East West rail, Bletchley to oxford line

[corneliuslundie]

Re Hills Road  bridge, Cambridge, it indeed has four lines under it, though only two are currently running lines. So no problem there.

There are, or were, two south facing bays as well, and I don't think there are nearly as many trains from the south terminating there as there used to be even when I lived there, and the Long Melford and LNWR branches had already gone even then.

Jonathan

[adanapress]

Theres an interesting side comment in the newly  published plans,  they mention the possibility of 'sharing the corridor' with the works allegedly  soon to start on the Caxton Gibbet=Black Cat roundabout road improvement scheme.   I wonder what sharing means in engineering terms, ,  a common cutting maybe ...?

[cbeagleowner]

As far as I'm aware from our local press sharing the corridor just means following the same route give or take so all the infrastructure is in one place. So round St Neots you’ll have the current A428 town by pass, the new dual carriageway and the railway running close to each other. 

[stewartingram]

Why does everyone forget that roadbuilding also involves house demolition

[31A]

2 hours ago, corneliuslundie said:

Re Hills Road  bridge, Cambridge, it indeed has four lines under it, though only two are currently running lines. So no problem there.

There are, or were, two south facing bays as well, and I don't think there are nearly as many trains from the south terminating there as there used to be even when I lived there, and the Long Melford and LNWR branches had already gone even then.

Jonathan

 

Actually I was talking about Long Road bridge which looks as though it was built to span four lines but has only ever had two beneath it; there have always been  four lines under Hills Road bridge, although I think the remains of the former goods loop on the Up side is now just a short spur.  Re. terminating trains in the bay platforms 2 and 3 I shouldn't be so sure as although the cross country lines you mention have indeed gone, they never had very frequent services anyway, but both routes from Cambridge to London have much more frequent services now than they have done at any time in the past.  Added to those there are Birmingham-Stansted and Norwich-Stansted services which pass through, and of course there is also now the new island platform, built a decade ago or so.

 

I speak as someone who grew up in one of the Cambridgeshire villages that was served by the original Cambridge-Bedford line (remember seeing Pacifics passing through Tempsford), went to school in Cambridge then later lived there and worked on the railway there or thereabouts for most of the 1980s and 1990s before emigrating to Yorkshire.

 

[rodent279]

11 hours ago, Bernard Lamb said:

As mentioned some while ago this is not China.

Yet.

[corneliuslundie]

Difficult to tell from Google Earth but it doesn't look as if there is room for four lines under Long Road bridge, and there are certainly only two as the up loop doesn't go quite that far.

Jonathan

[melmerby]

3 hours ago, stewartingram said:

Why does everyone forget that roadbuilding also involves house demolition

But people can't run their gas guzzlers on a railway!

It makes a lot of difference to the mind set.

Edited May 29, 2023 by melmerby

[adanapress]

Do I understand rightly that Tempsford is to be a full interchange station with the ECML?  And if so, does anyone know what arrangements are proposed?

[Pete the Elaner]

21 hours ago, stewartingram said:

Why does everyone forget that roadbuilding also involves house demolition

 

Indeed it does.

Another common argument against railways is that they don't make a profit. That argument should surely also apply to any road which does not require a toll to use it?

[Bernard Lamb]

49 minutes ago, adanapress said:

Do I understand rightly that Tempsford is to be a full interchange station with the ECML?  And if so, does anyone know what arrangements are proposed?

Page 102 of the report gives the information. More surveys are to be carried out with a view to looking into the development of the station. So, nothing finite in the way of (published) proposals.

Bernard

[Davexoc]

On 29/05/2023 at 18:37, adanapress said:

Theres an interesting side comment in the newly  published plans,  they mention the possibility of 'sharing the corridor' with the works allegedly  soon to start on the Caxton Gibbet=Black Cat roundabout road improvement scheme.   I wonder what sharing means in engineering terms, ,  a common cutting maybe ...?

 

Logically it should be common, but the road comes first being built by contractor A, just as it opens contractor B turns up to widen the cutting for the railway and close half the road off to do so. When he finishes and hands it all back along come Gritish Bas, Outreach or some other utility company to upgrade something or other, as all the new houses have overloaded the network....

[KingEdwardII]

On 29/05/2023 at 19:59, stewartingram said:

Why does everyone forget that roadbuilding also involves house demolition

Just try and fell a tree in a roadbuilding project and see what happens...

 

Yours, Mike.

[KingEdwardII]

14 hours ago, Pete the Elaner said:

Another common argument against railways is that they don't make a profit.

Unfortunately, the government takes a huge fortune in taxes on vehicles - and spends only a fraction of that on road building and maintenance. That's a kind of profit - and the current lack of fuel taxes on electric vehicles is giving the politicians and civil servants something of a headache.

 

Yours, Mike.

[Michael Hodgson]

On 29/05/2023 at 18:37, adanapress said:

Theres an interesting side comment in the newly  published plans,  they mention the possibility of 'sharing the corridor' with the works allegedly  soon to start on the Caxton Gibbet=Black Cat roundabout road improvement scheme.   I wonder what sharing means in engineering terms, ,  a common cutting maybe ...?

Not much need for a cutting, the ground is pretty flat.  If there's a "cutting" it will be more of an artifical thing to muffle traffic noise. 

 

11 hours ago, Davexoc said:

 

Logically it should be common, but the road comes first being built by contractor A, just as it opens contractor B turns up to widen the cutting for the railway and close half the road off to do so. When he finishes and hands it all back along come Gritish Bas, Outreach or some other utility company to upgrade something or other, as all the new houses have overloaded the network....

 

New houses have being going up for some time, especially at St Neots, so the network is already overloaded.  That's why they've got to upgrade the road!  When electricity becomes fully renewable energy, the gas fired Barford power station (originally coal fired, served by rail) will be redundant so in due course that land should become available to build yet more housing.

 

But the major road bottleneck is Black Cat roundabout where rush hour traffic between Cambridge and Bedford conflicts with the Great North Road.  The plans for that are a 3-level solution - keep a roundabout for traffic turning off, but add an underpass and a flyover for through traffic on both main routes.   Oh yes, probably add another turnoff to give access to the new Tempsford station.

[Davexoc]

10 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

But the major road bottleneck is Black Cat roundabout where rush hour traffic between Cambridge and Bedford conflicts with the Great North Road.  The plans for that are a 3-level solution - keep a roundabout for traffic turning off, but add an underpass and a flyover for through traffic on both main routes.   Oh yes, probably add another turnoff to give access to the new Tempsford station.

 

Something that should have been done last time they muddled with it when the Barford bypass was done. Stick a new dual carriageway onto a roundabout in the middle of an already busy trunk road and guess what??? Couldn't see that one coming, no forethought. Many years late....

[The Stationmaster]

4 hours ago, KingEdwardII said:

Unfortunately, the government takes a huge fortune in taxes on vehicles - and spends only a fraction of that on road building and maintenance. That's a kind of profit - and the current lack of fuel taxes on electric vehicles is giving the politicians and civil servants something of a headache.

 

Yours, Mike.

Judging by what happened near here last year the answer is - 'absolutely nothing except a great heap of felled healthy mature trees'.    trouble is lots f peole don't give a damn about trees unll they are their trees.

 

I don't know if the District Council still has a Trees Officer but if they have he's definitely changed his tune since we built our house and he got quite excited about it being in the same garden as a mature cherry tree which he said would suffer and die.  17 years on it hasn't died, and it is still costing me money for the tree surgeon to keep it under control.

[KingEdwardII]

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

lots f peole don't give a damn about trees

Hmm - my experience is of the mobs who tie themselves to the trees, or make homes in the trees (etc) to stop them being felled. Not seen many do that for any kind of house...

 

Yours, Mike.

[KingEdwardII]

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

District Council still has a Trees Officer

One of the neighbours in our village has a large mature Tree of Heaven in his garden.

 

A decade ago, the neighbour applied to fell this tree as it was sending up suckers and destroying his driveway. The local tree officer refused this, even though it's a non-native tree.

 

Subsequently, the tree has started to die and has a lot of dead wood in its canopy. It is now dropping large branches including on to the public footpath. I suspect the tree officer will not be happy until someone gets crushed by a falling branch.

 

More "Tree of Hell" if you ask me - and a warning not to plant potentially large trees in your garden.

 

Yours,  Mike.

[corneliuslundie]

And the other  way around the BS Code of Practice states minimum distances from trees for building. And has done for a good many years.

I am beginning to wonder, from the amount of apparently unnecessary tree telling I have seen recently, whether there is a feeling that tree felling will be banned and the owners of the trees want to get in first.

Jonathan

[Northmoor]

5 hours ago, KingEdwardII said:

One of the neighbours in our village has a large mature Tree of Heaven in his garden.

 

A decade ago, the neighbour applied to fell this tree as it was sending up suckers and destroying his driveway. The local tree officer refused this, even though it's a non-native tree.

 

Subsequently, the tree has started to die and has a lot of dead wood in its canopy. It is now dropping large branches including on to the public footpath. I suspect the tree officer will not be happy until someone gets crushed by a falling branch.

 

More "Tree of Hell" if you ask me - and a warning not to plant potentially large trees in your garden.

 

Yours,  Mike.

Almost every tree on our estate has a TPO on it.  One neighbour, seemingly got fed up with waiting for a decision on the (non-native) horse chestnut about 10' from his front window which would either seriously damage his house or block the street and probably crush a couple of cars, depending on which way it fell in a storm.  Eventually he removed it and the stump and laid lawn over it one weekend, by Monday you would never have known it existed.

 

There have been complaints around here relating to the number of trees being removed to install the new Fawley to Heathrow oil pipeline.  One or two wise residents of our estate have pointed out how many trees were removed in the 1970s to build this estate that they are so happy to live in.

[Ron Ron Ron]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[Ryde-on-time]

At least reopening of the Bedford Bletchley line is getting closer with the replacement class 150s getting sorted

 

https://www.railadvent.co.uk/2023/06/livery-unveiled-for-bedford-bletchley-replacement-trains.html?fbclid=IwAR1Eob6j01gIiH-_dLQ2HJp5Xpoy3R0dQpSpQe783ZhB90IYoFXcwWhNJmc_aem_th_AWDf-YLQTMrGg_U0lCxk7jBZPBNYmpzK2zF3Kqw-phT5p3o9xWOegVKMZegf2ukY-po

[Nearholmer]

TBH, I’d be happy to spend a Sunday with a brush and a tin of paint if it got trains going again. What colour they are is trivial.

[KingEdwardII]

Great to see the new laid track stretching out west from Winslow towards the HS2 flyover.

 

Yours, Mike.