Central Railway Route
It ran into resistance from HMG, hit the buffers, and the entrepreneur behind it died.
But it seems to have struggled on nevertheless, as good ideas will; Alan is now CEO, and it launched a nice new web-site last year.
2006 Central Railway recommences promotion of revised proposals for a diesel lorry-trailers-on-trains and double stack container railway from northern France and Belgium to the English Regions, Scotland and (via Liverpool's port) Ireland
Central Railway news (mid 2006)
My interest lies, of course, in how such a venture might be optimally structured financially and legally, and integrated with the (refinanced) Channel Tunnel.
I'd be interested in DoDo's professional take on the viability. It might even be worth a Diary. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
It was the usual Treasury crap that also got most of the tram schemes (MerseyTram, Leeds SuperTram) binned.
I guess they would have to update the study in the light of the last couple of years' development (but don't forget development doesn't happen overnight, so I should think their plans are still valid)
They only used the GCR route where that was still feasible: it certainly wasn't going through Nottingham Victoria.... "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
They changed the goalposts as they went along as well: the whole thing was a total fiasco. They kept stringing it - demanding more info etc etc - along and then - because of the time passing - upped their demands on the council because of increased construction costs. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
Roads are treated as investment. Rail is treated as expenditure. The rules which are used to calculate the value - or not - of spending are completely different, and the rigidity with which they're enforced is also completely different.
On top of it all you have enforced public-private partnerships and franchises which have wasted billions.
The rail franchise companies are smart and know how the game works. Because rail is supposed to be profitable, you promise the Treasury that you will make huge and juicy repayments by the end of your run, in return for a subsidy at the start.
Then when adverse conditions make your huge and juicy repayments impossible - completely unexpectedly, of course - you declare bankruptcy and walk away.
There have been two high profile collapses - GNER and Metronet - which have done exactly this. Sea Containers which ran GNER was always financially marginal, but anyone with a brain could have realised that the original GNER franchise deal was insane. Likewise with Metronet.
NEG has now 'negotiated' a deal for the GNER's former East Coast line franchise which requires even higher payments to the Treasury than the GNER deal did.
The wankers at the Treasury either don't realise they're being played - watch what happens when NEG suddenly isn't able to make those payments a few years from now - or are fully complicit and corrupt.
My guess is there's a whole lot of the latter going on than anyone wants to admit.
The end result is that passenger care ends up at the bottom of the list. This supposedly privatised railway is costing the UK are more in real terms than it did when it was publicly owned, and offers much lower performance. Engineering and management experience has also been fragmented.
Roads, meanwhile, have continued along more or less the same lines as they have since Beeching's day, with contractors doing very nicely out of building for the short term and then having to make renewals on a rolling basis.
But there has been 2 (that's 2) new roads in the Leeds area over the last 10 years. One is the M1/A1 link, which isn't anything to do with the city centre mostly, more about linking Scotland and London more easily.
The other is 2.7km of ring road extension.
Now I'll happily admit that's more investment than some areas have got (including where I live.)
But as someone who has to go into Leeds quite regularly for work I can say that volume of people going in and out every day is only increasing and there appears no plan at all to handle that, not even a corrupt road based plan.
And don't get me started on the GNER and NEG fiascos, that's the rail line I have to use... ;-)
Most of the money seems to have gone on motorway renewals in the south of the UK - with plenty of medium scale widening/improving/reworking schemes of relatively minor utility but high profitability - e.g. putting a bridge over one of the junctions on an A4 feeder road near Swindon, which must have shaved as much as a minute off journey times.
It's true we've stopped building motorways, but I suspect that's partly because even the civil servants finally realised that massed public protests were bad for business, and expensive too.
E.g. The A303 London/Exeter road could easily be motorwayed. I'm sure the funding would magically appear if a plan could be agreed, but politically it's not worth the aggro.
If this is right then once again we are looking at messing ourselves up by trying to deal with the percieved economic problems of thirty years ago, now. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
I'm not read-up on the project in detail, but from what I know, it is a very ambitious one: it's not simply about bringing standard European cross-section freight to Britain, but going beyond, as US-style double-stack containers are beyond the largest European normal-gauge cross-section. I consider this part of the project less viable, not only due to significant infrastructure investment needs this side of the Chunnel, but compatibility, too -- e.g. containers travelling say from Warshaw would have to be re-loaded in Paris or Lille.
If they would just go for normal cross-section, and get a good agreement with SNCF for the passage of freight there, I think it would make sense.
I note that in terms of railways out of the local standard, the most striking example is a Russian broad-gauge freight line, which extends 400 km into Poland from the Ukrainian border, with a planned extension (which is unlikely until Poland is ruled by nationalists) reaching the edge of the Czech Republic. (Check this map, it's a narrow red-dotted green line.)
Another negative point from my point of view is going for diesel traction, but financially, it is unfortunately a good choice. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Even considering peak oil? Oye, vatos, dees English sink todos mi ships, chinga sus madres, so escuche: el fleet es ahora refloated, OK? — The War Nerd
I'd hope $300 oil would change the picture radically even if interoperability would not be brought further by then. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
