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Most beeching stations were of no use- the service wasn’t there. The village my son’s school is at had a station, a mile out the middle, with 5 trains a day. Yo

by chgs 2y ago

Most beeching stations were of no use- the service wasn’t there. The village my son’s school is at had a station, a mile out the middle, with 5 trains a day. You would have to change to another train to get to a station with a regular service to London, and increasing services wouldn’t be possible without significantly increasing terminal capacity. Menawhile the far larger village I live in has never had a station. Some lines would be useful nowadays and could possibly be worthwhile, but there was no realistic way to know which should have been kept in the 60s. Far better would be to stop all the nonsense and just start digging new lines. But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels. Billions the m40 never had to spend.

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels Some political groups will never be happy, I wonder if better strategy is confrontating them then appeasing them. At least would have kept the budget down
eesmith 2y ago
That's really not my point. Okay, now the village has no train service, so they are required to use cars or buses to get around. Then the UK introduces a "UK ticket", £50/month for local train service anywhere in the UK. If those villagers protest against the ticket, because it's funded by their taxes while they can't use it, how should we understand that complaint? One way is to use their anger to justify shutting down the new ticket scheme. This is typical us-vs-them politics. A second is to say "suck it you car-addicted freaks", as if they had a choice in the matter and were not stuck with the results of decisions made during their grandparents' time. A third is to re-connect train services, an option made much more expensive by the decision to not bank the rail lines for possible future expansion; a hidden debt which must now be paid. But then who will pay those costs? Simply saying 'only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option' is entirely too simplistic to be meaningful.
- chgs 2y ago
  My village - which is far larger nowadays - never had a station. Subsidising buses like the £2 fare makes far more sense for most people than subsidising trains. Not that we get a bus which goes anywhere useful like a train station there’s 6 a day but you then need to change to another bus to get to the station. Offering free parking at stations would help with a “living close to station” lot. I went to Birmingham a few weeks ago, choice is drive 30 minutes to station, pay £12 to park, then pay £17 for the train fare. Instead I just drove the extra 40 minutes and paid £10 to park in Birmingham.
  - eesmith 2y ago
    > Offering free parking at stations From everything I've read, that's a huge subsidy. It takes land away from people willing to live without a car, and who would pay to be in walking distance from the station. Put subsidized parking around a station and you lose that tax base, and encourage even more car dependency. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#Replacement_buses_and_proposed_alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#Replacement_buse... and you'll see why you need to bribe people with cheap parking to use the trains: > The assumption at the time[citation needed] was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative. You've built a lot of your country around car transport (and diesel trains instead of electrification). Less than we did in the US, certainly, but the fundamental problem is to reduce the severity of the greenhouse crisis. If rail subsidies reduce CO2 emissions and parking subsidized does not, then why do the latter?

by chgs 2y ago

ClumsyPilot 2y ago

> But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels Some political groups will never be happy, I wonder if better strategy is confrontating them then appeasing them. At least would have kept the budget down

eesmith 2y ago

That's really not my point. Okay, now the village has no train service, so they are required to use cars or buses to get around. Then the UK introduces a "UK ticket", £50/month for local train service anywhere in the UK. If those villagers protest against the ticket, because it's funded by their taxes while they can't use it, how should we understand that complaint? One way is to use their anger to justify shutting down the new ticket scheme. This is typical us-vs-them politics. A second is to say "suck it you car-addicted freaks", as if they had a choice in the matter and were not stuck with the results of decisions made during their grandparents' time. A third is to re-connect train services, an option made much more expensive by the decision to not bank the rail lines for possible future expansion; a hidden debt which must now be paid. But then who will pay those costs? Simply saying 'only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option' is entirely too simplistic to be meaningful.

chgs 2y ago
My village - which is far larger nowadays - never had a station. Subsidising buses like the £2 fare makes far more sense for most people than subsidising trains. Not that we get a bus which goes anywhere useful like a train station there’s 6 a day but you then need to change to another bus to get to the station. Offering free parking at stations would help with a “living close to station” lot. I went to Birmingham a few weeks ago, choice is drive 30 minutes to station, pay £12 to park, then pay £17 for the train fare. Instead I just drove the extra 40 minutes and paid £10 to park in Birmingham.
- eesmith 2y ago
  > Offering free parking at stations From everything I've read, that's a huge subsidy. It takes land away from people willing to live without a car, and who would pay to be in walking distance from the station. Put subsidized parking around a station and you lose that tax base, and encourage even more car dependency. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#Replacement_buses_and_proposed_alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#Replacement_buse... and you'll see why you need to bribe people with cheap parking to use the trains: > The assumption at the time[citation needed] was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative. You've built a lot of your country around car transport (and diesel trains instead of electrification). Less than we did in the US, certainly, but the fundamental problem is to reduce the severity of the greenhouse crisis. If rail subsidies reduce CO2 emissions and parking subsidized does not, then why do the latter?