London Banter - View Single Post - CrossRail or CrossConnections? Guns or butter?

Colin Rosenstiel · April 20th 04, 10:00 AM posted to uk.transport.london

In article ,
(Michael Bell) wrote:

In article ,
Colin Rosenstiel wrote:
In article ,
(Solar Pennguin) wrote:

"John Rowland" wrote [about the NLL]...

The main bottleneck is generally alleged to be freight paths
between just west of Stratford and Camden Road (and to a lesser
extent as far as South Acton).

Since most of this frieght is coming from places outside London and
going to other places outisde London, does it look like there's a
case for opening outer orbital routes like
Cambridge/Huntingdon/Bedford? Even if they don't generate enough
passengers to be viable *on their own*, by helping freight avoid the
London bottlenecks, they'd still free up capacity for better
services in London such as improved NLL frequencies.

Oh, no, wait. That would mean integrated transport planning.
Silly me. It'll never happen...

The official alternative is from Felixstowe across the Fens to
Peterborough and then via Leicester to Nuneaton. Unfortunately it's
not electrified so Freightliner can't use their cheap class 86s as
they can via London. And the Government cut the funding for
improvements/clearance for 9'6" containers on that route recently.

On this morning's BBC Anglia news it was announced that the Government
is interested (I am sorry that I can't quote the exact woolly language
used) in re-opening a Cambridge-Oxford route, it was costed at 200
Million. No mention was made of whether it would be electrified. It
makes sense from all sorts of points of view.

While reopening part of the route (from Oxford to Bletchley, connecting
with the bit that never closed to Bedford) is being actively pursued the
latest Government instructions to the SRA were that no further work was to
be done on the Bedford-Cambridge section. It's only being considered for
passengers anyway.

--
Colin Rosenstiel