It would not be an easy route from the point of view of earthworks because you would have to take the line from c. 100 ft above sea level at Flax Bourton to around 540ft at the north west edge of the present car park to the north of the terminal, so a rise of some 440ft. To do that on a ruling gradient of 1 in 50 you would need a line just over 4 miles in length.BristleGWR wrote:I like the idea, but looking at an OS map I can't see an easy route from Flax Bourton to Lulsgate. What route were you thinking of taking on your survey??Robin Summerhill wrote:...... I put my Surveyors hat back on and concluded that you could actually run a branch from somewhere near Flax Bourton up to the airport with a ruling gradient of 1 in 50. The S&D managed that with steam so I am sure that present day diesels and electrics would have no problem getting up it!
To do that (and all this is coming from the OS map and Google Earth, not going out and looking on site - I did enough of that on the "Location Quiz" thread
) you would need a line on a gentle curve starting from somewhere near Station Road at Flax Bourton, then passing to the south east of Backwell, a tunnel under Blackwell Hill then passing just to the south of Downside before arriving at the terminus to the north of the existing northern car park.There are no doubt 101 other routes you could take to get a railway up there, and in the real world you would need to take into account such things as SSSIs, existing developments, planning restrictions and NIMBYs, but this is just an internet forum where I am idly musing and doing some very very basic research!
But to play devils advocate on a railway forum for a moment, the Powers That Be would probably find that most people would still want to go by car anyway, so a more environmentally friendly thing to do for most of the inhabitants of the area to the south of Bristol would be to build a dual carriageway from the eastern side of the M5 junction 20 (Clevedon) almost in a direct line to the airport, crossing the A370 near Chelvey Batch. Such a road would be just over 6 miles long.
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