From our Swindon Correspondent:
From the Cambridge Independent
Funding of £760m has been announced to break ground on East-West Rail, the new line that will link Oxford and Cambridge.
The cash from the Department of Transport will be used to lay track along a disused railway line between Bicester and Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, with services beginning in 2025.
The funding, announced today (Saturday, January 23) will provide better transport links across the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, which the government hopes will become an economic boom area due to the high number of science and technology jobs here.
These are the things the planning types never grasp about cars. There’s zero friction on the changes. When you change from one road to the other it’s less than a minute. Oh, and you never have to worry about your driver turning up, and your beat up old Golf is more reliable than the trains.
So…this is California’s Bakersfield to Livermore high speed rail in miniature.
Even California, though, has realized that when you are losing money on every mile, you can’t make it up on quantity.
Swindon Guy, I’m thinking that prowess in estimating the market for a new service is unmeasured, unrewarded, and unvalued, compared to Looking Like A Visionary.
An early criticism of the California train was that the usage assumptions assumed more riders than the Tokyo – Osaka line
But, but… we’ve got to have a train service between the two greatest universities in the world!
Nobody’s taken the bait?
“But this train service goes nowhere near Hull” 🙂
“…So, who is going to use this? You finish seeing a client in Milton Keynes and have to call a cab to get to the station. You then get there and just missed a train so have to wait 25 minutes. By the time the train leaves, you could be almost home by car….” I don’t think that Mr Worstall has quite grasped the situation. This is a Green Bureaucratic decision. It will take several years to come to fruition. By the time it does, cars are going to be very rare, and on their way to being banned (except… Read more »
There is no way that’s going to happen. Politicians can piss billions away on rail, but you try taking people’s cars and you’ll see a political force emerge that will stop them.
And once the work from home revolution has done its work, there will be less rail. 52% of rail trips, even more of the income, is commuting. The TOCs think they’re going to lose 20% of people permanently. But that also means roads are quieter, so why take a train instead of a bus or car?
The purpose is to create jobs as per Boris’s promises, and being a railway they are green jobs.
This link will be useful for people in The North, no not oop-North, but Northern home counties. It will help them to avoid Londonistan when traveling to Oxbridge. It might also relieve pressure on the outskirts, converting the otherwise useless land between the ivory clusters into a long commuter belt.
This is all penny-ante stuff compared with the mind-buggeringly large sums being thrown away on HS2.
It will have to be operated using the latest Greta-approved state-of-the-art clockwork trains or with carriages hauled by teams of free-range unicorns.