On Mar 2, 9:41*pm, Mizter T wrote:

I posit that the letter of the law about route closures is not
actually totally clear cut, rather that it's somewhat muddled, not
least because the realities of such situations are not easy to
legislate for.

Furthermore this particular case is somewhat absurd in that the
withdrawn XC service never provided a link between Wandsworth Road,
Kensington Olympia and Ealing Broadway stations - and journeys between
those stations can be quite successfully accomplished using the
existing network.


I tend to agree in a way.

This literal interpretation is silly - this residual train is
purposeless. I don't condone closures without going through procedure
either, but then the answer is go through the procedure.

The most extreme example i know of is this nonsense at Inverness.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to keep the ''bypass''line
legally open as a passenger line. No one in their right mind would
ever consider running a service that does not call at Inverness. Any
operational need to have a train from the Dingwall direction to reach
the east platforms or v.v. working should not need the line to to be
a passenger route, and any TOC should be free to optimise its
timetables and decide itself if it needs to do it.

This line is a worst case scenario of anorkism at work ... it did lose
its service once ... and it was some busy body track basher who
objected for the sake of it.

--
Nick