High Speed Two or Low Speed One for freight?
The upcoming review of Britain’s high-speed railway project could provide unexpected benefits for rail freight. The massive project to build a new line between London and Birmingham is to come under scrutiny again, as costs soar. Ironically, that could open up opportunities for rail freight. If the purpose of the line is reassessed, and the pattern of traffic on the network is recast, freight could have unexpected opportunities to take up the slack in the schedules.
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Rail freight, however, as well, urgently has to upgrade, for added capacity and added utilisation – of existing assets.
Track, infrastructure, current bottleneck, decisively has to be released from any disturbing!
Frequent, “maintenance” (repairing) tells about a standard no longer sustainable, an in no respect optimal! (“Optimal maintenance” current mantra is suboptimal!)
Redundancy has to be provided for at electrification, etc., etc.
Weak link at intermodal chains now has to be attended!
Waste of money. The vast amount being spent would electrify and modernise a massive chunk of our existing network and / or reopen miles of Beechings pointless 1960s closures. Everything is for the North and South East. What about a few quid for the forgotten South West. Only one line runs into the whole of Devon and Cornwall and we know what happened to that, at Dawlish, a few years ago….
A northern chord just south of Leicester station for freight as well as passenger traffic would solve a lot of problems. Further, the HS2 join to the WCML should be further north, nearer Euxton, & bypass Wigan completely if it is to be really high speed to/from Scotland.