What would it take to restore the UK's rail network?

Posted by deHaga@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 581 comments

What would it take to restore the UK's rail network?

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PurahsHero@reddit

Most of these lines never made any kind of sense. Many of them were narrow gauge or duplicated existing routes, with low frequency services. They existed at a time when they had no real competitor, and they still lost money. Beeching did a lot of bad things, and made plenty of bad decisions. But he called bullshit on the fact that the British Railways could not even tell him how much each line earned in revenue and how many passengers it carried. He rightly pointed out that intercity and freight is where railways can be competitive. People like the IDEA of having a local train service. But when it becomes a reality, they won't use it. We will never get back all of the lines lost during the cuts, and nor should we.

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notouttolunch@reddit

Quite right. Most of these lines were not passenger lines. They are freight lines. The reason they have all these stupid gauges is because they were just built by someone who needed to get their raw materials in or the final product out. Take a look at how they serve the former coalfields and this becomes really obvious.

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thekittysays@reddit

It would be really nice if the majority of freight was on rail instead of roads though. I did a 200mile journey on Easter Saturday and because there were virtually no lorries on the road (I'd guess a tenth, if not less, of usual freight traffic) it was an absolute breeze, despite the number of cars being still fairly high.

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Aggressive_Chuck@reddit

Tripling freight rail capacity wouldn't even reduce road freight by 10%. There's just too much of it.

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AsleepEbb7578@reddit

Still though, lorries could be used for last mile delivery. If freight were cheap enough and could get to essentially every major city then lorries would only be driving a fraction of what they used to, wouldn't be on motorways and dual carriageways as much and the wear would be significantly reduced. Kinda like a reverse park-and-ride. As soon as the business case makes sense for it, they'll flock to it.

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Aggressive_Chuck@reddit

> Still though, lorries could be used for last mile delivery. So drive a lorry five miles to the rail depot, spend an hour loading it onto the train, the train goes fifty miles, spend an hour tipping the trailer onto the second lorry, lorry drives three miles to the shop. Or the lorry just drives 60 miles. And you would need an insane amount of freight rail. Like ten miles the mileage of tracks. Now imagine that lorry was going to deliver ten drops across a region of the country. The complexity would be insane.

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traveller7077@reddit

I would guess that this is because we don't have huge singular industries anymore. The road network is better for lots of point to point travel.

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Teembeau@reddit

The critical thing about road vs rail, the thing that every advocate of rail can never seem to get their head around is the point to point problem. The journey is not station to station. It's start to finish. Getting to a station, getting from a station. if it's not direct, the wait time between connections. We once drove to Disneyland Paris. Now people might think it's a lot slower because of the Eurostar. But the thing is, We needed to do taxi to station, train to London, train around London, Eurostar, Paris station to station, paris station to Disneyland. The drive took about 1 hour longer and cost less than half the price. Trains and buses work when there's a reasonably high density. If you are going from the centre of Reading to the Bank of England, trains are so frequent you aren't waiting a lot at each point, It's far quicker and easier than driving. If you want to go from Stonehenge to the Cotswolds, the density is low, buses rarely happen. You'll spend 5 hours instead of 1. There isn't one size fits all with transport.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

We have a lot of port to central warehouse traffic though. A main constraint is that the lorry trailers the companies are invested in are too big for the freight gauge. High speed UK did a good plan on this. A network at Eurostar gauge that could carry much more freight and direct from Chunnel across country on existing corridors for the cost of high speed 2.

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notouttolunch@reddit

You're sort of right. The ISO containers are fine on the road, it's the railways they are not fine on. So you're back to front!

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SeventySealsInASuit@reddit

Freight is the main cost when it comes to road maintenance though so even a 10% reduction would likely represent extremely high levels of savings. Hell the government ran consultations into reopening the cannals because road freight is begining to put to much of a toll on the road network.

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Teembeau@reddit

Freight has limited uses. It mostly suits very long journeys of raw materials. You can't replace a lorry taking goods to a Tesco store.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

hers an article with a picture of a tram delivering goods to a supermarket. [https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/21/electric-trams-cities-groceries-europe-edinburgh-dresden](https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/21/electric-trams-cities-groceries-europe-edinburgh-dresden)

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Teembeau@reddit

Running a tramline just for that? What does running all that or a few stock trolleys? What's the CO2 compared to a lorry.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

>Running a tramline just for that? No. Just like you don't build a road just for delivering goods to a supermarket. You use it for passengers too.

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Teembeau@reddit

Thanks for that. My big scepticism about trams is partly that there's a massive upfront cost, but also that they're inflexible. Demands change, and the investment in them isn't a 10 year one but a 20+ year one. Like the predictions in the 2013 HS2 report are just wildly wrong. Some were wrong at the time, far too optimistic, assuming linear growth. But also, soon after 2013, we started to see a rise in remote work. Season ticket sales started to fall, despite the report's prediction of a rise in peak rail demand. New technology was replacing a lot of rail trips. "Comparisons usually forget that those buses and lorries have to be replaced several times over the lifetime of the tram." They do, but the cost of replacing a bus is not that much. A single decker is about £350K. The cost of Edinburgh Trams were £1bn. Edinburgh runs 27 trams. So, to run that for buses, we'd probably need about 150 buses, which would cost £52m. Assuming a lifespan of a bus of 10 years, the tram pays off after about 100 years, not including interest payments. And I'm being generous with the numbers there, assuming we have full trams running constantly, and that every bus passenger gets a seat. Personally I think that a lot of the tram building in Europe, and especially France is wasteful. it's "monorail" from The Simpsons. Large cities, maybe, but Caen has fitted them and Caen has the population of Solihull. The roads run fine for buses and cars. If you want electric, get electric buses. "Obviously if you already have road space available that changes the calculation quite a bit but if we had taken this approach to the motor vehicle we'd never have built the motorway." The thing with the UK road network is that very little of it was built based on predictions of use. The improvements that I remember from the late 80s and 90s like the Newbury by-pass, the A43 improvements, the M25 were because roads were clogged. From Oxford to Northampton you had to go through market towns and villages. Going from the midlands to Dover you had to go on the North Circular Road and it was like a car park. All the talk about trams and trains are based on predictive demand. Not that London to Birmingham trains are full, but that they will be in 20 years. Which it turns out has rather been wiped out by remote work.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

>Demands change, and the investment in them isn't a 10 year one but a 20+ year one That's true. However you can make a pretty good guess at demand you can see where roads and routes are clogged and where we plan to build new homes and model that impact. >They do, but the cost of replacing a bus is not that much. A single decker is about £350K. You have to remember that you need more buses to offer the same capacity as the trams so it's not just 1 bus versus one tram. You also need to account from the road resurfacing that constant rutting from heavy buses or lorries running over it versus the cost of maintaining rail. That's usually excluded from bus modelling. >Personally I think that a lot of the tram building in Europe, and especially France is wasteful. it's "monorail" from The Simpsons. Large cities, maybe, but Caen has fitted them and Caen has the population of Solihull. The roads run fine for buses and cars. If you want electric, get electric buses I disagree. Given European cites are usually denser than ours trams can make more economic sense earlier. Another thing worth considering is that trams get car drivers to switch in large numbers where as buses don't but tend to be only people who can't drive so there's more demand for tram than bus in the same area. Battery electric buses are actually pretty awful on fixed routes much better halfway is a modern trolleybus with battery backup. Extensively used in eastern Europe which gets you fixed routes and buses. Another thing to consider is that fixed rail usually spurs greater development and more valuable property, Europe usually captures some of that value UK hasn't since metro land (the extra value of the houses paid towards the cost of building the rail which gave the area the value) There's plenty of places where roads are clogged as any travelling to major areas at rush hour will tell you. I agree that modelling on clogged areas rather than future demand might make sense and would lead to a very different pattern of development. We are actually seeing a strong rto trend now so we might lose the advantages of remote work and go back to congestion. It's worth noting London and London routes gets a lot of investment. There's a lot of other places where a decent tram or rail route could make a real difference to rush hour but gets overlooked because everything is so London centric. There's defintley a place for buses and lorries but they make more sense as last mile first mile than trunk routes. (There's also the rolling highway concept we should look more into) Where lorries drive on to the train travel the trunk routes then roll off and go wherever they need to go that gets you the best of both worlds with no transhipment issues

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Teembeau@reddit

"That's true. However you can make a pretty good guess at demand you can see where roads and routes are clogged and where we plan to build new homes and model that impact." Actually, you can't in a 20 year period. As I said, HS2s estimates are completely wrong in 13 years. The passenger numbers for HS1 were much lower than expected, and that's been a waste of money. Concorde was disrupted by better telecoms. Many town centres have become wastelands in less than 20 years. "You have to remember that you need more buses to offer the same capacity as the trams so it's not just 1 bus versus one tram. You also need to account from the road resurfacing that constant rutting from heavy buses or lorries running over it versus the cost of maintaining rail. That's usually excluded from bus modelling." My numbers are based on that. Number of passengers per tram, number of trams, divided by bus passengers. What are the numbers for maintaining tramways vs maintaining roads? "Given European cites are usually denser than ours trams can make more economic sense earlier." If their density is lower, why do you think you can apply trams and get the same results? Lower density is going to mean less people using them. "Battery electric buses are actually pretty awful on fixed routes much better halfway is a modern trolleybus with battery backup. Extensively used in eastern Europe which gets you fixed routes and buses." And my point is that demands change. A fixed route means a tram going to a closed factory. "We are actually seeing a strong rto trend now so we might lose the advantages of remote work and go back to congestion. " Is there data to support that? "It's worth noting London and London routes gets a lot of investment. There's a lot of other places where a decent tram or rail route could make a real difference to rush hour but gets overlooked because everything is so London centric." No, the simple reason (and I'm not in London, not even a fan of it) is that London has very high density like nowhere else does. It's a crazy place to drive in compared to every other city in the UK. People keep going on about trams in Bristol but I've worked in Bristol and the buses are fine. Buses in Manchester are fine.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

You must have better numbers than any I've seen anywhere. It's not just intra London but towns to London the towns themselves aren't that dense. And I said European cites are more dense than ours not less dense. They have a lot more flats than houses.

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Teembeau@reddit

OK, so because they're denser, trams work. If we have lower density, that means trams are less likely to work, doesn't it?

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mjratchada@reddit

There was plenty of road freight on Easter Saturday.

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thekittysays@reddit

Well on my journey up the M5&6 there was significantly less than there usually is. I do that journey a lot. It was noticeable.

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jahalliday_99@reddit

It's because it's Easter Sunday I reckon. I was on the road that day, I thought it was fairly quiet for a typical Sunday (M6). Usually, Sundays are a nightmare with the weekend drivers who don't have a lot of motorway experience. There are approximately 65 cars to every truck in the UK. Congestion is mostly caused by cars. Drive at night when there's a similar number of trucks on the road as during the day, and you'll see a huge difference. Also, the vast majority of trucks are carrying consumer goods going to shops or local distribution centres. It's difficult to get those onto trains. My personal view is that trains are better suited to carrying passengers - one train can get literally hundreds of cars off the road, and the freight loads and unloads itself. That said, a mixed/hybrid road/rail freight system would be good, although already there's a fair bit that goes by rail.

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Nimblewright_47@reddit

A full 12 carriage train might take a round thousand cars off the road, on a very good day. Similarly, a freight train can take literally dozens off trucks off the road, doing point to point from the ports to the major distribution centres. The Port of Felixstowe is one of the country's busiest and it's convenient for precisely no major cities. I entirely agree that hybrid is the way forwards, but moving bulk by rail hugely reduces the damage to roads and bridges.

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notouttolunch@reddit

Passenger trains make this difficult - they mean that freight can only travel overnight. Freight is much slower than even the most basic of high speed services. One red signal will screw a schedule for a day. Also, our loading gauge means that anything made outside the country has to be repackaged on arrival for that to work. If you're doing that, may as well put it on a truck and go door to door. . This is the reason there are only four goods trains a day on the channel tunnel. They can't get off HS1! If you have an entire train load of one product - that's sort of freight our system can handle. That's an abbreviated summary of why we don't do more freight by train.

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Nimblewright_47@reddit

Why can't we load freight trains overnight at our ports - where loading gauge is irrelevant - and move them to distribution centres around the country in bulk and efficiently? A container doesn't care about loading gauge. I'm not disputing that our rail network would likely need expansion. What I think we disagree on is whether this is superior to expanding motorway traffic.

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notouttolunch@reddit

Think carefully about what you just asked 😂

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Nimblewright_47@reddit

No, I still don't get it. Tankers will normally unload direct to refinery; bulkers will transfer goods to rail cars; that leaves box boats, which will unload standardised twenty foot and forty foot equivalent containers, which are a standard size. I'm focused on ports as the overwhelming majority of our trade comes by sea (90% by value, which means close to 100% by weight or by volume). These goods enter the country at a few locations, of which Felixstowe is the busiest and least convenient for population centres. I don't see how rail gauge fits in at all here.

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notouttolunch@reddit

I didn't say rail gauge. The rail gauges 4 ft 8 and 1/2 in. The loading gauge however is not suitable.

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Nimblewright_47@reddit

Ah, my error. Yes - fair point.

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jahalliday_99@reddit

Yeah, true. Trains don't really help with consumer goods to shops though, but for large volume freight, especially from ports, they're good. I'd also support two-trailer trucks: reduces the problems caused by the driver shortage, no difference in road damage as axle loads are the same. They'd only be of use for depot to depot trunking on major highways though. There are many solutions we could combine, if only there was the will for people to sit down and discuss it.

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Nimblewright_47@reddit

Yup, fully agree. There's this weird fixation in British policy-making that "the market will solve everything", even though the market tends to stick with what's currently happening as investment is risky.

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thekittysays@reddit

It was Saturday not Sunday. And there were still lots of cars on the road. The thing is without the trucks and lorries there people were using the left lane much more and moving out to overtake and back again. When there are lots of lorries people sit in the middle/second lane because they don't like going in and out between trucks, often because you get boxed in by others sitting in the middle lane. Without so many large vehicles traffic flows much more smoothly.

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jahalliday_99@reddit

Funny, I read it as Sunday. Must be going senile. I usually find the weekends far more difficult to drive on the motorways compared to in the week, I hate it. It's a funny thing, in the week, driving at 70 mph sees me fairly slow compared to other cars, whereas at the weekend I'm the fastest thing on the road.

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-AntiAsh-@reddit

It's when they spend about 15 minutes trying to overtake each other and everyone has to slow down and filter into the third.

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IainMCool@reddit

Except people will and do use them, especially when part of a larger joined up service. It's not a binary thing. It's not the case that you either have all of them back or none. Many would make sense. Some wouldn't, or wouldn't be possible. The problem is that in post war Britain, they became Americanised and believed that everyone would just drive everywhere, so we created a car dependent culture, which has caused enormous problems down the line.

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ClasswarNOTProfitwar@reddit

If your only measure of value is money, it's a very poor value system!

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BuncleCar@reddit

Yes like local shops and post offices, they like the idea but wouldn't use them

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Ceejayncl@reddit

People do use railways though. Not far from me they reopened the Northumberland line which goes from Newcastle to South East Northumberland. It was expect to have 250,000-300,000 passengers a year. In the first year it had 1 million passengers, and that was with 3-4 of its 6 stations missing. It’s so popular that the trains themselves are full and they are trying to source additional trains so they can double the size of them, again this all before all the stations opened. There is already talk about an extension happening to it, with the regional mayor pledging money for a feasibility study, as well as the addition of another station.

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MayiruPudungi@reddit

Ofc Beeching went nuclear with the cuts. A lot of lines that should not have been closed ended up geting closed.

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Teembeau@reddit

They run about 30 trains a day each way except Sunday when it's about 15. So, that's roughly 570 trains per week, or roughly 29,000 trains per year. With 1m passengers, that's 34 passengers per train. Assuming there's at least 2 carriages with 70 seats per carriage, that's running below 25% utilisation, which is roughly the point where putting every passenger in their own taxi is greener. Then we could look at the cost. Which is £300m. The train costs £2 a ticket. So, with 1m passengers, that's a total of £2m of revenue. Even if we assume that everyone involved in operation and maintenance does it out of the goodness of their hearts, that railway will take 150 years to repay the investment. Or another way to look at it is that if the government just opened a Nationwide ISA with £300m, the country would be richer. If you burn large amounts of public money to make something cheap, people will use it. If I stood in the street with bottles of beer, selling them for 5p each, I'd get lots of people buying them. But I'd be steadily going broke.

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Ceejayncl@reddit

Well it was economically viable with much less passengers. Also, public transport shouldn’t be ran for profit. Lastly that completely ignores how many people will then get on at Newcastle for onward journeys, and the overall economic impact it has on the line outside of fare income.

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Teembeau@reddit

I'm not saying that public transport should be run for profit. But if you want to say that it should run at a loss, what's do you want to do to pay for it? Tax people more, cancel some hip replacements? People should pay for their own transport. If they get a benefit from having a more enjoyable trip to see the football, they can pay for it. I don't see why anyone else should. Fair enough. How many people get on at Newcastle for onward journeys What is the economic impact assessment for it? You clearly know this, right?

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Ceejayncl@reddit

You see this is the problem, people like you who seem to think they are a financial guru (going by your comments here and elsewhere) but don’t understand the basics of an economy. An economy doesn’t work like a corner shop, it’s not a simple case of having higher income to outgoings on pretty much everything, although people like you neglect to acknowledge loss leader lines in this similarly. An economy needs constant re-investment, because the financial gains are not immediate and they are further down the line, similar to how we have schools and don’t expect parents to being handing over money at the gates each day. Some areas of society are going to need constant investment/subsidisation. Public transport is often one of those areas. This is the very reason why we pay taxes, because we don’t and can’t expect people to just hand over obscene amounts of money. Lastly, no I don’t have the answered, but organisations such as the Department for transport, and Network rail etc do, and they all found that passenger levels much below what they are achieving was the threshold of where it is more beneficial to have the line than not too.

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Teembeau@reddit

If you can't show me the report, there is no way that we can reasonably discuss it. The Department of Transport's economic case for HS2 was flawed. It's full of problems. Just saying "Network Rail says so" allows for no scrutiny of the argument. Network Rail gets things wrong. The Department of Transport gets things wrong. Government investment produces benefits. There are benefits to, for example high speed rail. If you go and find the NAO report into HS1, it will tell you that there were benefits to doing it. Not only in terms of making money, but wider economic benefits. Someone travelling to Paris creating extra commerce, for example. But the numbers also conclude that the benefits were less than the cost, and therefore it was a waste of money. And when you waste money on HS1, that's money that can't be used for hip operations, or running a rural bus, which also have benefits to people. So knowing numbers matters. If a £200m train line means millions of people doing onward travel, creates tens of thousands of new jobs for people going to work, that might well be worth the cost. If it's 20 people doing onward travel, it isn't.

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Ceejayncl@reddit

They don’t make those reports public unless you do an FOI, so go ahead and do one of those if it satisfy’s you. As for HS2, what made that in economically viable was building tunnels in the countryside so some well of people didn’t see a train line on the horizon. The ability to complete more with air travel and how it would have opened up existing lines for more local routes. In the North East alone that would have meant places like Widdrington, Amble, and Bamburgh would have been opened up as commuter towns, and given the people who live there better career and social prospects, especially for the younger people. As I say though, it’s clear that you know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

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Teembeau@reddit

"They don’t make those reports public unless you do an FOI, so go ahead and do one of those if it satisfy’s you." That's not how this works. If you want to make a case, you get the facts. Which means that no, other than just seeing a number, you have no idea what is the basis of it. "As for HS2, what made that in economically viable was building tunnels in the countryside so some well of people didn’t see a train line on the horizon." Read what I said again. I didn't mention HS2. I said HS1, also known as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. "As I say though, it’s clear that you know the price of everything, but the value of nothing." Considering that I've just explained the problem, it's you that doesn't understand that. Is it worth running a train costing hundreds of millions to get 10 people to work? That's 10m+ to create a job. No, it isn't. Literally, paying them 1m cash, per year would be more beneficial. If it's a million people, so, say, £200 person per year? Quite probably. You're the one blindly looking at rail and saying "train good", rather than costs and benefits.

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Ceejayncl@reddit

You are the one asking how they came to value it as worthy of its cost price, so yeah it is how it goes, go and ask them. HS1 is nothing compared to what it was promised to be. There were supposed to be direct connections to places like Manchester, Newcastle, and Edinburgh. Also if you want to argue that it wasn’t worthy of the price then go ahead. You have no idea how much it’s been worth to the economy, allowing freight alone to move 24/7 without being stopped due to the weather on ferry services etc. It allows us to trade physical goods to our biggest economic partners in the EU. Like I said, you know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Considering that line alone is connecting deprived and semi-remote areas of South East Northumberland, allowing people access to jobs, education, and even healthcare facilities, then yes it’s worth it. Now go and tell London that they shouldn’t have their public transport because the government subsides them with 28% of their day to day funding, see how well the economy will do when you take that off them?

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shantsui@reddit

Great example. What they now need to do is integrate it into the metro so it is easier to use.

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Ceejayncl@reddit

It sort of already is. If you have a Pop card then it is in zone D, I’m not sure if it is linked up with the ability to use a Metro ticket on it or not. The overall plan is to integrate ticketing across the region though. It also now links up well with the Northumberland Park station that is now open, as well as Central Station.

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shantsui@reddit

It is the sort of that gets me. How are people meant to know? I don't think there are even plans to update the maps. To be clear I think this is great. Just let's make it fully part of the existing system instead of a weird sideways half part.

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GeordieAl@reddit

I think the best way to integrate it into the Metro would be a new Metro line taking advantage of the waggonways that exist and haven't been built on and part track sharing with the Northumberland Line. Starting at The Northumbrian Quay ferry terminal, Royal Quays Retail Park, Percy Main( connecting with North shields -> St. James line), Tyne Tunnel Trading Estate, Silverlink, Stephensons Steam Railway/Middle Engine Lane, Cobalt/West Allotment, Earsdon Road ( connecting with the Monument > Coast line at Northumberland park), Backworth, Seghill, Seaton Deleval, New Hartley, Newsham, Blyth Central

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shantsui@reddit

Would love that. I think the metro is great (know we had a bit of a rough patch). We should lean into it the way London has. A single connected system the way London has.

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Maya-K@reddit

Yeah, the problem was never that people didn't use the railways. In many cases, plenty of locals would use a station every day, but the population nearby was low enough that the station was always going to be loss-making. Which isn't a problem when railways are seen as a public service which isn't intended to make a profit, but unfortunately that how our railways are run.

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Teembeau@reddit

Our railways are absolutely not run at a profit. We throw £9bn a year at subsidising them, and that's just the current network, not including HS2 and East West Rail. Railways should run efficiently. That doesn't necessarily mean making a profit, but certainly not much of a loss. Losing money means making other taxpayers poorer. That £9bn of rail subsidy is £9bn not spent on scientific research, on medical treatment, or just on people enjoying themselves. If someone wants to make a journey, if it is of benefit to them, they can pay for it. Anything else creates a misallocation of resources. In the case of our loss making railways, the key problem is that there just isn't the demand and density to support them. The choice of transport should match the demand. Trains from Reading to London have that demand. From Chippenham to Westbury they don't. A bus is more applicable to the route. it is cheaper and greener.

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KyoshiKorra@reddit

I assume you also think roads should be tolled to recover cost of maintenance and new roads, right?

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Teembeau@reddit

Like Vehicle Excise Duty? £9bn collected per annum, vs £6;5bn spent on national roads? Drivers already pay the toll.

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Haunting-Incident266@reddit

Exactly. A similar thing happened at our nearest station, Okehampton, that was brought back into use a few years back. Way exceeded their expectations. There is plenty of talk about expanding the line further west towards the north coast but nothing yet. I think the Beeching cuts were one thing but selling off the track base was short sighted

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disappointingcryptid@reddit

Woo Dartmoor line! The south west desperately needs better rail connections.

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Teembeau@reddit

Why? Most of the roads are about empty. Buses have plenty of spare capacity.

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Nimblewright_47@reddit

Benching was motivated partly by motor-friendly ideology and (allegedly) by a personal interest in road-building. Selling the track bed cemented the loss of the railways.

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Teembeau@reddit

No he wasn't. There were lots of loss-making trains running, like there are still lots of loss making trains running (roughly half of the network). Beeching suggested closing railways and putting buses on the same journeys which are much cheaper to run than trains. The rail fanboys say this because they just want more overpriced trains at the cost to the taxpayer.

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Teembeau@reddit

How low were the expectations? It carries 27 passengers per train on average. That's worse for the environment than putting every passenger in a taxi. That's a service that needs a coach, which has much lower operational and capital costs. I'll bet it would be empty if all those people had to fully pay for it.

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Maya-K@reddit

RIP Sampford Courtenay station though 😔

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neilm1000@reddit

The Meldon viaduct issue needs to be sorted first. As a Janner I'm fully on board with more rail links in the county especially if we can move trains away from Dawlish when the seawall goes down.

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repair-it@reddit

But, imagine the NIMBYs who wouldn't want a train line at the end of their property. Just look at the planning problems around the Oxford to Cambridge line.

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GeordieAl@reddit

And they’re already talking about extending it to Newbiggin. Same with the borders railway. Edinburgh to Gala. Way higher ridership than was expected and now looking to reinstate the whole line to Carlisle And yet getting the Metro the 7 miles from South Hylton to Pelaw seems like it will never happen in my lifetime! And opening up lines like the Scotswood line, Riverside branch, and the former waggonways by middle engine lane where trackbed still exists never get a mention

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Purp1eMagpie@reddit

Reminds me of an article I read a while back. A pub had shut down because it wasn't viable. Someone bought it and applied for change of use so they could change it into a house. All the locals kicked off and the application was denied... Yet they obviously didn't use the pub hence it shut down.

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SamantherPantha@reddit

Currently going through the same kind of thing in my city. The council is planning on knocking down the old shopping centre and Facebook kicked off, outraged that we were losing a vital part of our city…the centre is always quiet and has lots of empty shops.

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Zingalamuduni@reddit

Exactly. People moan about their town centre being a dilapidated shithole while happily driving to the “big box” stores in the retail parks on the outskirts of town.

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FridayNightClub@reddit

Such a relevant point this but whst comes first here - a town with shops that people wish to buy from? I feel people simply follow convenience and the out of town shops make more commercial sense for retailers.

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Optimaximal@reddit

Funnily enough, it was losing our local Tesco that killed the shopping centre in our large village. Once the owners of the precinct lost the guarenteed rent from Tesco they lost interest in running the place as a going concern, ran everyone's leases down and closed it - it's due to be knocked down and replaced with retirement flats.

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mittfh@reddit

In Solihull, there's a plan for phased demolition and rebuild of a tired 1960s shopping centre into a mixed use development (mid to high rise, retail on the ground, flats above). Interestingly, as the first phase involves demolition of a car park and public toilets, loss of those facilities was the primary concern among those commenting on FB posts, yet none of the council run car parks in town ever get anywhere near capacity, while there's a Morrisons supermarket immediately adjacent to Phase 1 with toilets (albeit it's not signposted from the shopping centre and the footway to it is rather indistinct, running between the delivery yard at the rear of the store and a Royal Mail sorting office yard)... Oh, and of course, they think the new build housing will be for the "boat people" rather than natives...

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HELMET_OF_CECH@reddit

It’s a nationwide playbook that nobody locally asked for though. They knocked down our shopping centre and turned it into a ‘green space’ which is now just a place unemployed drug addicts congregate to beg, litter and fight. Nice one.

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lnm1969@reddit

We've got Wotsit Street in Birkenhead (along with £12 m for new paving stones on the main pedestrianised bit.) What. A. Farce.

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cheandbis@reddit

Wakefield?

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Tribalgeoff@reddit

My Great Grandfather was the town clerk for Wakefield in the 1920s' and it was a very prosperous city. He's been dead probably 80 years now but we have kept him on ice in the hope modern town planning can resurrect him. The first part is true.

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Chevalitron@reddit

Could have been Preston too.

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SamantherPantha@reddit

Correct

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cheandbis@reddit

I've lived up here for 10 years and I'm not sure I've ever visited The Ridings shopping centre. I have a lot of sympathy for those who live there who will need to move but the current situation is dire from what I've heard and a bit of regeneration is much needed.

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Tribalgeoff@reddit

Keyboard Nimbys

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Freddyeddy123@reddit

We're having this exact issue in my village right now, except we were in the pub they just ran it like shit.

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Forsaken-Ad5571@reddit

This is the bigger question. Sometimes pubs fail because people don’t use them. But sometimes they fail because either the attached brewery runs it to death, or because the landlord is incompetent. Just because it fails under one person, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll fail if ran by someone who knew what they were doing. Though sometimes, it is just not viable as a pub. But you can’t just assume.

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chefshoes@reddit

our nearest pub to where we have just moved to, doesnt do food (thats fine) but is classed as a farmer's pub (been told by a few people that when you walk in, everyone stops turns and stares at you) and in the village where i grew up was a very old pub that had been shut for years, it was always busy and a social location as it was very rural... went back a few months ago, dead.. and the staff couldnt give a shit (different staff tbf) no atmosphere so no urge to go back really. the idea is prettier than the reality

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CrazyHa1f@reddit

My family used to run the enterprise pub in our village (I think enterprise is gone now/subsumed into some massive conglomerate). It was nearly impossible to turn a profit on alcohol, and we gave up after 4 years of battling. We even tried to buy away the tie but they wouldn't budge, even though the pub was making pennies. We were forced to increase the price on our most popular cask ale - a bitter actually - and the village kicked up such a fuss like it was our fault that enterprise were a bunch of money grabbing sadists. So yeah - we were fucked in both holes, as it were. Running a pub is rough.

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Particular-Current87@reddit

I've heard only bad things about Enterprise, their pub near me seems to have a new landlord every year or so

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Expert_Vacation8897@reddit

Agreed - got two pubs in our village both changed landlords within 6 months. The one that was previously packed is dead. The other one was dead is now packed too much in times. So arguably if you had two good landlords you would have two busy pubs. Or we are a one pub village and like to flock 😂

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front-wipers-unite@reddit

There are three pubs in my village. And one of them has had 4 landlords in 6 years. Every time you go in there it's the same half a dozen to a dozen bar flies sat at the bar, and they'll make zero effort to make space so you can actually get to the bar. It puts people off.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

We have groups shut down due to losing funding because no one comes then everyone whines and say I was going to come. Well too late if you had done that it might still be running.

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Psycho_Splodge@reddit

Free house, manager, or tied?

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Jops22@reddit

I find pubs are slightly unique in that, its a huge revenue driver for the breweries that own it, So often they charge extortionate rents in order to keep the cash flow going, and its becomes really difficult to keep the pub running. Freeholds and a good landlord work well

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Teembeau@reddit

That isn't the big problem, but everyone likes to blame businesses. The real problem with rural pubs is that the rural towns and villages became dormitories full of people who come home and open a bottle of pinot grigio most of the time. Nothing wrong with that, but it means a lot less custom for pubs.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

Village pubs lost a lot of custom and never recovered from when drunk driving laws came in. They are too sparse and without public transit like the city pubs.

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Jops22@reddit

Ha, i always make a shit joke to my wife when the pub shuts again (for another 3 months) they need to bring back drink driving. As a kid i remember my village pub being full of men over 70 (including my grandfather), who would drink from 12pm to 8pm and then drive home! Pure lunacy, the death (literally and figuratively) of the old bar flies didnt help pubs either

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Teembeau@reddit

That's very true as well. And the smoking ban had an impact too.

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pioneeringsystems@reddit

There is a business model of people buying up local pubs and running them into the ground in order to get them redeveloped as flats. Grim as fuck.

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Teembeau@reddit

What people want is it to be there when they fancy a summer's walk for a drink. And that just doesn't add up. If a pub is empty 90%, it's going to lose money. Or, you have to hand over £20 a pint.

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Sate_Hen@reddit

My town kicked off because they didn't want a spoons so the pub stayed empty for years.. Much better

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InternationalGlove@reddit

It's normally how it's run that's the issue. My Mum's old village nearly lost its shop until the locals stepped in. They now run it and have put in a small cafe and stocked good local produce. This keeps people's money in the local area. Pubs normally need to diversify a little or be known for good food to survive.

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Forsaken-Ad5571@reddit

Also the business rates done by the council has a a massive effect. Some councils use business rates either blindly, or as a weapon to replace businesses with either their mates or to help a developer.

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jmr1190@reddit

This is the thing. You can't stock a small village shop like a Londis anymore, it just doesn't serve a viable purpose. Ironically the answer seems to be to go all the way back to the very inception of trade itself and have it as a place where local people can sell locally produced things. The free range eggs from Sheila's farm, the dairy from Dave's cattle, Mike's jams and chutneys, Janet's exercise in roasting coffee. Yes it'll be expensive, but then so is spending £6.99 on a small pot of Nescafe Azera.

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SecretSquirrel2204@reddit

Similar thing in our nearest city, wanting to knock down the old showground/speedway and build housing, I watched the planning committees about it as found it interesting. Ultimately the plan was rejected in a subsequent committee, initially was approved subject to certain terms, and the developer did not honour those agreements within timeframes. But it was interesting seeing how many people kicked off about how the speedway needed to be restored, that it was a cultural icon and part of the local identity, reminiscing about the times they had there. People still go on about it. Even though in the first committee the site owners advised that the speedway had been canned due to not being financially viable, and there was never a possibility that refusal of the application would equate to the return of the speedway. So the application was refused, and the site has been left derelict ever since, resulting in more complaints from people wanting them to reopen the speedway. Makes me wonder how long it will take for the pin to finally drop for some of those objectors.

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drquakers@reddit

Village I used to live in had this exact issue.

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Electric-aura3000@reddit

I use the post office now because there used to be 6 banks near me and now there's 0. It's a ballache going into the city center just to nip to the bank.

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Busy_Working9319@reddit

Damn but I use my local shop, local coop, and local post office, do people really not use them that often?

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Thrilalia@reddit

It's always the same here when something shuts. Groups of people would bitch and moan about it shutting, then asked "Well did you use it." suddenly no answer, or a "No, but"

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Longshot318@reddit

Reminds me of a conversation I heard between two middle aged ladies bemoaning the fact that their local greengrocer might be shutting down. This was in the middle of Sainsbury's fruit and veg aisle where they were happily stocking up.

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Forsaken-Ad5571@reddit

My issue with greengrocers and butchers around me is that they’re only open during the day whilst people are working. I literally can’t get to them unless I have a day off work. So I’m forced to buy rubbish produce at the supermarket.

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cherrycoke3000@reddit

I remember all the shopping centres opening in town. One used to be a school, another mishmash of various buildings. Somewhere for the Boomer generation to spend their spare cash. Then, I remember the out of town supermarkets, followed by out of town shopping malls. Flashing the cash, 'Loads of money!' was the thing. Fast forward and we don't have spare cash, work several jobs and need the convenience of online shopping whilst our richest generation prefer the convenience cars and out of town shopping malls. We constantly keep hearing how our high streets are empty. Like the Beeching cuts, I do think we need to have a good look and consider if what we created over the last 40 years was ever sustainable.

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juicy_steve@reddit

People do use local rail in the form of trams/light rail though. The fact much of Manchesters metro is build on old rail infrastructure kind of proves that

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Curious-Art-6242@reddit

I think a caveat to that is therecwere some cuts too deep to areas which would not benefit from the rail systems they've lost, jist not thevone they previously had, as some areas are car only hell holes with no current viable public transport offerings!

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Besmirching_Badger@reddit

> But he called bullshit on the fact that the British Railways could not even tell him how much each line earned in revenue and how many passengers it carried. He rightly pointed out that intercity and freight is where railways can be competitive. Been a while since i've looked into this but. 1. IIRC Beeching did surveys about track use during off peak hours, making his analysis of how busy various routes were useless. 2. The cuts happened basically immediately after the entire rail network had been overhauled and filled with diesel fuelled rolling stock. A massive investment which may have changed the analysis. 3. public infrastructure running at a loss is the nature of public infrastructure. Some things exist for social goods or because they have wider economic or social benefits. This thinking is exactly why infrastructure in the UK is so fucked. 4. The entire thing was based on pro-car/ pro-road interests (including the minister for transport). It wasn't uncommon at the time to think the 'car is the future', but that doesn't make it any less partisan and short sighted. It was coupled with tearing up all the tram systems too. This was always predictably stupid. 5. The complete insanity of not even protecting the trackbeds was easily the worst decision made and is why really quite important routes can't be re-opened. Imagine the great central main line being reopened instead of the HS2 fiasco. The same with the varsity line. The same with the carlisle-edinburgh line. > People like the IDEA of having a local train service. But when it becomes a reality, they won't use it. Isn't this just a perpetuation of the false argument given by beeching et al in the first place? If you've lived somewhere without ready access to the rail network or other public transport, you can be assured that there have been plenty of times when you would've loved to have used it. Especially in place of some of the shoddy bus routes that keep disappearing themselves. I've lived in numerous country locations well away from public transport that used to have train tracks running through them and would've made the world of difference. Especially to children and pensioners. Those places *require* a car now.

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mrggy@reddit

> public infrastructure running at a loss is the nature of public infrastructure. Some things exist for social goods or because they have wider economic or social benefits. This thinking is exactly why infrastructure in the UK is so fucked. I always find it interesting that we demand that public transit break even and pay for itself when we never say the same about road networks. Imagine if every road was tolled at a rate to cover it's construction and maintenance costs. People would rightly say it's ridiculous and unaffordable. Yet we have no qualms about doing exactly that with public transit

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DarkNinjaPenguin@reddit

Thing is, we *don't* demand that. It's invariably a very few people in charge who tend to think this is the case. There are bus routes in remote areas that operate on a huge loss, are usually empty, but keep going because the local council is aware of how important they are to the community. Same with small ferries that service many of the Scottish islands, highly subsidised by the government. But if the ferries stopped, the islands communities would be dead, period. Plenty of people are aware of this.

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Teembeau@reddit

The highways pay for themselves. It's only when you include town roads that they don't. But as trains compete with highways and not town roads, that's an unfair comparison. Even if you include town roads, the subsidy per km to roads is miniscule compared to the subsidy per km for railways.

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mjratchada@reddit

This is not the case. The direct costs are about 40%, when taking into account societal costs, highways cost ten times as much. I can get to the office in 30 minutes by train, and by car it would take 60-90 minutes. Railways are also far more efficient in terms of fuel.

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Teembeau@reddit

Where are you getting those numbers from? Also, no. According to BEIS, the most efficient form of domestic travel, on average is coach travel. Now, there are more efficient trains, like commuter ones, and major city to city routes, but many trains, such as rural ones are poorly used and if you want greener transport should be closed down and replaced with a coach. There is no single right answer to transport. At high density, trains are great. Medium, coaches. And at low density, like many rural journeys, cars are the most efficient form of transport. https://preview.redd.it/6bu8kxxp9bvg1.png?width=976&format=png&auto=webp&s=ccc6cc83bec233522096a72700b164e62611afc7

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alphaxion@reddit

It's also insane to not consider the amount of economic activity public transport enables as part of covering the cost of running, maintaining, and expanding those services. If it costs £1bn a year to run a line that results in tax receipts of £5bn worth of economic activity, then it has more than paid for itself. (numbers for illustration purposes) To then try and get the users of the service to also shell out £1bn or more to directly cover the running costs is actively removing that money from the economy.

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Leekspinnerwinner@reddit

OP has shares in Tesla

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

The trackbeds weren't preserved because that would mean bridges over them for the motorway and that would have hit the pocket of the company with the contract to build owned by transport minister Ernest maples.

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jiiiii70@reddit

I still live in one of those places. A logical journey to London for me is a 50 mile car journey to the station, and then a 90 minute train ride (total journey time around 2 and a half hours). I say logical because in theory I could get a direct train from a station that is only 35 miles away, but the station is in the city centre, there is limited parking, and the train to London takes 120 minutes, so actually the total journey is longer. My absolute nearest station is 12 miles away (and pretty inaccessible by public transport) has 16 trains a day total, which would then drop me at the aforementioned city centre station - total journey time well over 3 hours each way. Bear in mind if I wanted, I could drive from my door to central London in under 4 hours. If I am going anywhere else in the country apart from London I tend to drive. Quicker, easier, and if there are 2+ people, usually cheaper.

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neilm1000@reddit

>My absolute nearest station is 12 miles away (and pretty inaccessible by public transport) has 16 trains a day total, which would then drop me at the aforementioned city centre station - total journey time well over 3 hours each way. Bear in mind if I wanted, I could drive from my door to central London in under 4 hours. Roughly where are you?

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jiiiii70@reddit

MIdlands

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1stDayBreaker@reddit

I really wish we had more duplicate infrastructure right now…

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Smooth_Imagination@reddit

Virtually no roads support themselves either. They are all requiring subsidy. What a silly notion.

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Teembeau@reddit

Highways support themselves. Roads are only a subsidy when you include town roads, which isn't something you can compare with trains. When you unload freight from a train, it's going to go on town roads. If you added extra fuel duty to support all the town roads, the impact would barely be noticeable.

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mjratchada@reddit

Fuel tax road use is around 50 billion. The actual cost of road use and maintenance is estimated to be 125 billion.

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Teembeau@reddit

What is the source of £125bn? Do you have a link?

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PurahsHero@reddit

Yes, but most roads are able to take all vehicles, and don't run alongside each other for miles, and don't only serve one location for a specific type of traffic (unless its a small access road). And I say this as someone who wants more people on trains.

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Smooth_Imagination@reddit

Roads take mainly oversised passenger cars and freight. Railways can do that with high service frequency using a harmonised speed and future autonomous vehicles. You restrict freight inducing developments, i.e. distribution centres, to rail access points and build out a freight rail network. It was almost all already like that. Passenger services can share the line at harmonised speeds and with station passing points, where needed. Heck you could even combine them and have a means to move pallets on and off the trains at the station. Were already seeing heavy battery swapping robotics, its not that challenging. Its only not like that now because road cost is almost free for trucks to access despite the fact they cause most of the road damage, and the department for transport became road centric and added access roads to industrial sites to plug to the highway network they constructed. Everything relocated to that principally due to it being subsidised, then businesses and workers relocated to low density developmemt on the edge of town or out of town, where land is much cheaper. Youd of course always need some trucking freight on the road, last km solutions, they should have minimal axle loadings.

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GreenMist1980@reddit

Also bear in mind the idea was the lower frequency lines were to be closed and replaced with cheaper bus services. The issue being even the bus routes were not economical either so the local councils and private bus companies stopped running some of these routes as soon as they could. It's been proven with some lines reopening that Beeching possibly set his cut off to high, but BR was in a sprawling mess that needed to be pruned. There is also that the infrastructure is gone. A lot of roads have been built on trackbeds etc. A lot of Heritage lines have extended as far as they can due to blocked or lost routes.

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Teembeau@reddit

what lines have been reopened where they make sense economically? Where fare revenue even covers basic operational cost? Beeching was right, more right than he knew at the time. By the 1980s, the Serpel Report was commissioned to do the same exercise again. And we're burning £9bn a year on supporting trains that almost no-one uses. Trains were superseded by buses and cars. They suit high density travel, but for lower densities buses and even sometimes cars beat them. Not just in terms of cost, flexibility but environmentally too. Coach travel uses less CO2/passenger mile than trains on average. And look at the cost of a ticket, and then consider that the taxpayer throws £9bn/year in subsidy at trains. The idea of keeping trackbeds when rail has been superseded for most journeys is like keeping all the silkworm farms after nylon was invented.

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GreenMist1980@reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Beeching_cuts_service_reopenings

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Teembeau@reddit

And how many of those make any sense? I've been on Swindon to Melksham. There were about 3 people in the carriage with me.

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TheHornyGoth@reddit

Feeder lines aren’t meant to make a profit. And in any case, public transport (even planes to a certain extent) exists to connect communities and reduce reliance on privately owned vehicles.

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Teembeau@reddit

What's wrong with privately owned vehicles?

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Aggressive_Chuck@reddit

Most of those heritage lines are single track so wouldn't be much use anyway. They were made before the internal combustion engine.

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GreenMist1980@reddit

The Great Central Railway, had it survived could have been a fast link north. It was built to accomodate European loading gauge, but south of Nottingham effectivley copies existing lines. Now this would be seen as a benefit as it would increase capacity, to Beeching it was unneeded duplication.The track beds through Leicester and Nottingham are completely gone now.

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Smooth_Imagination@reddit

Roads are not more economic than railways. They take up more space and cost far more to run for equivalent capacity. Firstly developmemt should be restricted to coincide with the rail network. Every ton km of freight transported on the road should not be subsidised, which it is. A level unsubsidised playing field shows railways are inherently superior if they connect the same places. In the near future low cost fully autonomous services and ultra light passenger rail would allow superior frequency of services, that will increase demand and costs further. The things that limited thinking during the Beeching cuts will eventually be made out of date.

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Alexander-Wright@reddit

My biggest complaint about Beeching is that the land was sold off and not protected from use. We could have avoided a lot of the cost of HS2, a route that runs along a lot of the closed Great Central line, the Varsity line, and others, I'm sure, if the alignment was still clear. Some preserved lines are now being reopened, something only possible because the local people refused to let their local railway become abandoned. So there is local demand! Lots of the small lines weren't viable with the locomotives of Beeching's era, but with technology such as battery powered trains, now are. As fuel prices have gone up, people are seeking an alternative to driving. Alas, shortsightedness ruled the day.

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HomeworkInevitable99@reddit

> But he called bullshit on the fact that the British Railways could not even tell him how much each line earned in revenue and how many passengers it carried. That problem was solved in the early 2000s when the rail companies could track where each moved. Before then it was impossible, so saying "calling bullshit" is not the right phrase. He didn't know and neither did the railways because the system was too complicated and didn't track individuals.

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squigs@reddit

Main problem with Beeching is there wasn't a lot of consideration on how these services could be made profitable. Trains were considered outdated and to be replaced by cars. A lot of them couldn't be, certainly, but there were oddities like bizarre timetabling that has trains arrive just after an obvious connection would leave. I also wonder if they could have converted some of them to light rail. Essentially tram systems which require less infrastructure. Manchester Metrolink follows a lot of the old railway lines and seems to be doing pretty well.

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neilm1000@reddit

>A lot of them couldn't be, certainly, but there were oddities like bizarre timetabling that has trains arrive just after an obvious connection would leave. This is an issue all over the place now. Integrated transport is less bad than it was but it is mad that some connections just aren't timed.

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fkprivateequity@reddit

in my town, the bus operator and one of the train companies that serves our local station are the same company. there are bus routes that pass the station but don't stop there. the timetabling of the buses means that by the time you've walked back from the main bus station to the train station, you've missed the train. it's madness.

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neilm1000@reddit

Crazy that buses don't stop at the station. No doubt there will be (largely nonsense) reasons. In fairness to the TOC part of the company, this is on the bus part of the company: it's the ORR and DfT who decide train routes and times, the TOCs don't have a lot of discretion and have to justify/bid when they want to make changes.

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PostMilone@reddit

He didn't 'call bullshit'. He produced it. Beeching's purpose was to lie. His boss, the transport secretary, gave him a precise way to construct and frame his lies. The whole point was to misrepresent the railways and that's what he did.

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EquivalentMap8477@reddit

The transport secretary who had interests in a road building company which he passed to his wife when he got the job

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Hopeful-Project5504@reddit

Re-opened lines in Scotland have seen huge use and expansion being talked about. Borders and Larkhall to name two

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cheandbis@reddit

I'm all for better local infrastructure but I agree, it'd be a colossal waste of money to go back to how it was as the services would be underused. There should be some discussion about better rail networks (going E/W in this country by train is generally poor for example) but the days of local lines serving remote outposts are long gone. There are probably better solutions.

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Teembeau@reddit

A huge percentage of our trains now are underused. As for East/West, there just isn't the demand. The big use of trains in the UK is people getting into cities. Either commuting or doing a business meeting. Cities are difficult to drive into. When roads are fast enough, that is generally what people opt for. It's not just that you can split the cost across all passengers, it's not just that driving a Honda Civic is more reliable than a train, it's that it gets you point to point. My Swindon to Reading journey isn't Swindon station to Reading station. That's great that's really quick. It's my house over a mile from Swindon to Thames Valley Park 3 miles from Reading. Which means catching a bus, and then killing time waiting for the train. Then getting into Reading, and killing time waiting for a bus. it's 1'35 by public transport or 55 minutes by car. East/West just doesn't have the density for trains. The best public transport solution is coach or bus travel because it has a much lower cost. If only 30 people want to go from Swindon to Luton Airport at a particular time, that's energy and cost efficient like a train isn't.

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Historical_Owl_1635@reddit

> There are probably better solutions. Yes, it’s people driving. Then we complain there’s too many cars on the road.

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Bisemarden@reddit

Many lines made sense when the only alternative to get anywhere, or move goods to market was horse and cart, or walking. By the 1920s with the advent of primitive buses and the motor lorry traffic figures started to drop, and after the war there was little long term future for these lines. There was, of course lines that Beeching shouldn't have shut, and lines he recommended keeping open but shut eventually.

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It_d0_be_like_that_@reddit

Not even taking into account that the main use of rail should be freight, these kinds of comparisons are always a waste of time. What is the alternative to rail? No one's going around asking roads and motorways to make profit. Basic infrastructure is a requirement for broader economic growth rather than just a thing to be operated as a business.

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Crisps33@reddit

Rubbish! Look at London - underground, overground, commuter rail. All very well used. Why? Because they're frequent services that go everywhere. The purpose of a railway isn't to make money or be competitive, it's to get people around and improve their lives. Just a little thought experiment, think of some of the roads around you, not the A-roads, but the residential streets or country lanes which don't get that much traffic, but are nonetheless essential for the people who use them. Would you get rid of them or stop maintaining them because they're not well used or don't make money? Of course it sounds ridiculous because you understand the point of a road network is that it has to connect everywhere to everywhere else. If you kept only the "profitable" roads and discarded the rest, it wouldn't work. So why can't we apply the same logic to railways? In the mid 20th century when land was cheap, oil was plentiful, and cars and suburbs were the new trendy thing, it seemed like a great idea to abandon all other forms of transport in favour of the private car. Now times have changed and we've learned that cars aren't the be-all and end-all, and other forms of transport have their place. So it's time we made the effort to make other forms of transport viable again.

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PurahsHero@reddit

>Rubbish! Look at London - underground, overground, commuter rail. All very well used. Why? Because they're frequent services that go everywhere Primarily into and out of the centre, with orbital routes relatively few and far between. Central London has 11 terminus stations, compared to what, 6 orbital rail services? >Just a little thought experiment, think of some of the roads around you, not the A-roads, but the residential streets or country lanes which don't get that much traffic, but are nonetheless essential for the people who use them. Would you get rid of them or stop maintaining them because they're not well used or don't make money? Of course it sounds ridiculous because you understand the point of a road network is that it has to connect everywhere to everywhere else. If you kept only the "profitable" roads and discarded the rest, it wouldn't work. So why can't we apply the same logic to railways? Because roads serve more than one function. Part of it is to move vehicles. Part of it is to act as a street. Part of it is to move freight. They are much more flexible than railways are. This is not to say railways are not a public service, but roads do more than move vehicles. And we did use to charge for roads, that was what the Highwaymen did. But the railways blew them out of the water. >In the mid 20th century when land was cheap, oil was plentiful, and cars and suburbs were the new trendy thing, it seemed like a great idea to abandon all other forms of transport in favour of the private car. Now times have changed and we've learned that cars aren't the be-all and end-all, and other forms of transport have their place. So it's time we made the effort to make other forms of transport viable again. Of course that's the case. We need to reduce car dependence. But the lazy argument that we should just rebuild the railways of the 19th Century is just that, lazy. We should build them where its needed.

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Crisps33@reddit

Looks like we're in agreement that we need to build more railways then! I guess what I disagreed with was the idea that it was right to close all those lines. It was a mistake, and we'd be better off if most of them had been kept. But now we are where we are, you're probably right that we need to look at what's needed now and not just blindly recreate the lines of the past.

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Caracalla73@reddit

Let's also not overlook, many will have been built and developed on, so even if there was a financial model it's impossible, or would be ridiculously controversial requiring new routes or compulsory purchases (or both). And they can't build one HS2 line. Let alone restore the old network.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

Also lines like the varsity line he said to keep were scrapped by the government so motorways could be built more cheaply. He also pointed out that the railways had to be upgraded to accommodate containers to make sense.

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Teembeau@reddit

What people want is a train service to be there for them, but not to use it regularly. So, they'll generally drive around from the village, but when granny is coming to visit, it would be handy for her to be able to get to the village by train rather than you driving to the main station to pick her up. And you can't run trains on that basis. You need frequent use. A lot of our rural trains are already barely used and should be shut down and replaced with buses. They're expensive and worse for the environment.

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aezy01@reddit

The Northumberland line would disagree. It may be an outlier, but it’s success (so far) makes a compelling argument for some lines to be reopened.

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PurahsHero@reddit

Some lines, yes. The Okehampton Line is another. It doesn't mean all of them are a good idea.

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aezy01@reddit

‘Some’

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AdAggressive9224@reddit

I mean, theoretically, what with the population having increased so much, many of these lines that weren't commercially viable then may well be viable today. So maybe we should re-asses and see which ones are worth putting back in place.

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TSPF11@reddit

We live very remote & at the bottom of a field here there used to be (decades ago) a very small train station. Absolute waste of time, there's not even 100 people within a mile of here, yet it used to be regularly serviced. Wouldn't have been surprised if it serviced 1 or 2 people a day at the absolute maximum. Although would be unbelievably convenient for me, having a station for myself and maybe 1 other person is a tragically selfish waste of public funds. The station was rightfully removed however the line still operates & is very busy.

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dbxp@reddit

If you were to replace them with something driverless trams seem like the better idea. Having them on a fixed route (whether real tracks or virtual) eliminates a lot of the issues with driverless vehicles

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neilm1000@reddit

>Having them on a fixed route (whether real tracks or virtual) eliminates a lot of the issues with driverless vehicles Virtual tracks?

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dbxp@reddit

The simplest version is just a line painted on the road it can follow but you can go for a combination of GPS, computer vision, encoded signs and radio beacons. You could view it as a rubber wheeled tram or a bus with a very rigid route. There's all sorts of hybrid systems: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous\_Rail\_Rapid\_Transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Rail_Rapid_Transit) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown\_Seattle\_Transit\_Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunnel) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus\_rapid\_transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit)

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TheHornyGoth@reddit

The great thing about trains that trams can’t do is they don’t need the automation to be predicting how 100 idiot monkeys piloting cages will act in the next few seconds. Trams, unfortunately, do.

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jimmykimnel@reddit

Beeching had shares in mortorway services.

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captjons@reddit

> He rightly pointed out that intercity and freight is where railways can be competitive. precisely the wrong way to think about public transport

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paradoxbound@reddit

But a lot of them did and Beeching cut far too deep. Look at the maps and the lack of trains around London. Everyone is forced into London if they want to catch a train between Oxford and Cambridge. The Beeching cuts were very short sighted.

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neilm1000@reddit

East West Rail has been a long time coming. Annoyingly part of it could be up and running now but there's a dispute about single operator trains.

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twentiethcenturyduck@reddit

Not being able to count the number of people using the service and how much revenue each line generates is a failing of the accounting / information system and not a failure of the service itself.

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PurahsHero@reddit

Being able to understand how many people use your service and where its money comes from is the absolute basics of understanding how any organisation works. Beeching had to go and do his own fieldwork to make up the data gaps, and that fieldwork showed that some lines were used by literally a few people a day. People do not understand quite how bad British Railways were being run at the time, and how few people were using most of the lines that were closed. They told everyone they offered a good service, and when asked for proof their response was essentially "trust me, bro."

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neilm1000@reddit

They offered a good service in the sense that there were lots of services. Which as you say isn't necessarily how you actually measure services: much as when the Underground is running as planned TfL say there's a good service but really it's literally what should be happening. BR was being run badly although if they'd followed through with the 1955 Modernisation Plan I wonder how different it might have been.

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themcsame@reddit

Yup. Local trains sound nice, the problem is that it essentially ends up being a glorified bus service that costs more and doesn't really save that much time, so in the end, everyone just uses the bus. People like the idea of being able to pop round the corner to the station to get a train to miles and miles away. The reality would be you pop down the corner, get a train to the nearest city, which you could've done by bus for less in about the same amount of time, to then transfer in nearby city or town. In essence, nothing really changes other than the higher cost of your journey.

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fothergillfuckup@reddit

It was definitely brutal in places though. They removed the loop that used to go to Whitworth, not far from me. It used to be a booming manufacturing area, but it's been badly run down now since, as the public transport is terrible. They are talking about joining it to Manchester's tram network soon, so it should start to bounce back.

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neilm1000@reddit

Whitworth near Rossendale/Rochdale? I thought the railway was closed there years before Beeching. I get what you mean about the loops: look at the impact they Ordsall Chord has had and it will be even better when Oxford Road gets more capacity.

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Nimblewright_47@reddit

Bit of Column A, bit of Column B. British Rail ran far too many old lines (including "industrial" lines with minimal or even no services) but Beeching was also ideologically committed to the motorcar as the future. The axe was wielded more enthusiastically than necessary. There is the separate argument of "public good", moreso now we're concerned about carbon emissions. A railway may not make money, but may still serve a useful purpose in reducing road traffic, congestion and pollution. A solid public transport network enables people who can't afford to run a car. You're right that we won't ever get back all the lines: there's still a track bed into the Rolls-Royce Sinfin works that had no services daily for some time before closure. However, that the likes of Devizes and Gosport have no rail connection is a major loss.

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Sir_Madfly@reddit

>Many of them were narrow gauge This isn't correct. BR only ever owned three narrow-gauge lines and by the time of the map on the left, only one survived in their ownership.

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Brave_Assumption6@reddit

Just like people who want cash to remain alive. Well use it then, don't use your card or phone! Because then you're part of the very problem.

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danddersson@reddit

The lines were scrapped when roads were almost empty, and cars offered freedom for all. Now, roads are crowded. I think many services that were scrapped then would well used now. If some were re-opened, it would take time before people changed their habits.

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IamIronDann@reddit

But then we should have a German style system where the local and underground trains are subsidized by the commuter and freight networks.

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shlerm@reddit

I think it's foolish to believe that the revenue each line produces is the defining metric. Particularly in a modern world of unstable fuel prices, increased costs associated to car ownership and the cost to deliver car centred infrastructure. If we had more rail options, the government saves in many other ways not directly linked to the costs of services. I don't use local bus services because I can't get to work ontime and won't finish work in time to make the last bus home. If these changed and I'm experiencing the current fuel costs, I'd be willing to commute on the bus and trade the time lost.

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Historical_Owl_1635@reddit

Yeah… Anybody that has the philosophy that revenue is the defining metric and considers themselves left wing here may want to do some soul searching.

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Kickstart68@reddit

The maps are for the BR passenger networks. Other than the Vale Of Rheidol I can't think of any BR narrow gauge passenger railways.

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cdh79@reddit

Our town went 1-way in the 1970's to cut congestion in the centre. This included compulsory buy back of terraced housing to create car parks to service the centre. Then went pedestrianised for the centre. Now the centre has been ruined by excessively high rents & business rates, forcing small local shops out. So its only got pound shops, coffee shops, pubs, restaurants and charity shops. No-ones going into town to spend big money. The carparks that were originally people's homes, that they were kicked out of, are now being sold off to full short term holes in the councils coffers, to erect student accommodation, for students that won't spend money in the town....

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Betrayedunicorn@reddit

I think ‘people like the idea but they’d never use it’ is a huge generalisation. They recently built a new local station near my work and I could see the increase in passengers that previously didn’t get the train. My car was shagged and I tried hard to replace it with rail for inter UK travel, but most destinations didn’t have a station, or they required car travel after alighting. I ended up buying a replacement car. Lots of the old lines were supporting the coal industry and its workers. These obscure villages now don’t need them as there won’t be any demand, but there are lots of areas that could use a smaller line. For example Cirencester from Kemble.

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U9365@reddit

My local village was one that had it rail station on the existing line restored. I've never used it. the line runs to the local town do I use it to go to town - no I use my car. I can put lots of stuff in my car, I can decide when I want to leave and when I want to return not when the train wants to do the same.

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YOU_CANT_GILD_ME@reddit

Yep. There's a train near me into the centre of the county. Takes around 35-40 minutes due to all the stops. The price is around the same for a bus for a 1 way or a return. But the bus company do monthly tickets that work out far cheaper. Which is the far better option for anyone commuting for work. And the travel time is only about 10 minutes more for the bus. So people can pay around £200 a month for the train, or £100 a month for the bus, and it takes them about 10 minutes longer per trip.

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Aggressive_Chuck@reddit

Do I want a train that goes four miles once an hour (can't be any more frequent because it's single track, it's one train shuttling back and forth), or a bus on a circular route that runs every 15 minutes and goes both ways at the same time?

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JasterBobaMereel@reddit

Note the government shut quite a few routes before Beeching's report, and shut some Beeching said keep open using his report as an excuse, and closed many after Beeching, that Beeching said keep open ... Some of these have since been reopened

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martinj88@reddit

True at the time but with a growing population I believe some of these could be reactivated to benefit towns who have large population bumps and also boost local tourism. Your right that getting locals to use the service is one of the hardest parts but that's partly due to reliability and infrequency of service which for some reason we still really struggle with.

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Outside_Natural7210@reddit

People would use it. There are constantly places me and my mate would want to go but can't because there are no trains or buses.

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Chemistry-Deep@reddit

Network Rail would still struggle to tell you this information

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ffordeffanatic@reddit

We'll never get back to how we were before the cuts, but it could be more comprehensive and far more effective than it currently is. It just needs some major analysis and investment that has been sorely lacking since privatisation.

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aleopardstail@reddit

quite a lot related to freight routes that carry goods between two places that no longer exist either

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Consistent-Pirate-23@reddit

Where we live the train was basically just a freight service for a now closed mine. Anything that could be built on was when they closed the mine and subsequently the train station as it was unsuitable for passengers

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ByteSizedGenius@reddit

A tremendous amount of money both upfront and ongoing to subside the losses. Beeching might have gone to far but the reality is 50% of stations were contributing 2% of total passenger revenue and 33% of routes were carrying 1% of passengers. The model doesn't work when the car is a thing.

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PostMilone@reddit

Don't just quote Beeching's numbers as if they were accurate (but also don't just blame Beeching). The Beeching Report was maliciously false, because Dr Beeching was commissioned to misrepresent the railways. Marples, the transport secretary, had massive personal investment in road construction (including giving his own company the M1 contract) and wanted the railways to look bad, so he gave Beeching a detailed procedure which was guaranteed to produce bad numbers. So your records of passenger numbers are simply inaccurate, but also they fail to reflect that huge swathes of the network carried few passengers but a huge amount of freight. But cars are shite. Cars are utter trash. 'model doesn't work when cars are a thing'. Actually fuck you. The model is less profitable for the arseholes who control the country. Trains are infinitely superior for 90% of journeys and 95% of freight.

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

Exactly this - also - why are railways expected to be profitable but motorways are not? These things should operate as investments. No one expects the Fire Brigade to turn a profit ffs

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Daemon_Blackfyre_II@reddit

But the fire brigade IS profitable. It costs more to rebuild a city burns down than to hire a few people to man some fire trucks. Fire services started out as insurance schemes, which were then made public to extend coverage to all.

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

I agree with the logic but that's not how profit is calculated in a business sense.

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Daemon_Blackfyre_II@reddit

It once made a profitable business when it was privatly run by insurance companies. We just nationalised it.

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notouttolunch@reddit

Because lots of people use motorways (access to which liquefies the motor industry, something that returns a lot of money to the treasury - more money is collected from road users than is spent on them in general). Considering commuters, only 8% of commuter journeys are made by train in the UK. Of that 8% the lion's share are made on tfl. There's a huge misconception that loads of people commute by train. Nationally, it's a big number but in reality very few people, and of those I'm going to say it's going to be the middle class travelling to cities to do their fancy office jobs are actually using the train. Even if that figure were to double, which it can't due to capacity, it's still not that many people! And before you leap to the conclusion that everyone who's taking a car would love to get on the train, imagine what would actually need to happen to double that capacity on the lines where it really matters. I'll give you a clue, take a look at the Transpennine root upgrade; look at how much it costs and look at what it will actually achieve.

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

Yes. If you throttle access to trains to a middle class cosmopolitan audience of city dwellers then they tend to take the train more. Britain isn't the model. Look at places like Japan and China. Even France and Germany.

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Due-Two-6592@reddit

You could even look at it the other way, there are trains where there are middle class people, so having access to transport options increases the opportunities for someone to become middle class

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

Well exactly. There's endless proof that they stimulate economic activity and increase opportunities for employment and development.

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notouttolunch@reddit

I've lived in both France and Germany. Even with this in hand, I don't actually know what your statement means. As in the language, not as in what you are trying to say. It just doesn't make sense.

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

A nationalised and greatly expanded rail service would be of far greater national benefit, revenue, and environmental good than a motorway network that mainly benefits car and oil manufacturers. It really is that simple.

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notouttolunch@reddit

No it wouldn't. Take a look at some railway statistics. But this isn't what you said previously because it doesn't mention France or Germany anymore. Did you change it because I have experience of living in both France and Germany and will debunk any untruths about train journeys in those countries.

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

All the Railway Statistics and practically every urban planner in existence back me up actually. Your anecdotal evidence doesn't nix the stats: France and Germany have significantly higher passenger-kilometres than the UK (in the case of France, despite lower population figures!) because their models are based on planning a better and more equitable travel mix. Ergo they have more people taking the train. If you create better infrastructure... More people use it! Shocking I know.

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notouttolunch@reddit

Again, you're writing sentences that don't actually make sense. I didn't provide any anecdotal evidence, I told you to go and find the information which would show you that you are wrong. You claim to be using statistics, yet you don't have any statistics. France has a number of different railway systems. To which ones are you referring? Because they are each different and target different uses and price points.

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

Good grief. Why am I spending my evening arguing with a porn bot? The point is: It's majority state owned and operated, and it still undertakes more passenger kilometres per year than British trains. France isn't perfect which is why I didn't mention it first but it's proof that an expanded and nationalised train service is not just a sop to the middle classes, it's a vital part of a country's network infra and needs to be treated as such.

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notouttolunch@reddit

That metric isn't relevant. Not only because. It's not a comparable metric, but because you also made it irrelevant. Perhaps you're not used to arguing with someone who knows about what you are arguing with your half-assed knowledge about. It's a common problem on here where everyone thinks they are some sort of specialist because they catch one train everyday and have done so for 10 years. Maybe they lived in Luton once and then moved to Merseyside and therefore they are familiar with two rail systems. In reality, almost no one has enough knowledge and experience in the UK to comment on trains and how they operate. Everyone gets something wrong and it's usually something that is really trivial and in the public domain; something that doesn't require any experience in rail at all!

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

Genuinely this is absolute slop. "That metric isn't relevant. Not only because. It's not a comparable metric, but because you also made it irrelevant.". Complete gibberish. I have presented passenger kilometre facts as well as the truth about the French ownership model. You have presented absolutely nothing concrete beyond your own half baked opinion presented as fact, as well as 'I lived in France so I can debunk any untruths about rail journeys there" (which by the way is absolutely laughable as a statement). You have also massively revealed your hand by stating that you think "being familiar with different rail systems" is the killer metric here, as it makes me realise I am speaking to someone who feels personal experience outweighs actual modelling and statistics around rail infrastructure. I genuinely wonder if I'm talking to an AI here - if I am ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for brownies.

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notouttolunch@reddit

You're right, you are talking absolute slop. It's probably best that you don't. You haven't presented any facts, you've just typed some words. Just because you say them doesn't make them a fact. My half-baked opinion is used in determining spending on railways. One of the industries in which I consult. Those models and statistics you're talking about - guess who contributes to them. Guess who reads all the boring reports when they're published. It's not you! If you read anything, it's the biased output from something like the guardian which may select a relevant paragraph that it feels it can mislead a lot of socialists on. My laughable statement corrects a lot of things that people mistakenly say about other countries. I've had the pleasure of living in two other countries and most people do not have that experience. Your interpretation of experience is laughable. I'm not called Al, no. So you're not talking to them.

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FeGodwnNiEtonian@reddit

"I know more about train infrastructure because I've lived abroad". Yes I can tell you consult on UK train network policy.

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notouttolunch@reddit

This is a sentence fragment. Consider revising.

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EquivalentMap8477@reddit

In 2020 money raised from motorists in the UK was £48 billion and the costs of motorists to the UK tax payer was £123 billion of which £4 billion went on road repairs, noise accounted for £7- 10 billion, congestion accounted for £20 billion, collisions accounted for £35 billion and air pollution cost the UK £54 billion. Please do go on about how motorists pay more than what they get

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notouttolunch@reddit

You've picked a single year in the middle of a global pandemic. Provide a trend over several decades and you might win this.

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EquivalentMap8477@reddit

Even though the income from motorists would have risen in 2021 the costs would have risen as well meaning that motorists are heavily subsidised by the UK taxpayer. The fact that several months of 2020 were spent in lockdown meant that the costs to the taxpayer were lower than normal. Fuel tax for motorists has been frozen since 2010.

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notouttolunch@reddit

It's almost like you didn't read what I wrote.

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EquivalentMap8477@reddit

It seems simple logic is not your forte

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Cultural-Ambition211@reddit

Tell that to Pompey, or Crassus, one of them earned a fortune from it in Ancient Rome!

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SatiricalScrotum@reddit

Man… https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkrJUAg8aI&list=PLt1oN1lxtYdKbQR7wgH99ZrWMj1tBBdTH

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Daemon_Blackfyre_II@reddit

>But cars are shite. Cars are utter trash. 'model doesn't work when cars are a thing'. Actually fuck you. The model is less profitable for the arseholes who control the country. Trains are infinitely superior for 90% of journeys and 95% of freight. How utterly repulsive... Can a train complete compete for time against the car for my commute? Not in the slightest. Can a train get me from door to door in the dry? It cannot. Can a train help get a heavy load of shopping home? Also no. Can a train get me home on a Sunday evening? No, the line is closed for maintainance, but when it did, it was once an hour. Can a train keep you from being stuck next to someone else's sweaty armpits? Also no, in fact it's rather disgusting. Can a train save me money compared to driving? Given you're sharing it with 2000 other people, you'd thinks so, but no. Can a train ensure I have a seat, given how extraordinarily expensive the tickets are? Apparently not. Can a train take my bike so I can hybrid commute? Not in rush hour apparently, and even my tiny hatch back can manage that. So save the ideological rant... Trains cannot replace or even compete with cars for the majority of the time. That's not to say they don't have their place, but as for... >Trains are infinitely superior for 90% of journeys ... Not even close.

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PostMilone@reddit

No, I'm afraid your reply is the repulsive one. You are responding entirely to the status quo; not what is possible, merely what is. The government has been in the pocket of carmakers roadbuilders, haulage companies and the oil and gas lobby for longer than any of us has been alive. Their selfish, cruel and costly decisions have shaped our lives. So your judgment, based on how things are, reflects the WORST of trains, and the BEST of cars, and it still reads as positive only to a selfish, individualistic prick. But if you used your imagination, and considered life in a less corrupt society, you'd know you're brainwashed. Trains are better. You are misled. Set yourself free.

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notouttolunch@reddit

When you make statements such as "trains are infinitely superior for 90% of journeys", you immediately undermine anything else that you say. Trains are not superior for freight. Trains are suitable for certain types of freight. Trains are suitable for certain types of long distance travel. Trains are not suitable for going to the supermarket or going to buy a pair of new shoes. They're also not suitable given that even before the network was significantly reduced in the 1960s, they still didn't cover particularly significant parts of the country. Your comments are those of someone who knows nothing about trains and railways or their operation.

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PostMilone@reddit

1. Google 'rhetoric'; your mind will be blown. 2. Trains absolutely are suitable for those things, though they shouldn't actually be necessary. Most people should be able to do their essential shopping on foot (as they did for thousands of years, you know, before we killed the high street). And if they want to do some particular leisure shopping, then light rail is absolutely ideal. Cars, on the other hand, force these activities into dreary out-of-town miseries.

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notouttolunch@reddit

Point 1 looks to have been intended for someone else. Point 2 is not at all correct and is even a torch with your own claim.

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HELMET_OF_CECH@reddit

You sound unstable lol. No need to go crazy about cars.

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SatiricalScrotum@reddit

Cars are the worst possible means of moving people around, and it’s really bad for us and the country how heavily dependent on them we are.

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Karn1v3rus@reddit

r/fuckcars Completely agree

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neilm1000@reddit

>Trains are infinitely superior for 90% of journeys This from someone saying that Beeching's numbers were wrong!

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Aggressive_Chuck@reddit

> But cars are shite. Cars are utter trash. Well that's me convinced, all those facts, figures and logic.

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VastSpare920@reddit

The decision to use the car as THE mode of transport has almost hit it's limit, I don't really see how you can think otherwise - the road network takes a massive and constant investment and is still utterly failing - if you've ever driven on a road outside a city before.

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GeoFogg@reddit

Marples is not vilified in this nearly enough, Massive corruption and irrevocable destruction of the rail network, all nicely pinned on Beeching (who I am not trying to absolve)

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Splodge89@reddit

Exactly this. The data was collected over a single week, and minor stations only had someone there with a clipboard for an hour or two. It completely missed lines which were busy at certain times and quiet at others, and missed which towns had basically the railways as their only outside connection, even if they were quiet. My ex’s mum lived in such a town way back when. They lost their station yet the line stayed open. The town died on its arse as it was minor enough to not see any proper road building for a good while too

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Conscious-Ball8373@reddit

Looked at another way, what it would take is some way to make rail much, much cheaper to operate. The main ways that seem to be available to do this are: 1. Automation to reduce the number of humans involved (and therefore the payroll costs). This would mean going to fully-autonomous, driverless trains (strenuously opposed by a union which is still mysteriously strong given how irrelevant trains are to lots of people), digital ticketing (significant progress has been made here in recent times but still too many people not using it) and so on. 2. Improved data collection to do predictive maintenance. If we could collect relevant data to predict where track maintenance is required, this would both reduce the burden of unnecessary fixed-schedule maintenance and reduce the amount of unplanned engineering works required. I don't know whether progress is being made on this. 3. Stop buying bespoke rolling stock and use off-the-shelf units. We waste a tremendous amount of money, eg buying new, bespoke, dual-fuel rolling stock for the GWR line and then never getting around to finishing electrification of the line. We should have finished the electrification work and then bought COTS electric rolling stock or just stuck with COTS diesel rolling stock. £8 billion was spent on rolling stock, IIRC - a noticeable fraction of even the current estimates to complete HS2.

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jordsta95@reddit

1) Would be an extremely hard-fought battle unfortunately. The railways unions are very good at fighting for their workers. And the prospect of days, if not weeks, of rail strikes is enough to cause the government to cave. So when you even float the idea of "removing X% of workers" it's almost a no-go. I agree it's the best course of action. But I highly doubt we'd see driverless trains anytime soon. 2) It's a good shout. It's not going to prevent it entirely, as you'll still have trees blowing onto tracks during storms, lorries driving into rail bridges, etc. But it's better than nothing. 3) Absolutely! A potential 4th option to make it cheaper overall. Change ALL rail fares to a single "pay per mile" system. No advanced tickets. No off-peak. Nothing. All rail fares, across the entire country, you pay for your ticket from station A to B and it be the same price. Simplify the entire booking system, and have all money go directly to GB Rail (or whatever it's called), rather than having Trainline or other services be "required" to get a cheap ticket. First class will be the standard price multiplied by whatever they think it's worth. And for concerns about their not being enough seats. Add another carriage if demand seems to outpace the number of seats. (Anecdotal, I know) Pretty much every train ride I've been on in the past year realistically needed 1 more carriage added, due to how many people were standing. But it seems like train companies are reluctant to do that. And allow people to book seats (maybe for an extra surcharge, I dunno) so if they know they are going to be on a train on a certain date, they can ensure they'll have room on it. Yes, this will probably make certain routes more expensive, but it should make most routes cheaper. If we say it should cost 25p per mile (plucked out of thin air, I don't know what would be a good number) of track the journey uses, short-trips for one or two stations across the line may end up costing less than £1. But you'll see journeys between big cities drastically reduce their cost. Manchester to London, when I was looking at prices the other day, would have cost about £100. But at 25p per mile it would drop to less than £75. A massive saving. Still a big sum, but not enough to put as many people off actually taking such a journey.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

the whole point of off peak is to shift demand to avoid overcrowding.

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VladamirK@reddit

I'm all for simplifying the ticketing system but a flat per mile fee would likely lead to more of the costs being pushed to the poorest / most dependent users. People in London would pay essentially nothing while rural services cost a bomb. Distance doesn't translate linearly to the cost of running that service in the first place. It would however to get rid of peak/off peak pricing and rail cards as I see it. Rail journeys are inelastic services, so you shouldn't be punished for taking the train to get to work as opposed to going to the beach on the weekend. The upside of this too would be able to roll out tap to pay nationwide far more effectively.

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jordsta95@reddit

I definitely agree with the general sentiment, and this would only really work as a system for national rail. So metro systems such as the Tube, tram systems, etc. would still be priced however they like.

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Conscious-Ball8373@reddit

I like the ticketing idea, but I'm not sure it would actually reduce prices. A lot of local trains are much nearer £1 per mile - as a random sample near me, Keynsham to Bath Spa is £6.10 for a peak-time ticket for a journey of just under seven miles. Apply that to your London-Manchester run and you're looking at more like £180 (by the way, I think you made a miles/km error - London to Manchester is 186 miles, which would be \~£45 at 25p per mile; it is almost exactly 300km though). Some sort of balance would have to be found where ticket revenue roughly equals what it is currently and I'm not sure where exactly that would be. And does it actually reduce the input costs much?

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jordsta95@reddit

If you removed the ability for dynamic pricing, as seats get purchased, you are removing the need to maintain the systems which do that pricing, the need to update them, pay for the servers they use, etc. I don't know exactly how much that bit alone would save, probably not much. But changing the pricing itself would be massive for some regions, and should increase general revenue from trains (so "saves money" moreso by increasing income than reducing expenditure) For example, I recently moved away from Mansfield and the train between Mansfield Woodhouse and Mansfield (next stop over) is a 5 minute train ride (2.5 mile) and costs £2.60. About a third of the £6.20 ticket from Mansfield to Nottingham; a 40 minute (15 mile) ride... And the train from Mansfield Woodhouse goes all the way to Nottingham, so it's not even a case of it being different train companies charging different prices. And the train from Mansfield Woodhouse to Nottingham costs £6.30 - So where does the additional £2.50 come from? The distance itself is more suited to a bus, sure. But if you live near a train station, you may as well use it - especially when the nearest bus stop is a further walk (and the bus is about the same price and takes twice as long) Obviously, the pricing would essentially need to work out the same, or similar, to begin with for some of the longest routes in the country/on the most used lines. But as long as the longest routes aren't seeing a massive increase (maybe a few £ overall), the shorter lines benefit, and people would be more inclined to use the train for shorter journeys. And if more people are using the train for journeys one or two towns over, rather than the car. That's more money being pumped into the system, and the cost of tickets should be able to be reduced (or not increase as much each year).

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SeventySealsInASuit@reddit

Rail is already signficantly cheaper than road its just that they are charged very differently. If roads were paid via toll the public would likely have very different opinions on what is worth funding.

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Conscious-Ball8373@reddit

I don't think this is true. The DfT's total budget is \~£40 billion, of which about two-thirds is spent on rail (TBF HS2 is a fair chunk of that, but it's beside the point). So the upper limit for what we spend on roads is £13 billion. The UK collects £25 billion in fuel excise duty. So in reality motorists already pay about double what maintaining the road network costs. It doesn't seem to deter them.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

most of the repair cost is by hgvs who don't pay the full cost. rail is better at carrying heavy shit. if that cost had to be borne and it woukd be passed on to the consumer rail cargo would be more appealing. Once you have the rails it's easier to run passenger on them.

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SeventySealsInASuit@reddit

DFT maintains <1% of the total length of the road network.

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Conscious-Ball8373@reddit

... But provides most of the funding to those who do.

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Prefect_99@reddit

Quite a few roads already are toll roads that the government pay for centrally. PFI scams.

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Karn1v3rus@reddit

Also the entire argument of 'its expensive, we can't afford it' completely misses the power of public spending, and what it does. None of that money is wasted. It all goes into the economy.

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

There's that light rail tram thing that's supposed to be a lot cheaper vehicles but the cost of the rail is still too high

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neilm1000@reddit

> Stop buying bespoke rolling stock and use off-the-shelf units. We waste a tremendous amount of money, eg buying new, bespoke, dual-fuel rolling stock for the GWR line and then never getting around to finishing electrification of the line. We should have finished the electrification work and then bought COTS electric rolling stock or just stuck with COTS diesel rolling stock. £8 billion was spent on rolling stock, IIRC - a noticeable fraction of even the current estimates to complete HS2. And stop being done by the DfT, allow actual railway people to buy what they need.

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xander012@reddit

Will just point out the GWR IETs are literally off the shelf trains. They're just also shit

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Life-Adhesiveness713@reddit

How many policy choices over the last 75 years have been made to facilitate a consumer economy as opposed to a sustainable one?

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WhalingSmithers00@reddit

And the bus. Trains are great but there's a time and a place for just sending a bus

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HarB_Games@reddit

https://preview.redd.it/4efem6tgp5vg1.jpeg?width=659&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eeff59b8ec78bdccb061edb2eac9cb82a19fc6c0

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Greedy-Mechanic-4932@reddit

* A shitload of money. * Relaxed planning laws to permit easier building of rail corridors. * A shift away from road usage. * Fewer 'operators'. It'll never go back to "what it was" - the old routes have been built over, or converted to footpaths. There's also the fact each line served a purpose - moving goods from source to processing to market, and moving people to where they needed or wanted to be. Neither are particularly cost-effective any more.

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dead_jester@reddit

The “fewer operators” bit is already set to be a reality by 2027. There will only be one operator, the government

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clutchnorris123@reddit

Don't expect your tickets to go down in price though. ScotRail has been under the Scottish government for years and the prices have only went up

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dead_jester@reddit

Prices almost never go down. The cost of living and production of goods only goes up. But at least I won’t be paying shareholders and fat cat board members to not improve my service.

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clutchnorris123@reddit

You'll just be paying the government to also not improve the service it makes no difference to me unless the government actually improves the service.

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RFLC1996@reddit

The difference is we can hold the government to the promises they make, we can't complain to a capitalist that theyre being a capitalist. If the government mismanages them, we the people can complain.

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Teembeau@reddit

Which means waiting up to 5 years to change it. And if transport is one part of people's opinions, it might still be garbage. With a capitalist, you can stop using something which immediately causes them pain. If they are in competition with others, they have to work harder to deliver. This is why coach companies are making almost no profit at the moment. Flix and National Express are both offering a great value service, working hard to take each other's business.

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5im0n5ay5@reddit

"With a capitalist, you can stop using something which immediately causes them pain." How are you going to do that with rail? There's no competition and in any case they don't keep most of the revenue from tickets - it's goes to the govt, who pay the rail companies to run the service (whether it's good or bad).

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Teembeau@reddit

What do you mean there's no competition? Ever heard of National Express, liftshare, hiring a car?

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5im0n5ay5@reddit

That means nothing to rail companies and will make zero difference to their service.

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5im0n5ay5@reddit

You're already paying the govt. The govt pays the rail companies to run the service and then they get most of the ticket revenue back. So there aren't many incentives for the rail companies to actually improve their services besides the risk of renationalisation.

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dead_jester@reddit

It’s a fact that English franchises that were taken back into government administration have performed better than those same franchises when privately run. More of the money goes into reinvestment programs for the network

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clutchnorris123@reddit

Got any sources on that?

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Fudge_is_1337@reddit

Aside from the sources provided by the other guy, I'll just anecdotally add as someone who uses the ECML a lot, mostly LNER, I regularly have train-using people who are very very surprised at how easy that line between Newcastle and London is. Reliability is good, speed is excellent, price compared to some other routes is pretty decent. It's not all nationalisation, but it's one of the better services in the country and some of the horror stories I hear from people about their regular hardships with other routes just don't apply

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clutchnorris123@reddit

I agree lner is good and cheap compared to other services I guess the Scottish government isn't as good at running rail services as Westminster and I never thought I'd say that.

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dead_jester@reddit

[https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/lner-east-coast-main-line-britain-labour-newcastle-b1235095.html](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/lner-east-coast-main-line-britain-labour-newcastle-b1235095.html) Its not the same for all, as a Northern Rail and a couple of others have been a mixed bag, but starting to improve. Also there's a few where it's way too soon to call it as they have only just changed hands

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5im0n5ay5@reddit

Technically speaking you're not paying them for the service even now. The govt simply gives the money to run the service and then receives the vast majority of ticket revenue back. So when there are strikes it makes no difference to the rail companies' immediate finances. Probably the worst model of privatisation I can think of.

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FPS_Scotland@reddit

Untrue. They removed peak fares a few months ago. That's a very real example of prices going down for commuters.

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Aggressive_Chuck@reddit

Reddit's going to lose their shit when this doesn't actually improve anything.

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dead_jester@reddit

I’ll reserve judgement. Some have improved but not all. Thing is, by being answerable to the public there’s more chance of getting what passengers want, rather than improved the money going into more and larger dividends for shareholders

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Impossible_Theme_148@reddit

You mean like when it was British Rail when they didn't provide much service at all - because they knew the government was paying them no matter what? Or like when it was privatised when the contracts laid out how much the franchisees had to improve the rolling stock and how many trains they had to run and what services they had to provide? There's a reason why rail passenger numbers exploded after privatisation - it was because rail travel massively improved

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Greedy-Mechanic-4932@reddit

Hmm. A little disingenuous. Numbers in 1980 were the lowest they'd been in a century. Numbers peaked in 2019, but took 15 years post-privatisation to pass the previous highs in *checks notes* 1911. Given the growth of the country, it's hardly surprising that passenger numbers are increasing. I will agree that the performance under British Rail was, generally, poor - but it's widely acknowledged many TOCs have begun to fail more recently.

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Impossible_Theme_148@reddit

All you've written is that rail travel declined once car ownership increased Until rail was privatised And rail growth grew much faster than the population did eg from 1990 to 2010 (pre to post privatisation) Rail growth was approximately 65% But population growth was only 10% Rail usage plateaud but that just suggests that there was always this bottled up demand but people were choosing not to use the rail - until the rail got improved And yes,.the rail franchise agreements were written in a way that guaranteed improvement but didn't guarantee maintenance of that improvement The main problem is that because so many more people are using the rail - it becomes harder to keep up the standards they had immediate post privatisation It just seems really weird when people state that the State running it will fix all those problems - when it never did so in the past

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Greedy-Mechanic-4932@reddit

I know. I was answering the question though, as to what is needed. The rest is still needed...

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dead_jester@reddit

Yup. Just pointing out that it’s a redundant point, but as you say you know my point is also redundant

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t8ne@reddit

Interestingly the largest growth of capacity was when it was many operators; it shrank under government control, mostly because a nationalised system has to fight for spending against other things like health, education and defence. Hence mr beeching’s cuts…

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notouttolunch@reddit

Sort of. That and the government prioritised building the M1 as it's transport solution which made sense in the era of steam.

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SeventySealsInASuit@reddit

It's significantly more cost effective to move people and goods by rail than on the roads. The advantage of roads is convenience and the fact that different vehicles can take wildly different routes. When it comes to moving things from A to B its not even comparable.

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boringPedals@reddit

>There's also the fact each line served a purpose - moving goods from source to processing to market, and moving people to where they needed or wanted to be. Neither are particularly cost-effective any more. Yes, a lot of the old lines in south Wales would run coal from pits to the docks. Obviously the pits aren't there anymore. In some cases the like Briton Ferry the docks aren't there either. There would have been some passenger services on these lines but they were basically an added bonus on a line that was already there to move coal. Without the freight they aren't profitable. These towns and villages were essentially left to stagnate after the pits closed so it's not like there's even been large population growth in the valleys that could take advantage of a new line. And that's before you even get into the large sections of track that you won't get back because they're now so far disappeared under housing the only way you'd ever know a railway line was there in the first place is from a history book

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Sammeeeeeee@reddit

- getting rid of a million houses

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brushfuse@reddit

It should be fit for now, not fit for 160 odd years ago during a speculation craze. Some of those places that were served by halts are basically abandoned, and others have grown massively and require a station for sure. I think new battery trains with automation is the best way to reach these places rather than a full reopening of the old Linea. Branch lines should be simple affordable feeder services to the main railway.

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5im0n5ay5@reddit

I like the idea of automated battery trains feeding main stations. Is that something that has been done anywhere?

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brushfuse@reddit

It has been done separately, but not on the same branch line. It’s only a matter of time.

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Neat_Impression2338@reddit

Government taxing petrol and diesel to oblivion.

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Dependent-Log877@reddit

Would be mega expensive & take decades to get off the drawing board. Lots of those lines will now have been repurposed for leisure use like the Tarka Trail in North Devon or redeveloped in other ways & a lot of the station buildings have been sold for residential use. I seem to recall Ted Bowen, of Dusty Bin fame, bought & lived in such a building.

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WinHour4300@reddit

A lot of money, time and effort including ongoing running costs. It's make more sense to have targeted trams in i.e. Leeds, certain lines back and build new towns and cities with new connections.

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Unlikely-Squirrel832@reddit

The Oxford to Cambridge line was always going to be difficult to bring back. Currently the completed section between Oxford and Milton Keynes has yet to start passenger services as there is an impasse between Chiltern Railways and the RMT Union over staffing levels. It's a bit of a joke really, all that money spent and Government have yet to intervene to get the line opened for passenger services. The safety tests were passed so the line should have opened to passenger services in December 2025. Currently it's just rail freight using the line. Though I hope the rest of the Oxford to Cambridge line goes more smoothly than the Oxford Station/Botley Road part of it. The rail bridge replacement on the Botley road in Oxford has taken far longer than Network Rail planned. Hopefully Network Rail do manage to reopen the Botley Road at the end of August. This explains the project woes in more detail -https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/delivering-the-delayed-oxford-station-bridge-replacement-before-and-during-the-8-day-blockade-26-02-2026/ I think what's needed for the railways is to improve the existing infrastructure and rebuilding lines that make sense economically (Oxford to Cambridge line being an example, lessons can be learned from it) and fits within the wider public transport network. Rebuilding what we had before isn't going to happen for a number of very good reasons. If we invested the same kind of money as we do in London across the transport network in the UK? We'd be in a far better place.

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WinHour4300@reddit

I'm afraid we don't invest nearly enough in transport in London either for long term economics growth. That's a typical 'divide and conquer' strategy that gets thrown about. The government has agreed to one DLR extension East but it being paid for by above inflation fare rises. A lot of rail services have been cut back and areas are poorly connected. The housing crisis in London is severe and we need to unlock more land - it could be done with a mayor development corporation which is a better way of funding or partially funding transport. All majors have them it was how Milton Keynes was built. Basically they have powers to compulsorily purchase land, design a plan, sell it off with planning permission and use the profits for infrastructure including new transport links. It can even turn a profit. I think some new towns would be sensible, if anything delivery could be quicker than trying to bring back old lines as you find a load of fields. Somewhere near Manchester, Leeds etc. But I digress...

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win_some_lose_most1y@reddit

Socialism

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Flimsy_Law_1410@reddit

That Welsh HS2 money could have made massive improvements for Wales if it wasn’t sent to England

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Rab_Legend@reddit

A lot of compulsory purchase orders of very shite new build houses

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VickiActually@reddit

Wholesale removal of the motorways

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scottishcurrysauce@reddit

Hm, well one line that I definitely think should get restored (and probably will at some point) is the Buchan line from Aberdeen to Peterhead/Fraserbrough. Big population in that area, larger than on the reopened borders line! So it's definitely a no brainer and a great candidate for reopening!

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IainMCool@reddit

Political will and an enormous amount of money.

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ClasswarNOTProfitwar@reddit

maybe investing in infrastructure and NORT war!!!

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Captain_JY@reddit

Money

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GenericUser104@reddit

A nuke

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Siliconshaman1337@reddit

At this point? Probably an act of god...

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MayiruPudungi@reddit

We need to first focus on electrification and building city and commuter belt transit. With only 30% of electrified tracks we are at the mercy of the global oil market to run trains. We can adopt the Karlsruhe tram-train systems (trains outside of urban areas, trams within urban areas) for a lot of our urban agglomerations.

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juicy_steve@reddit

Fuck loads of money and a fleet of bulldozers.

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mittfh@reddit

A time machine. A lot of abandoned lines have subsequently had large parts developed and the stations obliterated, while others have had roads built along parts of their alignment; so restoring them would be virtually impossible.

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EUskeptik@reddit

A fit of madness? Today, we think mostly of passenger rail services but the fact is most of Britain’s railways were built to carry freight which today is handled far more efficiently by road. Many rural lines were built for political reasons and never covered their costs. Reinstating these lines would be a ridiculous proposition. There are a small number of routes closed after the Beeching Report that could be reinstated but all would require taxpayers’ money for reconstruction and long term subsidies for operation. There is no political appetite for squandering taxpayers’ money on rail reopenings when it could be better spent elsewhere, such as on flood and coastal defences which yield benefits typically eight times their costs, or more. -oo-

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

a large reason the roads are more efficient is because the lines were built to heavy standards and tge road freight is ridiculously light. a lorry is what 7.5 tons loaded. a ra 1 light rail could easily handle that abd would be a lot cheaper than what we have now. it's the locomotives that put the most demand on weight wise nowadays.

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dbxp@reddit

Trucks in the UK max out at 44 tons

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

Still trivial. Rail allows for that kind of margin of error. 44 tons over four axles (common enough in wagons) is well below the 16 tons per axle limit

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EUskeptik@reddit

*FIVE TIMES* what the person said. Is it any wonder that rail enthusiasts get it so wrong so regularly and so comprehensively? -oo-

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Effective_Will_1801@reddit

Still trivial. Rail allows for that kind of margin of error. 44 tons over four axles (common enough in wagons) is well below the 16 tons per axle limit.

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Im-So-Me@reddit

Actually doing it rather than spending money talking about doing it

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skrew86@reddit

More people using trains.

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PeanutOnRampage@reddit

Money and will and users

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Frustib@reddit

You’d have to knock down a lot of houses and buildings and roads to make it what it was.

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Massive-Machine4049@reddit

A lot of money, PWC, Accenture, Cap Gemini consultants and PM's kept well away.

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quellflynn@reddit

if all the disused lines around me in rural mendips were active, then thousands of people would commute to bath, bristol, yeovil, trowbridge all without using cars. i know some of the routes didn't make sense, and it seems weirdly odd that a village of 60 houses would have a train station... but with the prices of houses in the cities, these villages would have the potential to be reasonably sized, reasonably priced towns. seems a damn shame that the infrastructure was put in place, and dissolved in such a short space of time!

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SWM50@reddit

£ Trillions

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Muted_Promotion_5488@reddit

More money than the government allows to be dodged in tax by billionaires and big corporations

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Keatingslow@reddit

You would have to massively reduce the communities power to object and reduce the over regulation to make construction viable. The “not in my backyard” groups have too many ways to block construction

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SpudAlmighty@reddit

It's amazing how much of a disconnected mess the cuts made the NE of Scotland. Doesn't look like much on a map but it disconnected so many villages.

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veryordinarybloke@reddit

Unbuild a million houses?

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repair-it@reddit

Yes, imagine the NIMBYs who wouldn't want a train line at the end of their property. Just look at the planning problems around the Oxford to Cambridge line.

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AsleepEbb7578@reddit

I say fuck it and legislation gets passed so that major infrastructure projects are way harder to stamp down. It's crazy that a handful of houses can stamp down a project that benefits millions of people.

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Bernardmark@reddit

China has its problems, but this is the kind of thing their authoritarian system is good at.

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VillageHorse@reddit

They literally knock down your building to build other stuff. It’s like nice flat you have there, shame if someone randomly knocked it down one day to build a new airport.

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flightguy07@reddit

The line should be simple: there's a really high (and obvious, so it doesn't get caught up in tribunals all the time) bar for what is a legitimate grievance, and the government has the power to compulsory purchase any home or business necessary for a critical infrastructure project at 50% over its fair market value if that bar is met. Otherwise, shit happens. A home is an investment, and the value of your investment can go up or down. Don't like it, move.

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FormulaSolution@reddit

or put them somewhere else

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Besmirching_Badger@reddit

Hs2 has taught us that if a train goes near houses then it needs to be put in a tunnel (with due consideration given to the bats of course)

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TheHornyGoth@reddit

Only if they’re wealthy or old voters. If it’s a council estate they can get fucked, apparently

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Highlandertr3@reddit

Money and reformation of our systems for civic constructions. It costs us twice as much per mile to build anything.

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TrigWaker@reddit

Destruction of houses, reconstruction of bridges and viaducts.. sadly given the current situation in which we let billions get added to quotes because of paperwork and corruption it could never happen

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Efficient_Cod1348@reddit

A fucking miracle

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ghoarder@reddit

What's needed? Demand most likely.

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BigCol57@reddit

Investment simples.

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dbxp@reddit

Restore to what exactly? Reversing the beeching cuts wouldn't necessarily help as a lot of those lines were built to supply heavy industry which no longer exists. Even reopening stations on existing lines may cause issues as faster trains can be blocked by slower ones and the most efficient way to use trains is over long distances with infrequent stops. I actually support closing more of the small stations to increase the capacity between larger towns. On one of the main London <> Manchester lines are Adlington and Prestbury which are tiny stations, they slow down the entire line adding a good few minutes to the overcrowded Macclesfield trains.

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ItsIllak@reddit

Agree with this - there's zero prospect of convincing anyone to use trains instead of cars if they stop every 5mi for every station. And if there are no through-rails, that also kills intercity along those routes. Totally random - but I wonder how long till we have the computer controlled rails with much-much smaller carriages (maybe even only 4-8 people) that are effectively on call in some way? Any station would need a side rail, and a computer is optimising the network. It's the driverless car dream but without most of the complications. Cars just become something you use to get to and from a local rail. Sorry, that was random...

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dbxp@reddit

Trams with virtual tracks already exist: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous\_Rail\_Rapid\_Transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Rail_Rapid_Transit) In Japan they have a thing for these little busses like you're talking about usually to local residents happy when building a larger transport hub.

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ItsIllak@reddit

Yeah, kind of a middle ground between tram and rail and probably has many advantages over what I'm suggesting too. Though, that's still an autonomous system that depends on humans being nearby. Rail tends to assume no humans have stepped out in front of them and have plenty of physical barriers to avoid it. My solution has obvious issues - any rail crossings would also have to be converted to under/over passes.

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dbxp@reddit

Putting in all the earth works just to handle pods would be ridiculously expensive per passenger carried. You're talking over £10m per mile. Even then if the line looks like it is barely used then people will likely walk along it

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_real_ooliver_@reddit

And what if we could connect these "pods" so to say into a consist, a train if you will.

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ItsIllak@reddit

But why? We've all been in trains where there are 2 or 3 other people, but we've had to wait an hour because it's off-peak. What if there were trains that came within a few minutes and took the few people who needed to go somewhere? Sure, if two pods were travelling to/from the same places, they could join up for efficiency, and larger and smaller pods could co-exist, but as I say, it's a driverless car system with far fewer complications.

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indignancy@reddit

One of the things that makes operating trains complicated and expensive is the limited opportunities for them to overtake and resulting difficulty of making sure they don’t crash into each other or get stuck behind slower services. Operating lots of smaller trains makes that exponentially more complicated.

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ItsIllak@reddit

Honestly, and hate to say it, only because, "unions". This is a case where automation would be safer and open an opportunity to massively increase capacity, just vested interests that would make that very difficult to achieve.

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Garfie489@reddit

"Agree with this - there's zero prospect of convincing anyone to use trains instead of cars if they stop every 5mi for every station." Problem is, that is where local routes can be extremely beneficial. My local train line connects two major stations in my borough, with an intermediate station in between that is sort of near a town center (but inconvenient). There are two major school concentrations the line passes through, but doesnt stop at - and stations there would be heavily served for that reason alone if it were light rail. This is kind of the problem, its not that every line needs to be a through route - the line near me physically cant be. Its that we need the right type of rail for the right type of area they serve. One of the massive benefits of more local mayors will hopefully be more local metro routes in city suburbs. Again, look at how much increase in ridership the London Overground lines had at relatively little cost by simply making it a better service.

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ItsIllak@reddit

But, having a dedicated line that's used 190 days a year for an hour in the morning and hour in the afternoon is clearly a huge inefficiency...? It might even be cheaper just to invest properly in schools so that people want to go to the most local one that more of them can walk to! Not that I don't get or agree with your point, but I suppose I'm just musing that nothing's perfect - really it's a combination of fixes that'll improve our lot.

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Garfie489@reddit

Thing to note is i am not suggesting the line would only be suitable for a school run. But rather it is a clear example where the capacity of a train is highly beneficial, given multiple buses in the area are already full when they pass certain schools to the point the schools have staggered start/end times. Schools can actually be highly beneficial to a line - the RHDR is apparently locally significant for schools - and even buses in London are regularly empty at certain times of the day. After all, its rare you find hundreds of people without the ability to drive all needing to find their way somewhere at the same time. One of the schools i mention is actually a College - you cant have too many of them really given the restricted age group. In my case - that train exists and is currently running. Making it light rail would allow extra capacity and more stops to better serve the area. Making it light rail would still connect the major stations at either end equally well, and the increased frequency would more than make up for the currently half hourly running on the single track line. If it were every 10 minutes, id actually use it - i dont currently.

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MrKiplingIsMid@reddit

You need massive footprints for all the infrastructure - loops, storage tracks, etc - for this to work with multiple vehicles. Closest you’ll get is the Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit system in West Virginia. Additionally, issues with perceptions of personal safety, especially late at night or amongst demographics like women, the disabled, etc. Advantage of a conventional railway is that a two platform station can have an exceptionally small footprint.

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ItsIllak@reddit

Yeah, and rail crossings start having to be permanent fixtures rather than lights. Certainly not perfect, but nor is a system that serves a peak of huge numbers of people commuting in morning/afternoon and mostly sits idle the rest of the day (doubly so because it's such an infrequent and inconvenient service to use, self fuelling disadvantages!)

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TreadheadS@reddit

need to add more passing points!

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DareDemon666@reddit

The industrial revolution happening for the first time, again... Seriously though, 99% of the railway at it's height was a product of previously unforseen levels and speed of expansion, and ruthless competition between companies. Many of these routes are largely redundant under a single operator, but they were of course built by different companies who were competing for the same resources and people. Another factor is how lucrative a profitable railway could be. Building a new railway was a bit like stepping up to the roulette table and putting your life savings on red. The odds of it coming up aren't bad, but aren't good either - but the winnings are pretty good if it does work out. Many railways failed, but many succeeded, and those that did often bought out the failing railways. The GWR is a good example of this, as it was in it's heyday a veritable giant and practically untouchable. A great many independent firms in the area were practically subsidiary companies with how dominant the GWR was in the area - when it came time for the railways to be rolled up into 4 main operators (the others being LMS, LNER, and Southern) GWR was the only one that was pre-existing, the other 3 being basically created out of thin air by bundling lots of smaller companies together. The reality is that there is not nearly enough demand in most places for all the sprawling branchlines that once existed. They wouldn't just run at a loss, they'd haemorrhage money like nobody's business. There are of course a number of ex rail links that might well be used a lot, but again the problem is profit - it costs an awful lot of money to build a railway these days. I mean, HS2 isn't exactly a shining example of government effeciency, but it's also not good old fashioned Victorian engineering, using thousands of navvies (killing a few in the process) and paying bugger all out in wages. Not to mention the sheer lack of paperwork they had to deal with compared to today. No greater crested newt ever came between a stovepipe hat and the wearer's intent to build a 5,000' long viaduct! Rail will never be what it once was. Arguably that isn't a bad thing. The bad thing is just how far from that height it has fallen, and how low it is likely to remain

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AskingBoatsToSwim@reddit

Billions of pounds

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Charming-Awareness79@reddit

You don't want to restore all of it. The railways were planned and built by competing private companies - that meant you ended up with a lot of duplication of routes - see the lines in Kent for a modern example of what this looked like across many areas of the country. You'd never build railways like that today, even with the most pro-railway government imaginable and an unlimited budget. That said, the Beeching axe was an overreaction to a bloated network. It was thought up at a time when it was assumed that mass car ownership and the car would be the default option for most travel scenarios. We could really have done with a lot of lines still being in existence today. To restore lines that it would make sense to restore would take a lot of money and will from the government, and sadly neither are there at the moment.

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smutanssmutans@reddit

The lines should’ve been mothballed, not ripped up, knocked down and built over.

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JChristSocialist@reddit

Decrease ticket prices and improve existing infrastructure, I’m not bothered about getting a train to Immingham.

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KDf12002@reddit

A goverment thats not riddled with corruption and bribes

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eufemiapiccio77@reddit

Non corrupt politicians

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SheepherderOld3638@reddit

Shite maps

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unabridged-version1@reddit

Too much i'm afraid. If you want a short answer.

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MerchantofDoom@reddit

They removed the old line between Belfast and Newcastle Co Down decades back, and now they really need it as a direct link! Too late as there are now houses where the tracks went, so busy windy roads are the only option. Stupids!

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kipribley28@reddit

Competent politicians.

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LouisDewray@reddit

One solution would be to make driving tests much more difficult, so that only one person on average in a large group of friends had one. The roads would be safer, and use of public transport would increase, which help being down ticket prices and fund more lines/trains

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thecowsbollocks@reddit

Money. Shit loads of it. About 2 years and a lot of inconvenience to the town and business. I've seen this in action as a station was built and reopened.

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chef_26@reddit

At least some steel

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123R_B321@reddit

Investment and the relisation that a train serves is a service not a profit making industry

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Dolgar01@reddit

Lots of money and a willingness to create unwanted, unnecessary and ultimately unused train lines. If they were worth keeping, they would gave been kept.

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bondinchas@reddit

Very difficult to restore now, as many ex-railway lines are now part of the national cycle network, bridges have been removed, or were never originally built to modern specification, tunnels closed and deteriorated beyond repair, and in many places the old lines have been built over. It would be prohibitively expensive to restore much of it.

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StanleySmith888@reddit

**fewer cars** (1963 to 1984 saw a huge rise in car ownership)

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FewAnybody2739@reddit

Building homes along where the lines used to be. It'd take a critical mass to build/reopen a station, but it is slowly happening.

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Great_Gabel@reddit

Lots of the railways were built to serve industries that no longer exist, sure reopening the Great Central Railway for its entirety makes the most sense, likewise with reopening Woodhead. But some of the lines could not be justified anymore

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Horizon2k@reddit

Probably hundreds of billions. Not to mention ripping up a number of roads / houses / infrastructure/ cycle routes that have since been built on the alignment. You’d have to get LOADS of political will locally and nationally. And not to mention, although Beeching (and subsequent reviews) did close too many routes, some were economic basket cases that wouldn’t make sense to restore, even today. So ultimately it would take a hell of a lot, and the chance of it happening? Zero.

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GliderDan@reddit

You’ve left out NI

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BourbonSn4ke@reddit

About the same or less than hs2

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Evo_ukcar@reddit

China.

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Sobieskil@reddit

More than any government would give, and for some of those lines it's not entirely bad

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SubnauticaFan3@reddit

we used to be a proper country

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EnquirerBill@reddit

Re-Nationalisation

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Teembeau@reddit

Why would you want to? These were low demand services where a bus is more suitable. Cheaper, greener. Roughly half of all UK train lines lose money. Go on a rural train in the middle of the day and they're 10-20% utilised. At that level, it's cheaper and more environmentally friendly to put passengers in taxis. They re-opened the Dartmoor line, spent £45m on it and it gets about 30 passengers per train. Turns out, the people who shut it down were right.

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Skanedog@reddit

Enough passengers wanting to travel the routes.

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dazza12@reddit

I would love to have a lot of the lines restored. But, it's just not practical. I live in Yeovil. At one point we had 5 railway stations. We had a line to Taunton, the next large town from us. 3 of those stations, plus the associated lines are now gone. In the place of the Yeovil to Taunton line is a heavily used A road (A3088) and several businesses that didn't exist 60 years ago. There's just no way of restoring this. I feel restoring some kind of connection is likely the way to move forward. For instance, a Western connection from the Heart of Wessex line to the Reading to Taunton line would be a cheap way of achieving this connection. I feel we can achieve some of the connections that were lost, albeit by different ways. However it will require GBR to be invested in and run well. Sadly I believe GBR will just be BR mark 2, with the lack of investment to match.

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lost-in-midgard@reddit

A time machine. There is literally no need in 2026.

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Prefect_99@reddit

Lots of money.

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I_eat_apple_stickers@reddit

No one owning cars anymore.

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Kitchen-Customer4370@reddit

I was one who was really hoping to get a lot more local stations. Ours town only has one and it's only a good option for people who can walk there within 10 minutes which isn't a lot at all. A lot of traffic to get through town too. Other nearby towns our size have 2/3. Ever since i learnt how to use the escooter, i still want more stations but less than before, and more lines than lots of stations. Trains are, like stated, great for intercity rather than too many local stops. Trams would be good for travel in towns / small cities. There needs to be better connection to rail stations by bike / bus rather than more train stations. The reason i considered the scooter in the first place was because i'd have to take 2 buses just to get to the rail station (changing at the town bus station) even though the bus and rail station are 3 minutes away by bus.

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Ldero97@reddit

I'm so tired of the Beeching killed the railways rhetoric. You can always build infrastructure, if there's the will to. If the UK wants to be serious, it needs to create S-Bahn-like systems in major cities (that aren't London). Commuter rail services in Britain are absolutely atrocious outside of London and Glasgow. That should be rectified over re-opening failed lines nobody used.

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stonesco@reddit

Correct. The fact you have to go into the central part of London for a lot of rail lines and then come back out of it again to get to some places in the country is ridiculous. The things is, your idea relies on politicians to move a lot of things away from London, unfortunately there isn’t much political will to do so.

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Ldero97@reddit

I'm all too aware of that unfortunately. It's not just a UK problem, it's a problem baked into most non-Federal countries. I thankfully only have to contend with this a few times a year now.

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ViperishCarrot@reddit

What would it take to restore the railways? Idiocy, to be frank. The railways we currently have are so badly run that anything more would cause absolute chaos. Not to mention no one would use them because it’s prohibitively expensive, because share holders.

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Razorwireboxers@reddit

The problem with trying to reopen a lot of the railways that were closed in 1960s is that by then they just weren't in the right places for passenger transport. They were built mainly for transporting industrial materials and a lot of those industries are gone or better served by road transport. For example in our rural county the railways were built to transport agricultural produce out, and things like coal in. So the old railway routes tend to meander through the countryside rather than go directly between population centres. So not really any good for passenger traffic, and also no longer any good for agricultural use. Because generally It's much easier to load up an articulated lorry on a farm with produce and drive it directly to a processing centre in hours, than load up a truck, take it to a station, unload it, put in train wagons, take it to another station, unload it, load it onto another lorry, and then drive it to a processing centre, which might take days. So despite the wonderful dreams of the local rail enthusiasts there is no way most of our defunct local rail routes will ever come back as economically viable propositions. Though there is at least one route local to us that probably would be suitable for reopening because it runs between a quite high population area and a main line, without having been much built over. Where the capital investment would come from to do it is, as always, probably the problem.

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Smooth_Imagination@reddit

Almost no places that had industry did not have towns that still could benefit from having services reopened.

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Razorwireboxers@reddit

Passenger traffic has to be high for railways to be ecomically viable. Just because towns might benefit isn't enough if fares won't cover the cost of building a railway and then maintaining rolling stock and track.

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AsleepEbb7578@reddit

A big mistake of the Beeching cuts was assuming that people would drive to a major rail station and take the train from there. If you're having to drive into a city anyway to get to the train, why not drive the whole way? It isn't helped by the existence of motorways and dual carriageways. I think he also put way too much focus on trunk lines which are great but the lack of ability to divert trains means whenever essential works have to be carried out a good part of the country gets delayed on their journeys which must hurt the economy quite a bit. To get a lot of these lines restored, you'd have to have a lot of money and political will. Unfortunately, our planning system encourages extensive bureaucracy. Every single piece of rail needs to be assessed so some moles don't get disturbed and everyone takes a cheque. Pair that with NIMBYs that seem to spend their time compofacing to the media and filing sham court cases and even something as simple as the Burscough Curves is predicted to be roughly £30M for what is less than a quarter of a mile of track. It unfortunately makes the cost to benefit ratio not worth it where under different planning regimes it may have been worth it. Another mistake is that the land was sold after the lines were closed. One of the good things that America has done is retained ownership of the land that disused lines are on in most cases.

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BlueOXMotel@reddit

What we should do is spend billions on a route that already exists to get us there 30 minutes faster......

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Evening-Tomatillo-47@reddit

A miracle

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BaseballParking9182@reddit

Most of those closed lines and stops will be for industry that is no longer there.

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Responsible_Coat_477@reddit

The rail industry shrank globally because cars and lorries began to carry the people and goods that trains previously used to transport. To reverse that trend is impossible. The coal industry that was primarily responsible for their expansion no longer exists. Hard to see any investment being worth it.

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Tribalgeoff@reddit

A Time machine and a minister for transport born in1812.

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Take_that_risk@reddit

It's not worth doing. I love trains but it's really not worth doing. Certain railways should be built but not the entire network.

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SermoLupiAdAnglos@reddit

Hell to freeze over.

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Codzy@reddit

Few hundred billion £ and 150 years of consultations

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OG-87@reddit

Billionaires to not exist and greed to disappear

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Special-Audience-426@reddit

Here in Cornwall you'd have to compulsory purchase a lot of houses and gardens.

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Throwaway91847817@reddit

You can put a cycle trail next to the railway

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neilm1000@reddit

What would it take? Huge amounts of money, a gigantic training programme, vast amounts of steel and concrete, unlimited time, and a population that both would use them and be prepared to pay large subsidies.

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stonesco@reddit

Money is what it comes to at the end of the day. Another is fixing the bad inconnectivity between rail lines. For example if you live in Sidcup and you want to go East Croydon by train. The fact that you have to go into an area quite close to Central London, change and then take a train headed out of that area close towards East Croydon is confusing. If doing that by travelling via vehicle, it is way easier. Lastly , although this is will probably be very unpopular among the UK Reddit userbase is that in my opinion a lot majority of voters that have influence over our elections in this country are Car centric users. It is easier for a PP to get public approval to say that you are going to building a new motorway / several motorways as part of “regeneration of Britain”. Even alternatively saying you “You will fix all the potholes” and then tack on another major rail improvement. Rather than saying you won’t do anything about the roads and you just want to focus on rail.

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Mr_Reaper__@reddit

Japan created the best railway network in the world by moving all the intercity services onto dedicated new main lines (shin-kan-sen). Which freed up spaced on the existing lines to allow more regional and commuter services.

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usedqueendream@reddit

sounds like a missed opportunity

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Small-Pension-9459@reddit

A will to use it.

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clrthrn@reddit

Nationalisation, political will and a decent % increase in income tax for a short period to cover the hundreds of billions needed to fund it. Fun fact that my dad shared....The minister who asked Beeching to do the report to see what train lines could be cut was a major shareholder in the civil engineering company who got the contracts to build UK motorways. A small conflict of interest and one that meant Beeching set out to justify a plan that was already in place. Whole country got screwed so a bloke called Ernest Marples could have a nice pension.

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libdemparamilitarywi@reddit

Rail infrastructure is already nationalised

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chaotic___energy@reddit

Yeah the infrastructure which requires huge amounts of maintenance, the profit making elements are privately owned....

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TinitusTheRed@reddit

More money that the government and private enterprise are willing to invest, and more money than the average UK train user would be willing to pay out in raised fares. Sadly.

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pillow_princessss@reddit

I would kill to restore the direct line from Sheffield to Manchester, but I don’t think the Victoria Hotel would appreciate losing one of their car parks and having the road outside them become the pick up and drop off space

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GuelderRoseFruit@reddit

Too much but restoring the main lines in Scotland, Wales and the south west must surely make sense.

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His_Mom___@reddit

Hey how about we nationalise it again instead of fully rebuilding? That was good.

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NoiseNecessary4737@reddit

A government that actually worked for the people.

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Emergency_Ad216@reddit

The image is of Britain not the UK.

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AirlineSevere7456@reddit

We both have one of the most expensive and rundown rail networks in Europe. Go on the continent and everything is clean, not overcrowded and dirt cheap. It would take many decades to get even close to that quality. HS2 is very small improvement overall.

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notouttolunch@reddit

On the continent, the service says as bad, it's just as overcrowded on lines that are actually used and it's definitely not cheap! Railways on the mainland of Europe are roughly the same as ours, despite everyone's claims to the contrary. Don't confuse internet anecdotes and your experience as a tourist with actually having to endure these services as a resident of the country. I've done this in two European countries and in both, the service has been very average. This includes Germany which is alleged to have amazing trains!

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Sure-Recognition-262@reddit

One way in which Germany is better is fares for very frequent travellers. A friend of mine's regular commute is Brighton-London. A season ticket for that in Standard Class costs £5,204/year... In Germany, a BahnCard 100 costs €4,899 (£4,255) in 2nd Class. So you pay 18% less and get unlimited free travel in the rest of the country Similarly, I used to do a weekly commute Edinburgh-London. To do so today, at the days/times I used to travel, looking at tickets at the end of the booking horizon, would be £335 return in 1st Class. If it's that price every week and I do it 45 times a year, that's £15,075... in Germany a BahnCard 100 costs €7,999 (£6,962). So you pay 54% less and get unlimited free travel in the rest of the country.

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notouttolunch@reddit

I'd have a couple of responses to this. Firstly, the number of people commuting from Edinburgh to London is going to be low and they are not going to be commuting for cheap jobs. They are going to be people like Gerald Urquhart - working at the highest level of business. Where there is no singular place of work. Secondly, although a lot of people do commute between Brighton and London, as with above, these are only people commuting for specialist or high paid jobs and that is the reason they are working in London in the first place. If you can find better examples of people, perhaps commuting to Birmingham or Bristol, it might be a lot easier to deal with the pricing of a fair, season ticket or regular travel. The UK is a small country and everywhere can be driven. That's not really the case in Germany. But even though Germany is much larger and can make better use of train travel, its network is still not that useful! So most of these considerations are relative anyway.

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Sure-Recognition-262@reddit

>Secondly, although a lot of people do commute between Brighton and London, as with above, these are only people commuting for specialist or high paid jobs I think you're very wide of the mark here. A very high proportion of people working in London have a lengthy commute, it's not just those in specialist or high-paid jobs. Reading for example is primarily a commuter town for London - thousands and thousands of people travelling from there to London every day. A season ticket from there costs even more than a season ticket from Brighton >Firstly, the number of people commuting from Edinburgh to London is going to be low and they are not going to be commuting for cheap jobs. They are going to be people like Gerald Urquhart - working at the highest level of business. Where there is no singular place of work. You're not wrong on it being a fairly small number of people (though I think it'll be more than you'd expect), but I think you're wrong on the typical employees. When I started doing it in 2013, I did so for a salary of £32k. By the time I paid travel (which back then was £110/week in 1st class, with East Coast rewards making every 4th or 5th journey free) and accommodation (two £30 nights each week in a Travelodge/Premier Inn), I broke even compared to my lower salary but lower costs in Edinburgh, and it was a first step towards being able to progress without leaving my existing employer. I can guarantee you I'm not alone in doing something like that!

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notouttolunch@reddit

I don't think it's more than I expect. Using a slightly different metric, only 8% of commuter journeys are made by rail in the UK. Of that 8%, the majority of that is in central London on what is considered the tfl network. In reality, no one is doing this anyway!

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Hame_Impala@reddit

Depends where you go. In southern European countries that aren’t exactly known for their efficient government I’ve been impressed by their trains in comparison to ours in terms of costs and speed. I get there’s a level of bias though insofar as I’ve seen people come to Scotland and really like our trains because they’ve never had to deal with a ScotRail delay.

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DameKumquat@reddit

DB seems to have plummeted in reputation in the last decade, as if maintaining infrastructure became a problem more recently for them due to ours recently building/rebuilding it. Still cheaper than NR, though. I've never had a problem myself, beyond broken lifts and escalators.

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notouttolunch@reddit

I'd best not tell you when I was living in Germany then.

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confuzzledfather@reddit

Sam from Jetlagged can testify to that.

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Impossible_Theme_148@reddit

Germany is alleged to have amazing trains by people who have never used them regularly Everyone I know who has lived in Germany has said it's the worst service they've ever known I believe the high speed network is good in Europe - but that's only a small part of the total

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BroBroly@reddit

A new colony to exploit

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Glittering_Pop7807@reddit

The biggest mistake with closing the lines was not making them into cycle/walking routes.

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JourneyThiefer@reddit

They called the railways here in western Northern Ireland, but didn’t build any motorways to replace them… So since the 60s there’s been no rail and poor road infrastructure here. It’s shite, probably never be improved either

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RepsUpMoneyDown@reddit

Probably not having 500 different operators and bylaws helps

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JourneyThiefer@reddit

We’ve only one operator here in Northern ireland and we’re like decades away (if ever) from getting rail again in western NI

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Feisty_Baseball_6566@reddit

# What would it take to restore the UK's rail network? Removal of the the human reliance of greed, and to take away the profits and restore a "service" for the country yeah, not going to happen

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Kickstart68@reddit

Very very difficult. And also for many lines pointless, as they were not that useful (during railway mania it was not unusual for a competing railway company to build a duplicate route not because they wanted to, but rather to knobble a route their competitors were building) There are certainly lines that shouldn't have closed (I would suggest the Great Central is a prime example), but even these would be difficult to reopen. Taking the Great Central as an example, the route through the south of Nottingham is pretty much non existent now, and the main station is completely built over (north of it the tunnel still exists). I live near the old route from Stafford to Wellington. This was a dual track line, and there has been talk about trying to reopen it. Much of the trackbed is still clear from outside Stafford to outside Newport. But issues are:- - houses have recently been built on the trackbed on the outskirts of Stafford. - the new western bypass route cuts over the trackbed with no effort to avoid it (the road is raised above the trackbed but nowhere near enough for a bridge, too high for a level crossing and not enough run up for a reasonable incline in the road to have a bridge) - the trackbed out of Stafford is used for the gas mains to various villages. - in Newport the trackbed has been built on, with a Lidl being built on it not that long ago. Various houses further on the route. - about half the route from Newport to Telford now carries the main road. - once you get to the outskirts of Telford the route is partly built on and partly the road (although there is still a rail connection only half a mile along this) Could this be reopened? Probably yes, but the cost would be very high. Would this be worthwhile to replace what is in effect a single carriageway road which is not that busy through most of the day? Unlikely. If Stafford and / or Telford had a tram network then it would probably be a viable extension - the ability to climb and traverse tight bends would make it far easier to move around obstructions, and it could run on the roads for some sections, but this would be fairly useless for freight. However, there are lines that still exist but are currently out of use that could relatively easily be reopened (effectively check and reinstate signalling, etc). How useful any route would be in difficult to know. Containerised freight can't really easily be adapted for freight for shops, etc. It would need to be loaded and unloaded on a small lightly used route, and if everything needs an extra unloading from a lorry to a train and back to a lorry at the other end then the costs rocket and the time increases massively. Far cheaper, easier and faster to just keep it on the lorry. At least passengers generally have self load!

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Kickstart68@reddit

To add to this, even with routes open they would not be convenient for many. For example my recent commute was ~15 miles. I live right by the line, and my office was on the outskirts of the town with a station on that old line. However it is 2 miles from my house to a station on the old line (walking on the trackbed, 3 miles by road) , and another 2 miles at the other end. Sure I could drive to the local station but that would put me through far more traffic than doing the whole journey by car manages (and add a £15 a day parking fee). If there was a bus service I could use that, but that is a mile to the bus stop and would require a massive increase in the number of buses to be viable. An extra station could be opened, but add lots of stations like this and the route becomes slow. At best it would would double my time to get to work while being less flexible. Even on open lines, many small stations closed. Reopening many of these is not viable as that would destroy the flow on the lines between cities (eg, I have a choice from here of the slow cheaper tickets to London, or the faster Arrival service - but the slow service spends much of its time after over 100mph - interrupting that for tiny stations would make the slow service unviable)

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geniusgravity@reddit

Heavy, heavy subsidies.

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misterjonesUK@reddit

The train line land was also mostly sold off, so you could not reinstate it anyway. I do rather suspect that public transit will come back in a big way, and quite soon if things stay as they are.

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Common-Aardvark-8358@reddit

If there was a decent respectable on time regular bus service in every rural area and less traffic on the roads you wouldn’t need to have UK rail network restored

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-greigus-@reddit

Tbh banning buses on the same routes. Busses kill trains.

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Infamous_Tough_7320@reddit

A lot of money. Money that we don’t have

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neutronburst@reddit

Socialism? Fuel prices to rise to epic proportions?

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Ok_Deer1956@reddit

It's a tough pill to swallow, but the numbers really do show that a lot of those old lines were just not viable, even before cars became dominant. Any real restoration plan would need to focus on modern, high-demand corridors and accept that a permanent subsidy is part of the deal for a public service. We can't just rebuild a romanticized past; we have to build a network that people will actually use today.

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bahumat42@reddit

A miracle. There is not much good will in regards to public transport in this country. The amount of spending that would be required to fix it would be substantial. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, in fact I would love if it were. I just think its unlikely.

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IWasJack@reddit

A need.

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fothergillfuckup@reddit

A time machine?

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Depress-Mode@reddit

Going by the cost of U.K. infrastructure projects; around £1tn.

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U9365@reddit

Well next to nigh impossible in many cases. There are roads, shopping centres, houses, town bypasses and the rest built on the old lines. That's before we consider the centres of population now are not where the old stations were anyway.

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Sideshow86@reddit

France or china 🤣

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linkheroz@reddit

It can't be restored. Let's take the Great Central Railway as an example. On the bit that still exists, in the south, Leicester Station has been repurposed and the route there is replaced with other buildings. The North, Loughborough is severed from the Nottingham half and their current plans to reunify the 2 halves involve only building a single track bridge, not double as a factory is in the way. At the Nottingham end, once again buildings are in the way to continue further, much of the old line is now a tramway, Nottingham tunnels are still there but buildings are in the way and there's a shopping centre where Victoria station was. Most of the country will be similar and there just no way you can start kicking people from their homes and forcing businesses to move.

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Antique_Client_5643@reddit

A willingness to operate highly loss-making lines, that'd have to be paid for by the taxpayer.

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Carphead@reddit

I often think about this. Where I live in the highlands there is no train line near us. The paths for the old railways still exist. But because the area is so rural there is a limited bus service and even that had to be taken over by the council, the local provider said it wasn't profitable enough. So, what I wonder if they built on the track but create an autonomous type system. That stopped in the villages and towns and ran on request rather than a timetable. But only stopped and started at specific points, if it ran at a speed that was faster than a bus and more convenient than a train I think more people would use it.

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fletcheros@reddit

Not being able to go to Spain for the weekend.

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gatoStephen@reddit

It would be so great if Whitby still had a line to York. It's two and a half hours to do the journey through a bus to Scarborough and a train from there to York. This is for an as the crow flies distance of forty miles.

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EmergencySausage@reddit

TIL: Northern Ireland isn't part of the uk

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ukbot-nicolabot@reddit

A top level comment (one that is not a reply) should be a good faith and genuine attempt to answer the question

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koyliMeld9003@reddit

Sh*t loads of cash we don’t have.

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Clungemuncher23@reddit

£10000000000000000000000000000000000000

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Lt_Muffintoes@reddit

Privatisation And Abolish planning permission

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New_Line4049@reddit

Money. A lot of it. And not just a single, one time upfront investment youd have to subsidise the operating costs of a lot of the network as many of the lines simply will not be profitable, its a big reason why they were closed to begin with.

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esn111@reddit

Bare in mind that lots of those routes are now quite nice nature trail paths and walks. Also, to quite Jay Foreman, we've built "things" in the way like roads and houses and what not.

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_a_m_s_m@reddit

That’s kind of why CPO’s exist in the case that it would be of benefit to society.

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Scasne@reddit

I would say the first thing would be to replace a lot of the existing tunnels and possibly upgrades to stations on the current lines in use to allow double decker carriages like in mainland Europe which use the same gauges we do. The only places to really reactivate old lines is where the current lines have high maintenance costs and regular downtime due to weather like dawlish.

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Conscious-Rope7515@reddit

Mainland Europe may use the same track width, but the loading gauge is much bigger - both taller and wider - than the UK's. We can't fit mainland-style double-decker trains on our system without every aspect of it being completely rebuilt. And that's not going to happen.

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Scasne@reddit

I mean I mentioned the tunnels and the platforms but yes there is likely a lot more that would need to be done and the hassle of getting the works done then the changeover would again be a pain but the tunnel widths had been a massive issue for over 100years, but these structures are deteriorating and enlarging the tunnels as part of a staged planned replacement plan would surely be a prudent plan. Oh right yeah sorry it's the sensible action therefore it will never be done in the UK.

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lovesorangesoda636@reddit

I just want my local station to have trains stop at it... It doesn't have a ticket machine, doesn't have any trains to the closest city which work for a 9-5 job, and they wonder why its not used... I couldn't even get the train to and from work from it. The next closest station is *better* in that it does have commuter trains but it still doesn't have a ticket machine. I know they're pushing us all to use phones but work buy me tickets which I need to collect from a machine.

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PassingShot11@reddit

A time machine

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notouttolunch@reddit

An awful lot of stupidity. The rail network isn't the answer to transport issues as it was 200 years ago. Remember that the passenger railway was only an afterthought. Railways, like canals, made their money from freight.

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Smooth_Imagination@reddit

Its very much the answer to transport issues. You start with the railway and you plan development around it. Road investment simply induces demand and requires something like 4x the space. You put high density development around the railway forming corridors. London literally could not function without them. We dont need very fast railways. Higher speeds not only are way more expensive but induce average trip distances to increase. A harmonised speed can increase capacity both for passengers and future autonomous freight multiple units. The railway is the superior engineering solution. It will have a brighter future fusing with new technologies.

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Besmirching_Badger@reddit

> London literally could not function without them. Bizarre isn't it. The overwhelming economic hub of the uk has all the public transport infrastructure in the world as part of a vicious feedback loop, proving the concept. Somehow such things apparently have no benefit anywhere else though

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notouttolunch@reddit

See paragraph 1. Not sure which marketing textbook you got the rest of your comment from.

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Marigold16@reddit

An extractive empire.

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Impossible_Theme_148@reddit

Vast quantities of cash for the legal process Vast quantities of cash for just purchasing the land needed Vast quantities of cash for actually building the infrastructure back Vast quantities of cash for subsidising the service I'm all for the concept that public transport is a service that the state should provide - but if you go along this process then at some point the economic price will outweigh the national benefit

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Besmirching_Badger@reddit

Vast quantities of cash for fighting the never-ending and often ridiculous local council objections https://martinrobbins.substack.com/p/how-hs2-built-a-bridge-to-nowhere

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FOARP@reddit

A literal revolution. I mean, let's look at what would be required to restore the local train line where I live. Our train station was on the Meon Valley line between Alton and Fareham, and was served by some small engines running on standard gauge with a few trucks and carriages. Even when it was running, it never fully reach capacity. The station is now a car-park, the line is a well-used foot-path. So somehow all of that would need to be compulsorily purchased and returned to railway use. The station and the line would have to be rebuilt. The bridges would probably need to be replaced as they are 100+ years old and have not be maintained to carry that much weight. The tunnels would have to be re-worked to be safe. A lot of the encroachment on the old line by home-owners/land-owners along it would have to be dealt with. Obviously the whole town would be up in arms about this. They would suddenly lose the footpath everyone enjoys and the carpark lots of people use, and have a whole load of inconvenience forced on them in the form of recontruction. Multiply that by every town in the country where this would have to happen. Then you've got the fact that we have an hourly bus along the line that is almost never full, but everyone is suddenly going to use the railway \*because reasons\*. Yeah, it's a nice thought but it's never going to happen.

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NotABrummie@reddit

Vision and a little backbone.

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aleopardstail@reddit

and quite a bit of money and industrial capacity the country lacks

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NotABrummie@reddit

We have the capacity. And it would save money in the long-term given what a drain roads are on the economy.

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ChanceBranch1146@reddit

The vast majority of the lines that were closed wouldn't be viable today. Complete wadte of money

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NotABrummie@reddit

Most of them weren't replaced with any option other than driving. Any way to avoid wasting money on road maintenance is worth it.

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aleopardstail@reddit

except when said road maintenance is cheaper than the rail maintenance and operations roads get used because for the most part they are the most efficient operation rail excels at bulk freight point to point and high value passenger operations, very few short distance passenger routes have ever made a profit, the operating and construction costs are just way too high now it should always be considered, and where it exists using rail encouraged, but a realisation that its not always practical is needed note: I am in favour of rail travel and while I'm not longer in it worked in that industry for 20 odd years

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ChanceBranch1146@reddit

Still cheaper than running pointless branch lines that no one would use.

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aleopardstail@reddit

we lack the ability to make the track in quantity or the trains we also lack the need for much of it, e.g. a lot of those lines were set up to move say coal or iron ore from a mine, which no longer exists, to a works, that also no longer exists. the fact some also carried passengers was a side line many also only carried passengers because the alternative was walking, which is no longer the case Beeching cut too deep, some feeder lines should have been kept, but the entire network was certainly not needed then and even more certainly isn't needed now. more light rail would be good, more heavy rail on some routes without a doubt, but there is zero point in replicating the 1920s & 1930s network

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AnonymousTimewaster@reddit

More than a little. The NIMBY opposition would be **fierce**.

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Breaking-Dad-@reddit

There have been many attempts to restore the line near where I live, a lot of the old track is still available land, although a bypass and bridge were built where the old railway bridge went. Apparently it would cost "100s of millions" of pounds. It's a 10 -15 mile stretch between two small to middling towns and there is an excellent bus service. Added to that most of the stations are now homes and the one in my town is a good mile away from the centre and more from a lot of the houses. I don't believe people now would walk and cycle there, get a train to the next town for work or to connect onwards towards the bigger cities. As much as I would love to see it back, I can't imagine it will happen. Just to add to this, all of the buses (which run every half an hour during the day) are now electric with overhead charging in the bus station at the next town. It also travels onwards to Leeds which is the nearest major city.

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jmr1190@reddit

Skipton to Colne?

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SpudFire@reddit

Sounds similar to the line near me. I actually wondered if it was the same one until you mentioned Leeds. This one runs between Burton-upon-Trent and Leicester, running through a few towns along the way. I know it currently doesn't join up to the main line at Leicester and apparently can't because of buildings where the two lines meet, so that's a major stumbling block for the people campaigning to get it reopened. Lots of people are vocal about how it should be reopened but how many of them will actually use it regularly to make it commercially viable? Kind of like pubs closing down - people complain their local closed but when you ask when they last went there, their response is "errrmm".

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Ok_Music253@reddit

The Ivanhoe line connects to the Midland Mainline going south about a mile south of Leicester Station, but you're right the northern chord is long gone and sat under buildings in the Freeman's Common industrial estate so has little to no chance of being rebuilt to make a Leicester to Burton passenger line a realistic prospect. The line from the quarries Ashby way running to Leicester and south does see a couple of freight trains per hour running gravel to wherever it goes south of Leicester and back again with the empties, its the section from the quarries to Burton that is more or less mothballed I think currently.

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Ramtamtama@reddit

I remember when my local pub closed. Residents used it, but the area saw a lot of houses converted to HMOs, and students went clubbing in town as opposed to the pub. Live music and stand up, including a couple of big names doing warm-up gigs, didn't draw the student crowd. The only financially viable option for the owner-landlord was to sell up.

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Varanae@reddit

I'd settle for a Sunday service from my town. And any kind of East-West line between Peterborough and London. It's so difficult to get from the east to say, Milton Keynes

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SwimParticular3070@reddit

What it takes: People realising we are not a rich country no more and willing to build for growth.

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Western-Mall5505@reddit

In my area you would have to pull down houses and shops and dig out tunnels to get the railway back. Though we have a mothball line they was supposed to will re-open.

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Resident-Gear2309@reddit

There’s me thinking Stornoway used to have a train line!! Bloody hair on the paper 😂

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CarpeCyprinidae@reddit

People are less patient If all 1960s-era routes still existed I could get to work by train. But it'd be a 2 mile walk at each end of the route and 4 separate trains, including a short walk from Uxbridge Central to Uxbridge Vine Street About 2 hours then. And I can drive it in 30-50 minutes. You'd need to close the M25 to make it worth taking the train.

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netean@reddit

a TARDIS

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AcceptableResponse15@reddit

Prayers.

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TSR2Wingtip@reddit

In our part of rural Dorset almost all the lines went. And almost all those lines were built on. There'd have to be a lot of demolition to get a rail line back through Bridport and on to West Bay.

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martinj88@reddit

Nationalisation would be the first step, it's not a perfect structure but private companies with contracts only focus really on their contract lifespan, they need to focus on recouping as much money as possible in that limited time because someone else could pick up the contract next renewal. Next is the juxtaposition of needing to reduce fares and invest billions into the network. I would have scrapped HS2 and focused on improving the current infrastructure to the point where it's reliable and somewhat future proof so reducing costs and providing a stronger revenue stream long term. Automation, this is an issue as unions will fight tooth and nail but it's needed to reduce costs and help justify services on routes with a net loss profit wise. Lastly is the population who actually needs to switch from cars to trains but because of issues of reliability, cleanliness(those toilets smells have made me tempted to drive before), convenience and price it's going to be a massive uphill battle and a long one as well

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ukstonerdude@reddit

Everyone being a YIMBY

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Exact-Strife@reddit

Or a PM that's on the spectrum and really *really* into trains. But I realize that's like hoping for an overnight utopia.

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ukstonerdude@reddit

Francis Bourgeois for PM.

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goimpres@reddit

It's a tough pill to swallow, but the financial reality is the biggest hurdle. We can't just rebuild lines for nostalgia; they need to serve a genuine, sustainable demand. The focus should absolutely be on making the profitable intercity and freight networks as efficient as possible. Only then could we even consider where strategic, modern local links might actually work.

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MrNice00001@reddit

That will be the problem for the financial giant that buys national rail.

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Alexadamson@reddit

Rip up the whole lot and start over.

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_a_m_s_m@reddit

Well, given the grip that neoliberalism has on society, restoring lines is likely to require financing models that don’t involve too much public subsidy to function otherwise **very bad things will happen!!!** Like cleaner air, less congestion, less freight moving by roads (which is the vehicle category that does the bulk of road damage by the way) better access for opportunities for people especially those who may not be able to drive for any reason, a much more energy efficient method of transport for which the technology to electrify has existed for over 100 years. Being able to make people more productive & benefit from economies of agglomeration etc. the list goes on, this is some truly horrible stuff & **what wasteful public subsidies would enable!!!** With that being the “mindset” in place across much of the country I’d want to turn to the [Rail + Property system](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/19/how-public-transport-actually-turns-a-profit-in-hong-kong) used in Hong Kong & Japan where the train companies build up properties around stations, e.g.offices, flats, shopping centres, restaurants etc. Which is conveniently very easy to access beachside of modern rail infrastructure. For a business, renting an office is a no brainer because there is bound to a huge labour pool that has easy access to your office. The same is the case for retail locations etc. As in individual, renting/buying by a station gives you access to all things very conveniently either in walking distance or a short train ride away & insures for the railway companies that there will be a large pool of potential customers who will buy tickets & properties which are more valuable for the reasons stated above. The housing crisis is very frequently discussed in this country & a major inhibitor to building more are “traffic” concerns etc. Network rail is exploring some form of rail + property in a limited capacity. I say expand this. Killing two birds with one stone, more sustainable transport which can help better access jobs etc. & sort out a lot of our housing woes. Why not build sustainable transport links into developments from the start instead of haphazardly trying to add things in later with great difficulty. Or realise that building sprawling housing estates miles away from anything & crawling into a car at the same times as everyone else is perhaps less than ideal? But given the diabolical leasehold & planning systems in place in Britain, it’s unlikely.

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Adventurous_Break_61@reddit

Sorry off topic but have we stopped using the word left?

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PuzzleheadedBag920@reddit

money lots of money

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luala@reddit

Transfer money away from road investment and airport subsidies into intercity rail. A lot of political willpower. A massive localised planning battle to tackle the homes and other infrastructure built on former rail tracks. Or LOADS of tunnelling!

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phil8715@reddit

When it comes to passenger traffic have you noticed how a lot of towns and cities UK that the Railway station is miles away from either the bus station or even the nearest bus stop? I've travelled a lot in Northern Ireland and they've got more joined up thinking for example Belfast Grand Central is the jewel in the crown for a public transport hub where bus and trains meet. Coleraine is another example of a connected interchange where the train meets the bus. In Preston Lancashire the bus and railway station are opposite ends of City Centre where you walk between the two in 10 minutes or catch a bus if you want to get caught up in the One way system.

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AyeAye711@reddit

Full automation

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mrj86ng@reddit

People to realise and accept that the previous extent of the UK rail network was not centrally planned. It was built by competing private companies that occasionally did daft things just to spite their perceived competition. Much of it was not economical feasible then a d wouldn't be feasible now. Some rebuilding is good (Northumberland line and the 5 new stations in Birmingham), more could be done (get the hell on with EWR, consider taking over the heritage lines to Minehead, Swanage etc.) But the full track mileage is never coming back.

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newbyoes@reddit

Probably the end of corruption

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TonyMnn@reddit

First thing would have to be to nationalise them. And bring in a nationalised train system, take them.out of private hands.

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SquashyDisco@reddit

There are some obvious lines to reopen but others have no justification for consideration. Buxton - Chinley (via Peak Forest) would give a new link to the Hope Valley instead of the bus from Chapel-en-le-Frith (all you need is a new platform!). March - Spalding would be worthwhile to keep most freight away from Peterborough to/from Felixstowe. Dumfries - Castle Douglas - Stranraer would provide greater connectivity for the Borders. Weston-super-Mare - Cheddar - Wells - Shepton Mallet - Westbury would give another diversionary route to Bristol (albeit slower). Oswestry - Gobowen could be converted into light rail. Northampton - Wellingborough would give a new link to the Midland Mainline, rather than a 60 min journey on the Bedford-Bletchley route. Here in Wales, everyone bleats about Carmarthen - Aberystwyth. But in reality, it would be a considerable cost to reopen, maintain and run. It’d be easier to put an express bus from Carmarthen - to which there are plans. But remember: what you give to passengers, you often remove from freight. And there’s a lot of containers/wagons on our network that could easily go on the roads.

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tearsswwhereyyouread@reddit

Am I wrong but for what we have retained from the image on the left we actually haven't done bad. There's a lot of countries who lost a lot more and really did gut their rail network. We can still travel the vast majority of the country by train fairly easily

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Alone_Storage_1897@reddit

A bleeding miracle

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evertonblue@reddit

A need for it to be restored - which just doesn’t exist There is tiny demand for a lot of these and they were closed because they weren’t used enough and that hasn’t changed.

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tinnyobeer@reddit

Demolition of an awful lot of buildings and someone with an endless supply of funds

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auntarie@reddit

probably demand. I can't say for the rest of the UK, but up in Scotland most of the old tracks are still there, just rusted and overgrown. so all it takes to get them running again is a few months' worth of safety inspections and cleanup + route learning. drivers and guards in Edinburgh recently picked up Winchburgh junction, which was previously only used for shunts and freight, so it's not impossible. and I heard we may be reviving 3-4 stations along the suburban line in Edinburgh, though that's just talks so even if it were true, it would be 10+ years before we start working it

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handsome_vulpine@reddit

It's fair to say we're definitely not going to restore ALL of it. Some lines definitely did deserve the chop, but Beeching absolutely went too far.

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itsfourinthemornin@reddit

I always thought we had so few trains especially connecting further north (from north yorkshire) but it's something else seeing it on a map. I have some old photos (buried deep with many other family photos) of the long gone Scarborough-Whitby line, which closed only two years after photo a!

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Odd-Swing-2025@reddit

I'm confused at those saying it would be a waste of time. 1. It's easier for me to get from East Yorkshire to London by train than to go anywhere else in Yorkshire by train. I cannot go directly from Canterbury to Folkestone, but have to go via Ashford. In what world does this make sense? Doncaster used to be the train hub of England and now it's basically all just a London service. 2. People in small outposts absolutely do and would use trains. Not everyone can afford a car or can drive. The closing of passenger rail networks has directly contributed to unemployment. 3. Replacing rail services with bus services is a fucking joke and everyone knows it. A bus is forced to make a 20 minute journey 40 minutes for no discernible reason where there could be a train. Train travel is so much nicer and there are usually onboard toilets. Buses are the absolute pits of travel if you're going anywhere significant. 4. Trains can easily be made cheaper and more efficient. We could also bring back a tramway system. We just don't want to because here in Britain ever since WWII we've been conditioned into accepting mediocrity, so barely road legal buses that travel halfway across the country before reaching your destination that's 20 minutes away it is.

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ackbladder_@reddit

Passengers. I think people forget that even now there are stations which have astonishingly low ticket sales and are only serviced because the goverment forces rail operators to service them.

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Crayen5@reddit

Government subsidisation

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effinjamie@reddit

it already gets government subsidisation, most franchises couldn't survive without them. Shareholders still get paid though!

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louse_yer_pints@reddit

Locally to me it would mean tearing up roads, demolishing houses and the lengths of railway embankment that remains as paths or just overgrown would need structural inspection and probably strengthened and underpinned. There's also several bridges that would need to be rebuilt. That's just across a small county so the cost would be astronomical across the whole country.

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effinjamie@reddit

Nationalisation and a focus on delivering a quality service for the nation rather than maximising profit for shareholders.

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macrowe777@reddit

One of the most valuable ones you could likely reimplement would be the line to Keswick. There'd be almost no chance of it getting through all the hurdles though, it would cost an obscene amount to tunnel what can't be flattened or interrupted, and....generally people get by on the busses and cars instead.

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CongealedBeanKingdom@reddit

Money and the will.

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Equivalent-Pen1440@reddit

At least one of the closed branch lines has been reopened (the Borders railway, running south from Edinburgh). Took about fifteen years between campaigning and construction, but it’s possible and has been functioning well since 2015! More detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_Railway

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akademmy@reddit

As a percentage of HS2's cost, probably less than 100%... and lines would be usable much sooner... (HS2. Expected to be the worlds most expensive railway. Finish date probably 2040s)

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Select-Band007@reddit

100s of billions, to buy property on the lines, close to the line. Roads that have been built will need moving reconstructed and then the actual lines relaided

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fortyfivepointseven@reddit

We shouldn't. We shouldn't be restoring a failed 19th Century network, we should be building a true 21st Century network. The Victorians built thousands of miles of railway line on the basis of an investment bubble. The model was truly privatised, with companies building multiple parallel lines to undercut each others' business. Industrialists would gather investment for lines to places with little industry and few passengers. There are three true stand-outs for excellent rail systems in Europe. Spain has mastered the intercity network. This is about building long, straight, high speed lines, with nice clean central city stations, where trains can run uninterrupted between cities. The Victorians built us lines with lots of stops and little service seperation between fast and slow trains. This won't do. The lines are too curvy, too many stations serving small cities and large towns†, and too congested. † Not that these places don't matter, but the success of the Spanish network shows it's best to serve them with the intercity network. A fast train rapidly stops becoming fast if it stops at too many places. We need to not only build Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2 in full, but then look at schemes to connect England and Scotland, London with Wales and the South West, Cambridge, and build connection between the continent and the rest of the country. There's nothing for it but new lines. Spain has showed it's possible - with the right laws and the right decisions - to do this quickly. In the time it's taken us to commission, cancel, uncancel, recancel and reuncancel half of HS2, Spain has built a high speed national network, then gotten to the point that they're embarrassed about failing to have anticipated the demand for it, and having to build relief lines. Germany has mastered the regional commuter network. This is about Thameslink/Crossrail-style schemes, connecting up existing commuter branch lines through the central city, and creating a regular, predictable, half-hour timetable that guarantees your commute from the exurbs and outer suburbs to the city centre. We should be looking to build these networks in all major cities. We need to learn lessons from their failed implementations in London and Manchester, and follow the German model as closely as possible. Again, this isn't about restoring random rural branch lines. This is about using the branch lines that already exist - where people live - and using them better. Making them more useful, and more reliable. We don't need to re-open anything to make this work. We need to dig Crossrail style tunnels under Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham, and expand on the (eventual) success of the Elizabeth Line in London whilst fixing the remaining issues with Thameslink. Finally, the UK (yes, surprised to see this one here, aren't you!) has mastered the metro network. I say 'UK' but I mean London. This is about creating metro-controlled authorities with pride in their work who focus on turn-up-and-go service. TfL is a world-leader in building and maintaining these systems. We need to spread that expertise - and the political model that's supported it - across the UK. Again, re-opening random rural branch lines isn't helpful here. This is about working with what we have - and digging a few new tunnels in the areas needed - to create metro systems. It means prioritising metro travel over fast trains, which will piss people off, but is how London has created such economies of scale. I'm not against re-opening any closed branch lines. The Branch Line Society has identified about a dozen branch lines that are high priority for them, and I absolutely support those ones (https://www.branchline.uk/home.php). Otherwise, we shouldn't be repeating the mistakes that the Victorians made. The UK network needs rebuilding, not restoring.

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hyperdistortion@reddit

A lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of public demand, and a lot of sustained political will through multiple local and national elections. Not every pre-Beeching line can reopen, and that’s okay. Some of them likely wouldn’t be used in the age of the car, anyway. For a bunch of major cities, though, there’s huge scope to get cars of roads - *if* all the factors above can be met, and commuters can be persuaded to take the train. Moving more short journeys and commuter journeys onto public transport - including railways - should be a no-brainer. Reduced road congestion, reduced land use by car parking, reduced pollution from petrol and diesel cars… it should be an easy sell. Problem is, convincing people it’s good *for them*, not just for everyone else. Also, it’ll need an overhaul of planning and construction regs to make it quicker and easier to build things that are in the public and national interests. And that’s a much harder sell. Still, looking at other countries, it can work. For the UK it’ll take time, and cost money - in the long run it’d be worth it though.

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Randohumanist@reddit

Rail is so much more expensive than roads. It won’t happen now.

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CatchRevolutionary65@reddit

Getting rid of neoliberalism

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Ruddi_Herring@reddit

Money, time, workers, and political will but god what I would give to have the Beeching Cuts reversed

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Crazy_Breakfast_6327@reddit

Vast wealth and a common goal

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DotComprehensive4902@reddit

A few trillion pounds and understanding and compliant financial markets

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Willing_Coconut4364@reddit

Money

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Ash420Williams@reddit

Nationalisation

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nine8nine@reddit

Passenger rail is already a subsidy-hog, an expanded railway network that is not also doing a significant amount of rail freight would simply continue this trend. >More people than ever use the network Yes and it still requires the government to directly or indirectly contribute 40-50% of rail operating costs. >It should be nationalised How will that make it any cheaper to run? It certainly will not make it more efficient or scaleable? >Muh Beeching! Beeching made his cuts because Victorian railways couldn't pay their way any more after losing freight and were taking money out of the pockets of the poorest to pay for middle class professionals to get to work. The railways still operate this way- nothing about his justifications has really changed.

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ArtichokeDesperate68@reddit

Buy it all back. Raise our income taxes by 10%. Spend spend spend!

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Tall-Reputation-9519@reddit

I can only talk for Norfolk but there's just no real need for so many small railway branches from the big city/towns to the smaller market towns when cars are so much easier and more convenient. Yes, the Norwich --> London line is always packed but Norwich --> Yarmouth is pretty much empty half the time and so is Norwich --> Sheringham, especially outside tourist season. The Norwich to Aylsham/Reepham line has been converted to a bridleway called The Marriot's Way which is massively popular with walkers, cyclists and horse riders. If you changed that back I can pretty much guarantee you it would have less train passengers than it currently has as a bridleway as there's not much demand to get from those towns to Norwich. Add to that the surrounding villages being where more people live that you'd have to get a car to anyway you may as well use the car for the whole journey. This isn't the 1950s where cars are a luxury, they are a necessity these days in rural areas.

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richmeister6666@reddit

Allow private companies fuelled by venture capitalist money expecting to make a loss on most of them to build railways all over the country, which is essentially how they all got built in the first place. Obviously now there’s no incentive as none of them that aren’t already built will make any money.

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Unhappy_Importance81@reddit

A competent government

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Dragonogard549@reddit

A shedload of disposable cash. For every mile that turns profitable, theres 10 miles that wont. Not that the aim of a rail line is to make money as a result of sales, because each mile of inner-city rail links that are restored will make that other 10 miles worth it in the huge economic boost from increased employment opportunities. It'd be a net-positive, but its the inbetween part thats a bitch to get off the ground.

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talligan@reddit

Interesting note about the one railway heading south from Edinburgh towards the borders. That track was laid in the 1800s and they straightened the tweed tributary to run the tracks alongside it. But that sped up the water flow and increased flooding on the tweed. With the railway long gone,[ they're looking to re-meander the river](https://tweedforum.org/) as part of natural flood management measures.

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PrettyLilObsession@reddit

more funding and bet

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notemark@reddit

Divine intervention.

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hermansherberts@reddit

China

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Particular-Swim-9293@reddit

You'd have to fight a lot of cyclists who aren't going to give back their routes in a hurry.

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Useless_or_inept@reddit

Many disused lines simply wouldn't be viable. Most of the UK's railways were built viable in an era when your choice was between steam trains or horse & cart. In the intervening time, some towns have grown massively, but we have also invented cars, trucks, and Microsoft Teams. So a railway between Oxford and Cambridge might be economically sustainable, but not a railway twisting through sleepy valleys full of little farms. In the British Rail, post-WW2 era, there were many opportunities to shape traffic and build new traffic generators next to railways, to merge the networks of separate prewar companies and to prepare for a modern era of faster trains & containerised freight, but they were mostly bodged, and instead the UK chose policies which massively inflated the cost & time of building anything new.

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Jinkii5@reddit

North Cornwall, connect Dumfries and Stranraer and for gods sake a central north south line in Wales.

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Competitive_Test6697@reddit

Is there an update within the last 42 years?

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Vaxtez@reddit

[https://www.railmaponline.com/UKIEMap.php](https://www.railmaponline.com/UKIEMap.php) if you want to look at modern & historic railway lines

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titlrequired@reddit

Political will.

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Less_Mess_5803@reddit

It would bankrupt us, not to mention it would be pointless as almost all these lines would be economically unviable in their running.

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Master_Elderberry275@reddit

Will which won't ever be forthcoming. It would be insurmountably expensive to restore many of these lines, let alone the ongoing subsidy that would inevitably be required. They weren't cut for no reason at all, and in an era when car travel is so cheap and readily available, most will not attract enough customers outside commuting hours to be commercially viable. Many of the routes would require the removal of homes, roads or leisure paths which have been built over many of the routes which would likely raise enough local opposition to make it a political minefield for any political trying to take it on.

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snakeoildriller@reddit

That, and an actual budget.

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Whulad@reddit

Why would we? Cost taxpayers and/or the national debt an absolute fortune with no overall upside.

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No-Photograph3463@reddit

Flattening houses, industrial estates and leisure centres and major roads where I am, as those have all been built on sections of the old railway line. The Old railways network at least where I am (Bournemouth) would of been hugely useful and effective nowadays, as we would have more than 1 line through the new forest (so when there is an issue your not stranded in Southampton) and you'd actually be able to go north to Bath and Bristol too, rather than having to go to Southampton, and then changing as is the case now.

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GeekHabits@reddit

The closing of almost all of britains motorways

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andrew0256@reddit

What do you want to restore it to? A replica of the past or something that plays a bigger part in transporting the nations people and goods? It will take a lot of money, political will, less ego wasted on vanity projects such as HS2, and forward planning. We should also get away from dealing with infrastructure in a stop start fashion, it being one of the reasons building railways is so expensive in this country.

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ConfectionHelpful471@reddit

About 35 years after a plan gets approved and the budget set in stone by the government as it will take that long to build the workforce to actually build the track and connect it into the existing network. Unfortunately had there been more investment into the railway over the last 5 years, the mass exodus of people could have been stopped and there would have been a workforce in place to deliver a project like this in a shorter time frame

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Hairy_Al@reddit

Huge investment and the ability to ignore NIMBYs

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electrobolt1@reddit

Why would it need to be restored in the first place?

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tdrules@reddit

Undo 50 years of car centric development

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Galen476@reddit

The end of car ownership and usage. It's the only way it could really be economically viable.

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thedudeabides-12@reddit

Privatisation..

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TruthfulRepugnance@reddit

A lot of money, willpower and demolition - so much of what was formerly railway infrastructure has been built on, or the railbed used to make roads.

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Consistent-Pirate-23@reddit

There was a line that was torn up and the estate I live on built on it. The station was viewed as inadequate for any passenger use by Victorian standards. Basically anything here built after 1970 would have to be ripped up, meaning no one left to use the station

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iamnosuperman123@reddit

Lots of money, planning reform, less powerful/influential unions, time, political/public will power...... Or we could just build trams.

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Feeling-Medium-7856@reddit

Well, some lines *are* being restored (Dartmoor, Borders, Northumberland). Others have unfortunately had stuff built where the line used to be. You’d struggle to find many political decisions that have aged worse than the Beeching Cuts. We absolutely need to improve the rail network. Passenger numbers continue to rise and it’s the best way to take pressure off the road network too.

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jibbit@reddit

un-invent the car

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