News from the East Anglian Branch of Railfuture, Edited by Martin Thorne and Jerry Alderson.
Railfuture News Snippets 271 - 31/10/2015
- ROLLING STOCK [all issues]
- STATIONS [all issues]
- £100,000 improvements promised for Newmarket station
- Cambridgeshire County Council releases passenger flow study of new Cambridge Science Park station to justify lack of canopies
- RAIL ROUTES [all issues]
- PRESERVED RAILWAYS [all issues]
Phase 1 of the western part of the East West Rail Link, which will hopefully lead to the full reopening of the railway between Oxford and Cambridge, opened as planned on Sunday 25th October with a preview service between the brand new Oxford Parkway station and London Marylebone. The new service, which made use of a brand new 1.2km-long chord, was opened by Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday 26th October. A series of photos can be seen at the Oxford-Parkway-opens article on the Railfuture website.
An easy-to-read breakdown of costs and benefit-to-cost ratios for the reopening of the Wisbech-March railway line from the GRIP2 feasibility study and outline business case carried out in summer 2015 has been published by Rail Technology Magazine - see http://www.railtechnologymagazine.com/Rail-News/growing-support-for-wisbech-march-reopening.
Colin Elliff, one of the people behind High Speed UK (a group calling for a greener, cheaper and better-connected alternative to HS2) will be giving a talk in Cambridge about the High Speed UK scheme, and compare it with High Speed 2 and 3 proposals on environmental and other criteria. It will be held on Thursday 5th November at 15:00 at the Makespace Classroom, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX.
On Friday 13th November at 20:30 there will be a presentation in Cambridge by Robert Holden, the Chairman of High Speed 1. Previously he was the CEO of London & Continental Railways, until 2009, when he became CEO of Crossrail, until 2011. He will be keen to discuss all these activities in a talk, followed by a Q&A, to the Cambridge University Railway Club (CURC). On Wednesday 25th November the CURC's guest speaker will be Aidan Grisewood from Transport Scotland, who oversees the Scottish Government's railway planning and operations. Both events are in the William Thatcher Room at Fitzwilliam College, and are open to the public.
Unfortunately Clare Moriarty, who was the Director General of the Rail Executive, Department for Transport between 2013 and 2015 and is currently Permanent Secretary for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has withdrawn from a planned talk to the CURC on Friday 20th November. She had planned to talk about running, innovating and driving the railway industry - franchises and Network Rail - forward within Britain. As Director General for Rail she was responsible for delivery of the government's objectives for rail, from developing strategy through franchise procurement and management, to major infrastructure projects. She had a £3 billion rail budget and led commercial relationships with a wide range of private sector partners. Before this she was Director General, Corporate Group in the Department for Transport where she was responsible for finance, corporate services and sponsorship of the five motoring agencies.
The Fen Line Users Association's (FLUA) Annual General Meeting will be on Saturday 21 November 2015 at the Good News Centre, St. John's Church, King's Lynn at 14:00. From the station turn left and the church is in front of you (use main entrance facing the parking area). Their guest speaker is Keith Jipps, Passenger Service Director at Great Northern (Govia Thameslink Railway).
A resident in Waterbeach, just north of Cambridge, who is frustrated by overcrowding on trains because only four-car trains can use the platform, has used a Freedom of Information request to find out how much it would cost to double the length of both platforms to allow eight-car trains to call. See https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cost_of_extending_platform_at_wa.
ROLLING STOCK
Abellio Greater Anglia plans to refresh a further 26 of its class 321 trains
Keywords: [GreaterAnglia]
As reported in [Snippets 267] Abellio Greater Anglia has paid for a minor 'refresh' 40 of Class 321 EMU trains. In [Snippets 268] it was reported that train owner Eversholt would perform a full refurbishment on another 30 of the trains (ten would be finished during the current franchise that ends in October 2016). Now Abellio has confirmed that it will pay to refresh another 26 units trains. This means that with the upgrade work carried out on some units when the franchise began in 2012 all of the 94 units used by Abellio will have had some kind of makeover in a four-year period.
STATIONS
£100,000 improvements promised for Newmarket station
Keywords: [NewmarketStation]
Abellio Greater Anglia in partnership with Newmarket Racecourses, Jockey Club Estates, Tattersalls, Suffolk County Council and Suffolk Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty will be investing £100,000 to improve facilities at Newmarket station. The aim will be to smarten up the station (platforms will also be jet-washed and the edging has been repainted), carry out some repairs (the car park repaired and relined, and landscaping on the approach to the station will be improved) and make it more attractive to visitors (hanging baskets and planters will also be installed on the platforms). There will also be improved passenger faculties. A new LED customer service screen will replace the old tube-based screen and for the first time there will be a ticket vending machine (card-only to avoid thieves attacking it for cash) where tickets bought online can also be collected.
The justification for the external funding is to "create an improved gateway" to the town, which has become synonymous with horse racing. All signs at the station will be replaced with ones that say "Newmarket - Home of Horse Racing".
Cambridgeshire County Council releases passenger flow study of new Cambridge Science Park station to justify lack of canopies
Keywords: [CambridgeNorthStation]
Railfuture was very disturbed to find out from Cambridgeshire County Council that the new Cambridge Science Park station, like the Cambridge station island platforms that opened in 2012, will not have canopies along the entire length of the 12-car platforms (designed to be 254 metres long). With a budget of £44 million there is no excuse for minimal cost-cutting that makes passengers suffer. No shop would expect its customers to stand in the cold once they have walked through its front door so why should passengers? They should be under cover throughout.
It appears that there will only be a continuous canopy next to three out of the (potential) 12 carriages on the train. It appears that none of the consultants have considered that in bad weather passengers will bunch up beside the carriages nearest to the canopy and footbridge, which will increase the dwell time for the trains at the station as many people try to alight and board from a few doors and block each other's way. It seems incredible that money is being spent in London to provide information to passengers at stations about the least crowded carriages to even out the flow and reduce dwell time and yet at Cambridge North exactly the opposite scenario is deliberately being created.
The council has now released a document (defined as a "technical note") produced in 4th August 2015 by Atkins that reveals the projected passenger numbers and how this will affect the platform usage. The document attempts to justify the lack of canopies up to 2026 believing that few passengers will be waiting very long on the platform. They say "it is highly likely that passengers will utilise the ticket hall facilities and move to platform in line with train announcements" but that really depends on the size and scope of those facilities including where the tickets barriers are located. They also believe that the over-bridge would be used by passengers to wait during bad weather. In case these assumptions are flawed, in the "Key Findings" section the consultants claim that "Analysis undertaken represents a worse case of all boarding passengers waiting on the platform. Based on the anticipated forecasted demand there is sufficient sheltered area available to passengers to wait on platform areas, with additional space provided on over-bridge and ticket hall. On Platform 3 train will be terminating, therefore boarding passengers can arrive from the over-bridge, and dwell within the train, reducing canopy requirements." Railfuture asks whether these consultants considered passenger behaviour when trains are delayed. Another omission is that the consultants seem to believe that all passengers using the station will board or alight rather than interchange there, with interchanges presumably being done at Cambridge station. However, this is false thinking. Passengers are quite likely to board a train that will terminate at the bay platform in the new station before switching to a train heading to Waterbeach, Ely, and beyond, especially if they have started from London.
The total daily demand, which assumes after 10 years (2026) mere two million journeys a year to/from the station, is based on 6,623 two-way trips throughout the day, which assumes that the same number of people board trains as alight (3,312 for each). As with trains generally it assumes the morning peak period occurs over a shorter period of time (as people arrive at work between say, 07:30 and 09:30) but the evening peak period is spread out more (some people work late to get work done and others socialise with colleagues). Therefore the busiest boarding period will be the morning - it estimates that 17% of passengers will arrive at the new station before 10:00. The consultants have made some statistically dubious assumptions such as the pattern of pedestrians arriving at the station can be inferred from the studying the car park usage at Cambridge station.
The consultants have assumed that approximately the same number of people will use it as a departure station than as an arrival station. This makes sense as despite the new station serving a large number of offices at the Business Park, St John's Innovation Centre and Science Park, it will also attract a lot of people in the north of Cambridge (and those on the route of the guided busway from St Ives) to use the station to get to London and other destinations such as Stansted Airport.
| Tables 3 and 4 combined - Boarding and Alighting Demand assumed equal | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Demand for each (2026) | Platform 1 (60%) | Platform 2/3 (40%) | % |
| Daily Demand (3,312) | 1,987 | 1,325 | 100% |
| AM Peak Period (07:00 - 10:00) | 338 | 225 | 17% |
| AM Peak Hour (For calculations) | 162 | 108 | 48% |
| AM 15min (For calculations) | 44 | 29 | 27% |
| AM Peak Minute (For calculations) | 3 | 2 | 10% |
The consultants also considered the how many passengers would board the busiest train of the train frequency were reduced (they considered six, five, and four trains per hour) and worked out the space needed for passengers (assuming each occupied 0.65 square metres), and they also considered patronage up to 50% above the 2026 prediction. Again the consultant's work seemed dubious as they treated all trains equally and did not consider that some trains would be more popular than others because of their destination or length of journey, and possibly even differential pricing. They made no mention of the effect of 'cliff edge' fares whereby the first train on which discounted fares can be used may actually be one of the busiest of the day. Unsurprisingly every one of the consultants' published tests, based on the criteria and figures chosen, showed that there would be ample space for passengers. But did they sanity check any of these results by looking at the number of passengers and how they behave on the platforms at Cambridge station?
RAIL ROUTES
Public consultation for Crossrail 2 opens and it could bring benefits to East Anglia
Keywords: [Crossrail2]
On 29th October the public consultation began for Crossrail 2, the cross-London railway that, if built, would connect the railway lines in Surrey and Hertfordshire via new tunnels running from Wimbledon to Tottenham. The Cambridge News had a feature on this scheme, even though it will never reach Cambridgeshire, because it would bring improvements for Cambridge travellers using crowded peak-time trains on the Cambridge-Stansted Airport rail corridor. Because there are only two tracks on the West Anglia Main Line it restricts the ability to timetable a mixture of fast, semi-fast and stopping suburban services. The problem would be eased if the latter services ran on the two added tracks on the West Anglia line between Broxbourne and Tottenham that the proposed Crossrail 2 would deliver, thereby separating suburban from faster trains and allowing additional long-distance services to operate. Transport for London's Michèle Dix believes that Cambridge-area businesses in tech and other industries who rely in part on London-based staff will benefit as getting to Cambridge will be easier than it is now. However, the opening date is likely to be around 2030, even if tunnelling begins in 2020, and those businesses cannot wait that long.
PRESERVED RAILWAYS
Mid-Norfolk Railway used again to service rail-head treatment trains during leaf-fall season
Keywords: [MidNorfolkRailway]
After a break of several years, when another facility was used instead, the Mid-Norfolk Railway's facilities are being used to service the rail-head treatment trains that run on the East Anglian rail network and are operated by railfreight company DRS from Stowmarket. Trains visit the MNR about four times a week, starting from early October and will run until early December 2015. This provides very welcome income for the MNR especially as it coincides with its quiet period in terms of passenger trains. Unfortunately a train derailed at the junction to the mainline at Wymondham. This was actually on the short section of track managed by Network Rail and they had re-rail the train and repair the track rather than the MNR.
Railfuture East Anglia Branch News Snippets 271 - 31/10/2015
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