Re:Many railway lines in Britain that were closed in the 196...
by martinald on Monday April 18, 2016 @02:55PM
(#11522269)
There's passive provision (ie: at not a lot of extra cost - perhaps no real new infrastructure, not entirely sure) to run a 4tph service to Gorebridge + continue half of them to the rest of the line.
I think a 4tph / 2tph service pattern is fine and future capacity could be gained by platform extensions + longer trains.
I'd rather they 'value engineer' it to that level now than build a double track railway at significantly extra cost, and spend the ~£100m (educated guess) on other railway improvement projects for other areas (eg, the quad tracking of the ECML near Musselburgh to allow them a 2tph service - will cost around £100m for the various improvements).
Re:Many railway lines in Britain that were closed in the 196...
by takno on Monday April 18, 2016 @12:27PM
(#11521118)
Several of the completely new bridges were built with single track capacity as well. I suspect the government thought they were being a bit clever forcing Network Rail to shave a few million off the cost this way, but actually just not laying the second set of rails doesn't really save much so actually the savings came in places where they will cause a lot of pain later
Not for all of it was — there's certainly provision in places, but there's also parts where doubling would be incredibly expensive (the viaducts especially, where the maximum dimensions of the trains it has been built for are larger than it was originally built for, are inherently single-track now).