to the South-East was completely reassured to know that there was actually no problem with them losing their access to the railway because some longer-distance travellers were still able to complete their journeys on a parallel route 50 miles away