Just watched it, and read the article.
As I've often said on here and to others until they get bored with me
, its one thing talking about re-using existing freight lines for passenger traffic, but quite another to bear the cost of rebuilding formations and relaying lines on long-closed bits of former infrastructure.
Reopening the Portishead line as far as Portbury should theoreticlly be reasonably straightforward, but rebuilding the line beyond to Portishead would not. I was down there a couple of years ago and there are trees growing in the four foot, metal fences across the line and Gawd knows what else.
I see in the BBC report that a bid for ú43m to reopen the line has just been rejected by HMG. It'll need more than a few jumble sales and enthusiasm to get that sort of money together, and I doubt that it would come from private capital - ú43m plus interest takes a lot of paying back, and I wonder whether the revenue generated would ever cover it. A back of a fag packet calculation tells you that if investors were to get only 5% return on their capital, you'd need ú2.15m a year just to pay that, let alone the capital.
Just thought as I was writing this - Jules was going to put a business plan together some months ago - how you getting on?
Moving on. The Henbury loop might be a runner, but it does suffer from the problem that the line is right at the northern end of Bristol's residential development in Henbury and Brentry. In other words, if you live half a mile closer to Westbury than the railway, it would probably still be far quicker to get a bus into Bristol than to go in the opposite direction to the Centre to catch a train, which ulitimately would not land you particularly in the centre of Bristol at the other end.
If some bright spark suggested a spur with a triangular junction from just west of Henbury to Cribbs Causeway, then that might indeed have the potential to pick up some traffic. A service running from. say, Parkway via Henbury to Cribbs, then on to Avonmouth and back to Bristol might be a runner.
I see that the Thornbury branch gets a mention again. I honestly don't know why - perhaps its because some politician has looked at a map, seen a railway and thought "Ooh look, there's another one!"
The Thornbury branch was fine in Midland Railway days when it was the means of "escape" from Thornbury to the outside world, when the alternative was a 4-hour walk to Bristol or Berkeley Road. You will recall that this was not one of Beeching's victims - it didn't make any money 80 years ago and was closed to passengers in 1941. The line goes through nowhere of any consequence as far as passenger revenues are concerned - Tytherington, Latteridge and Iron Acton are not West Drayton, Hayes and Southall as far as catchment areas are concerned! Come to that, they don't have the traffic potential of Patchway - perhaps more like Pilning .... 'nuff said ...
Most people who want to go anywhere (in numbers) from Thornbury want to go to Bristol or Cribbs Causeway or perhaps Gloucester. They are most unlikely to go to Bristol by train via Yate if a bus gets then there in half the time and half the distance, and if they want to go anywhere of significance by train they'll go to Parkway, where you could get more quickly on a bike than a train via Yate.
Ypu may have gathered by now that I think the Thornbury branch is a dead idea before it starts.
Finally, electrification to The Beach?? Interesting concept - I know that traffic levels have increasd substantially in recent years, but enough to justify "the wires?" Seems unlikely to me, but somebody aroud here might know better.
