Rail Reopenings - a trickle now, but a long queue behind

Here is the article which may be of interest. Obviously East-West Rail is a lead example - local councils and organisations working together to make the case and take it to corridors of Government which has responded. I'm not like some railway journalists who set themselves up as adjudicators on what could be in or out, but select ones I believe deserve more support including the inter-linking Northampton-Bedford rail link. The March-Cleethorpes 'East Lincs Line' may need as many bypasses and deviations as Central Section of East-West Rail, but I believe it could well be worth looking at, studying and like East-West, Councils getting organised and forming consortia. Other councils can learn from East-West Rail and "go therefore and do likewise". We welcome people to join/donate time and money to ERTA to help us continue our work, planting ideas and challenging arm chair critics - action can make a difference and many hands make light of hard work. Please click this link for our membership page on our website and encourage others to support us too please https://ertarail.com/membership/

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/axed-beeching-rail-lines-re-opened-102057347.html

ERTA Welcomes rail reopenings announcement

See link for more news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42157853#_=_

Initial Response: https://www.facebook.com/RichardPill24c

"This is welcome but I hope they will reveal the fine detail of which particular railways they have in mind. Ideally a few for each region with devolved areas having their own lists and budgets. England is lagging behind and there should be start up incentive grants to Local Authorities to incentivise them to be galvanised in the national interest. So much talk about money, so much swank about the modern railway with it's nose coned train fronts and sardine can ride experience being lauded as 'success'. We do need to re-rail Britain - conventional not #HS2 and #EastWestRail needs to have curves or redesign to ensure Bedford and East Bedfordshire have physical rail links onto the East-West physical rail and are not bypassed for Wixams or expediency on end to end fast transits for example. Personally I'd like to see Bedford-Northampton - Northampton has tripled since the early 1960's cuts and has a raw deal in network diversity terms. Others include Great Central south of Leicester-Nuneaton to Calvert linking with existing lines and #EastWestRail and Calvert-Grendon for access from Leicester to Old Oak Common/OCC for Crossrail linkage and a new line from OCC-Heathrow direct -the Woking-Guildford lines and Guildford-Shoreham informing a Leicester-Brighton 'not via London' option. London the Dudding Hill Lines could inform a Luton Airport Parkway (build a bay)-Reading 'South Chilterns Link' or Windsor and Eton (tourism). Likewise Cambridge-Haverhill and maybe even Colchester would help with #EastWestRail for more capacity if we're to have Felixstowe-West Midlands freight 'not via London' saving milage and time making rail transit more tempting contrast #A14 haulage. As more freight and logistics gets pumped into East Anglia, the March-Spalding and whole of East Lincs including Mablethorpe need regeneration and re-railing would certainly help them, Peak Rail and Woodhead for East Midlands-Manchester and North West and Hull-Liverpool land bridge connectives - Europe to the rest of the world - we need to re-rail our ports including Plymouth. No dreams if it were roads, it would be assumed as 'must have' and I declare to Lincolnshire Councils and any associated LEP type set ups "Go back to your constituencies, get organised, make a case, protect a corridor and prepare for shoe-horning railway reopening." Members of the public can join ERTA and volunteer to help us with our work like becoming an area rep and recruiting more members and support please: https://ertarail.com/membership/"

Inclusive Railways Please!

Dear Colleagues,

With these drawings I try to illustrate how we can ensure the East-West Rail, good as it may be does not bypass Bedford. Moreover that it enables a variety of services to use the rail infrastructure and diversity is the name of the game here. Freight must come from Felixstowe to the Midland Main Line for the West Midlands. Here we have had the Mayor of Bedford involved in campaigning to retain fast services for Bedford Midland but the East-West Rail will be at Wixams Interchange 4 miles south of Bedford Midland.  Won't East Midlands Trains not see potential in calling at Wixams for Oxbridge connectivity and so stagger their services as per Luton and Luton Parkway? Yes people will drive to Wixams, yes new development will enable it to serve those new audiences - the Marston Vale etc, but for poor ordinary people who use public transport, who do not drive, they and the regenerative footfall and spend minus the car are in Bedford and East Bedfordshire's case disenfranchised currently with the design of the laudable Oxbridge link. If you support these curves/make the case - remembering Northampton, Milton Keynes Central and rails into, across and out of London stand to gain if we redirect this freight via Bedford, so in their interest to cooperate. Likewise Northampton, if a Northampton-Bedford line is rebuilt, it brings footfall and spend minus the car but also Northampton-Cambridge with just one change of train at Wixams calling at Bedford en route. The perfect combination one would have thought. 

Please make these suggestions in your offices and help support an inclusive railway for all our sakes including Bedford. Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Pill

ERTA Chairman.

East-West Rail to bypass Bedford???

Now that the East-West Rail route is settled i.e. avoiding Bedford and serving a Wixams Interchange one draws a line in the sand concluding Oxford sees Cambridge and vice versa and what is Bedford that they should be mindful of it? I will continue to use the X5 as out of town anything is anathema to me. I accept a load will use it but the lack of a curve from the railway towards Bedford in any shape or form throws away freight and path creation capacity and the lack of physical links with the East Coast Main Line/ECML means the benefits of Stevenage/East Beds and Peterborough/St Neots-Bedford and beyond is scuppered and disenfranchised. I hope I am proved wrong, but that is how it looks currently. If Thameslink was extended to serve Northampton a 30 minute transit to change at Wixams for Cambridge is competitive contrast 1.5 hour No. 41 bus duration and 1 hour X5 and driving with congestion and parking would be slower too. ERTA will continue to press for Bedford-Northampton rail link to give local non London centric options. It would deliver footfall and spend minus the cars to both traditional town centres contrast bypasses to out of town draining town centres. Seems a weird logic to a layman that there has been all this clamour for saving fast trains at Bedford Midland yet silence from the Borough in the media about Bedford being bypassed by East-West Rail and the fact the two links will not be linked except by protracted means - a change and cost of two trains. Will East Midlands not be tempted as with Luton and Luton Parkway not be tempted to stagger some trains to link at Wixams as the growth interchange? One presumes the Borough is content to let it be, but if I were the mayor I'd be campaigning for better joined up thinking and for Bedford town centre not to be bypassed by East-West Rail.

See here: https://www.nic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/5thStudio-FinalReport.pdf

Oxbridge Arc Fact, Fiction or Farce?

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Government's response to the National Infrastructure's Report revealed in the Budget today and our concerns are that:
1. The rail link bypasses Bedford town centre/report misses Bedford off in the title and intent
2. There's no provision for an east-north rail access allowing trains (passenger and freight) to enter Bedford Midland from the east - vital for taking current 150 mile freights via London to West Midlands off existing lines creating more paths and capacity for more trains - affects Bedford, Milton Keynes and Northampton respectively
3. Light Rail part of Marston Vale seems detrimental when it would be more cost effective to retain it as it is, improve reliability, timetable and rolling stock and open a halt to serve the Kempston Retail Park - also truncating the line at Wixams could sever the town centre-Bletchley link of the current shuttle of Marston Vale operations, seems counter-intuitive.
ERTA will monitor progress and interject as and when and where as may.

Hope of interest, we very much want a Bedford-Northampton link included, sadly Northampton is left out, change at Bletchley is time consuming. So Bedford and Northampton are marginalised.

On other news, we're still seeking 3 more speakers for our conference next April and 28 delegates, likewise we need a new volunteer webmaster to update our word press website for us. Kind, able and patient are ideal qualities. All offers and enquiries to my colleague Mr Simon Barber: Simon Barber T. 0208 940 4399/E. simon4barber@gmail.com

Yours sincerely,

Richard Pill
ERTA Chairman.

Example of Government pandering development without adequate infrastructure

Example of Government pandering development without adequate infrastructure

Example of Government pandering development without adequate infrastructure: They have no or adequate infrastructure. 250 houses at 2.5 cars per house is potentially 750 extra vehicles on the road per day, a proportion of which will have a good 10 mile drive to Bedford or Milton Keynes Rail Stations for commuting. The No. 41 bus offers hourly services via Yardley Road but that is all public transport wise and depends on subsidy from MK Council. Contrast a rail link which seat provides from walking/cycling distance of where they live and frees up pressure of road, parking and costs. Clearly we need bigger fry to bring this home and efforts to acquire it is welcome on all fronts. It may be presented as a piecemeal, isolated development, but x 18, 000 homes quoted for Bedford Borough, similar or more for MK and Northamptonshire, the impact is unsustainable without new and more infrastructure which includes parking management, not cost management, but adequate land use to accommodate it, rather than clogging up streets.

We don't need another quango, what we need is a force which can intercept these patterns and say think again, used to be Public Inquiry, now... there doesn't appear to be anything. We need more support for the railway and as far as ERTA goes it is steady as she goes into the new year and our plan, inadequate as may be is still a tabling of the rail link, which people can rally with or face the outcomes of their refusal to collaborate with, a mess accumulating and normalised as 'daily life'! We must beg to disagree. The railway can bypass Olney but like East-West Rail greater or lesser we're talking cost but time is clearly running out as development pressure mounts. Join our free no obligation loop richard.erta@gmail.com and support our call for reopening the local railway and join ERTA: https://ertarail.com/membership/

Support welcome for putting Northampton-Bedford back on the map!

Transport Matters

The good news is that we now have Oxford-Bicester of East-West Rail and now that end may wish to push for Oxford-Thame-Princes Risborough to inform a loop through Oxford to London with new deviations where blockages exist such as Wheatley where a Park and Ride with the M40 could lure more footfall to Oxford minus the horrendous congestion which bedevils every main town and city these days. Witney should also be considered as if you can put the A40 through surely you can rebuild a new rail link alongside? Light Rail through Oxford linking Kidlington with Cowley may also be something to entertain. 

Likewise in Buckinghamshire, we need 'spades on the ground' for speeding up delivery of Bicester-Bletchley/Milton Keynes Central and Bedford. It is essential that it is hurried up and delivered with local passenger and freight 'new born to rail' planned and implemented 'new' now going forwards. A new station to serve Calvert as a Park and Ride and Claydon - all growth areas would seem prudent, Winslow taken as a given already. 

The line towards Cambridge goes as far as Bedford and enters the main Bedford Midland Station via St John's. However the new-build so called 'Central Section' whilst consensus came down on a Bedford-Sandy-Cambridge route, the exact definition is still to be set before the public. 2035 seems a very long time for just 30 miles of rebuild when before that (2026) we have HS2 scheduled and a Super Highway costing £3.5 billion. I say ditch the road and put the money into speeding up delivery of the full Oxbridge Railway, give the railway a chance and see what difference it makes before eating up and brownfielding lands which otherwise would be green belt, countryside, food growing and conservation lands - to create more ribbon development with hoards of cars turning up to existing rail outlets and urban centres - parking/land use demand allocation conflicts - is a recipe against cleaner air and ambiance, rather carnage and chaos.

This brings me to the weird view emergent in some quarters of a separate Bedford-Cambridge railway whereby it goes cross country bypassing Bedford to the south of Sandy and links somewhere undefined in Cambridge. This would be ludicrous! The railway must come into Bedford and go out via St John's (reinstate the triangle of track) and head eastwards towards Cambridge on the old alignment. Yes, realignments at Willington are probably required, yes north of around Blunham is a costly business but the line must physically link with the East Coast Main Line at Sandy and interchange properly for St Neots, Huntingdon and Peterborough for example and East Bedfordshire and Stevenage from the south with East-West Rail. Otherwise you loose critical links. New build has blockages too, so some weaving around is essential, may as well use the old alignment and bypass where built up and share a new station such as Potton and Gamlingay which has doubled in size since closure and surrounding villages. Linking at Shepreth is one possibility into Cambridge or tunneling under the M11 and coming up and utilising the current single lane Guided Busway which assumes the old trackbed to enter Cambridge at Trumpington Junction would avoid conflicts of paths at Shepreth Junction. 

Freight from Felixstowe must be able to turn at Bedford from east to north for onwards to the West Midlands and thus must be able to get through Bedford Midland Station. There is no east-north access at Bletchley, Bicester, Oxford, so if we want the benefit of freeing up train paths through Milton Keynes we must consider these things at the design stage surely? Milton Keynes Central is just under 3 miles along the West Coast Main Line north of Bletchley and lacks adequate baying capacity. Trains want to link with Milton Keynes Central plethora - from Oxford, Aylesbury, West London (Southern) and Bedford (Marston Vale Railway). They cannot all bay or access MK Central without new infrastructure. Bedford-Northampton rebuilt would keep freight off existing tracks and allow a Bletchley-Bedford-Northampton loop. East-West Rail should welcome this and incorporate it as a Phase 2-3 scoping aspiration at very least. It would also clear trains which currently idle at Bedford off through tracks allowing more services to serve Bedford. It is hard for lay people to ascertain how well this is appreciated as silence is the order of the day here.

ERTA applauds the study into Wycombe - Bourne End, which could integrate with the Windsor link, which is being taken seriously.

I welcome you to support our stance and aims and hold those running the show on these matters to account and scrutiny and demand they stick to a direct Bedford-Cambridge route with quicker delivery dates. We ideally need these rail links now. HS2 will apparently have no station between Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street, so all brownfield developments from that which a new railway creates will flood existing roads and rails. ERTA believes a study should be done jointly to explore a Leicester-Aylesbury reopening of the old Great Central as a capacity creation corridor which, coming off the Leicester-Nuneaton line would serve P&R Lutterworth, Daventry, Brackley and Calvert P&R. It could run on a new link to Grendon for Old Oak Common link up and a new link direct to Heathrow and the Woking - Guildford lines.

I hope this is not too over-whelming, but it is strange how some councils can entertain multiple roads and yet only one rail reopening per time? Bedfordshire has had lots of dualling and bypassification but it has attracted ever more volumes of traffic and congestion with accidents. We cannot go on blindly following this pattern, the Treasury must be told we need a more balanced transport budgeting programme which switches more freight from road to rail. We cannot do that without these central rail links and that should be our focus in my humble opinion. Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Pill

ERTA Chairman

Minutes of BEDFORD TRANSPORT FORUM – TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER, 1.00pm

Minutes of BEDFORD TRANSPORT FORUM – TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER, 1.00pm Social, 2.00pm – 4.00pm business, at The Pilgrims Progress, 42 Midland Road (near bus and railway stations), Bedford, MK40 1QB (usually near table 65 back of ground floor under the stairs). 

T. 01234 363751 E. richard.erta@gmail.com

1.       Apologies for absence: Simon Barber

2.       Notes from previous forum and matters arising/feedback:

Item 3. We have learnt only the main line section will be rebuilt to enable overhead lines for extension of electrification north of Bedford.

Item 4. No news on EWRL but continued clearance of vegetation keeps having to be done, delay is costing money.

Item 5. Bedford-Northampton:

Northampton Blitz early 2018 with meetings Saturday 24^th February at the Friends Meeting House (Quakers) School Room Quaker Meeting House, Wellington Street, Northampton NN1 3AS starting Saturday 24th February 1.30pm – 3.30pm. for Bedford-Northampton Rail Reopening Committee 1pm – all welcome.

Northampton conference Saturday 28 April 2018 from 9am-5pm at the Castle Hill United Reformed Church (upstairs/lift) Function Room), Doddridge Street, NORTHAMPTON NN1 2RN.

Market Stall and leafleting to kick in Jan-Feb to help boost presence, emails and letters will also go out.

3.       Bus Matters

No 40-withdrawal due to a lack of use and withdrawal of MK subsidy.

4.       Rail Matters: ERTA has the choice to either grow membership and allocate people top cover regional projects or knuckle down to more localised specialism like Bedford-Northampton scenario and related aspects. Great Central (Leicester-Nuneaton)-Calvert-Grendon needs complete rebuild/new build/backing, OOC-Heathrow direct to Woking Guildford (away from London contrast Crossrail) needs sorting and Guildford-Shoreham for Brighton likewise. Some bits are operational but 2/3 needs rebuild/new build so that’s 100 out of 150 miles approximately and can be done as one scheme or separate infills. Bedford-Northampton helps feed to and from Bedford-Cambridge (EWRL), M1 parallel end to end Northampton-Luton/Airport and vice versa and frees capacity/spare paths into/across and out of London and on the WCML at MK Central – critical for enabling EWRL, MVR, Southern and others access to and through MK Central which lacks adequate baying to accommodate them all with increasing frequency for multiple operational service providing with contra commute markets and other centric patterns, not just London. We applaud the reopening effort for the Dudding Hill Lines which will enable MML-GW/Southern transits for passenger services, London arcing centric but also Luton/Airport-Acton/Windsor or Reading for example ‘South Chiltern Link’. ERTA has long championed it.

5.       Bedford- Northampton: Needs more volunteers and a new webmaster. We are stretched and all can ask friends, family, local rail groups to join/affiliate/come to meetings/get involved/help us.

6.       Other related matters: XMAS BASH – TUESDAY 12 DECEMBER, 1pm – All very welcome.
If you would like to join us, so that bookings can be made, please let Richard know by 24 November – 01234 330090. Dragons, River Street, Bedford, MK40 1PX Tel 01234 328866/327778

7.       Day, Date, Time and Place of next Bedford Forum proposed as: Tuesday 30^th January 2018 1.00pm Social, 2.00pm – 4.00pm business, at The Pilgrims Progress, 42 Midland Road (near bus and railway stations), Bedford, MK40 1QB (usually near table 65 back of ground floor under the stairs). T. 01234 363751 E. richard.erta@gmail.com

England’s Economic Heartland – A curates egg!

England’s Economic Heartland – A curates egg!

http://www.englandseconomicheartland.com/Pages/home.aspx

The England’s Economic Heartland (EEH) is a consortium of Councils and quangos which arcs the East-West Corridor and Northamptonshire and brings road, rail and other interests. An umbrella of councils to shield them from risk and liability or a conglomerate of interests thinking more power from many pushing for or against than individual units can muster. However, it seems on the transport front to be with little overall vision or strategy or accountability to the electorate. Vote for someone in Oundle, which lost its railway in the mid 1960’s and you find your local representative is on the County Council, the County Councils Network, South Midland Local Enterprise Partnership (SEMLEP) and Strategic Transport Forum Chairperson. Cllr Heather Smith commands a wide gambit of position and power but for what purpose? Is anyone proposing reopening Northampton-Peterborough railway? No. Is anyone supporting rebuilding Northampton-Bedford railway? No. Is anyone supporting Light Rail linking Rushden, Irchester, Irthlingborough and Wellingborough? No. So that is a considerable population with no new rail infrastructure. Likewise, the EEH supports Oxford-Cambridge East-West Rail, but also a monstrous East-West Highway (new) along the same geographic corridor, north or south or criss-crossing the railway. Other roads will feel the weight of development growth and cases likely to be made for other highways spend, but no new rail other than East-West Rail. There’s no station for 20 miles north of Bedford, so all new growth for 20 miles north of Bedford will bring commuter traffic to our station for London. We can’t reopen local rail links due to blockages, but we can do more roads whatever the cost. That is grossly unfair and the whole £’s sign of approach the EEH seems to present, indicates commodification of the area and people fit in with it rather than it tailors to people and what they want. Their hands are tied thanks to the legacy of local rail closures, locking in road consumption and pattern demand. However, that chicken and egg of demand and supply trend, ignores the land use allocation balance of scenarios like if we have a hard Brexit, land will be required for food more than before – home grown etc; but who owns the land, if we develop the countryside or split it up to ever smaller units and tracts surely, we undermine the objective, organic and non-intensive farming which we need for food and healthy eating? Some are complacent whereby they hold more than 3 strands of grass up and say “look! We have grass!” (plural) but whether it can sustain 75 million population by 2030 remains to be seen. If prices rise then wages frozen or lower incomes brackets will be priced out of the market locking in Food Bank syndrome. Again, our balance of trade deficit means that inflation is locked in unless we can re-rail the regions, get freight back on rail which in turn speeds bulk transit times and keeps costs down. Endless juggernauts plying the A14 or M1 in congestion laden corridors is wasteful of time, fuel and road space. Who or what will blink first? EEH has no real answer to this, it is tinkering at the edges and for 5, 735 people voting in Oundle, that is a lot of power and hardly represents the whole area. We should have local referendums on the switch from road to rail and lists of rail schemes and then charge quangos or councils to deliver. That we find we need EEH shows LEP’s have largely failed to deliver and whilst Parishes look after their own, it is locally elected councils which face the squeeze on government funding. In short more quangos give high flying jobs for more people, but actual service and service delivery is scant to say the least. We still need a Tsar for Rail, as many fragments speak akin to parish councils for their own patches, rather than the coordination of a regional and national network. Meanwhile what role Westminster? On the one hand the Government came in with Eric Pickles saying he would reduce quangos, but now it finds it useful to create new ones, as it shares and farms out responsibility, accountability, risk and makes news rather than tangibly and specifically delivers.

The question is what makes for change? Can change be brought about and what role the public at large other than to give comment at consultations to help bureaucrats refine their proposals and achieve their goals and be ever thus rewarded for it – but we return to our basis of operations – the foundations upon which the design of what changes are needed predicated on a roads agenda, rather than seeing the rail gaps, addressing them first and then if they don’t deliver seeing what else needs to be done. Alas.