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East Anglia Branch News - Snippets Issue 315 - 30/06/2019

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News from the East Anglian Branch of Railfuture, Edited by Martin Thorne and Jerry Alderson.

Railfuture News Snippets 315 - 30/06/2019



Railfuture East Anglia has set a date for its end-of-year meeting in Cambridge. It will be at 14:00 on Saturday 7th December 2019 in the Parish Meeting Room at Little St Mary's Church, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1QG. This is a return to the venue regularly used in the past, and it is now serviced by improved bus services from Cambridge station and the Madingley Road P&R site.


STATIONS
Plans to improve Whittlesford Parkway station out to consultation

Keywords: [WhittlesfordParkwayStation]

A six-week public consultation on more than 30 possible improvements at and around Whittlesford Parkway station commenced on 10th June 2019. Many of the wide variety of proposals in the Whittlesford Transport Masterplan concern making it easier to reach the station on foot, using a bicycle or by public transport. This includes better car and cycle parking, introducing a bus turning circle and changes to surrounding roads to make it easier to get in and out of the station.

According to a press release, Cllr Lewis Herbert, Chair of Greater Cambridge Partnership, said: "We want to transform Whittlesford Parkway into a genuine travel hub where people can quickly and easily change between rail, car, and bicycle to help them get about around. We want people to travel more sustainably wherever possible, so I ask people to take the time to tell us what they think about these measures." Research has found that many station users travel in from Sawston, Duxford and Haverhill as well as from Whittlesford itself, and Railfuture is aware of people driving from close to Ipswich to make use of the cheaper rail fares to London. Patronage at the station has grown by more than 60% in a decade and facilities are now outdated — with bike racks and the car park constantly full — as Railfuture East Anglia identified when it did a station audit in November 2016. The rail user group, SAWRUG, which Railfuture helped to set-up soon after, reported that full-size buses were unable to serve the station because they can't turn around.

The Greater Cambridge Partnership, which will fund some of the improvements at Whittlesford Parkway, is also working closely with partners to support plans for a new Cambridge South station that will mean thousands of workers, patients and visitors can travel to the expanding Cambridge Biomedical Campus by train.


ROLLING STOCK
Greater Anglia aims to improve service performance with new technology that detects train damage earlier

Keywords: [GreaterAnglia]

Greater Anglia is investing in Automatic Vehicle Inspection Systems (AVIS) in its Orient Way and Southend Victoria sidings that will routinely check the condition of its trains when they are stabled there overnight or during the day. Once installed and operational. the equipment will measure damage and wear to wheels, check the wear on the pantographs and look at the condition of brake pads and discs and the profile of the train itself such as loose nuts and high temperatures.

Inspection of the trains will not be performed by its staff when the train is stationary, but when the full-length train is moving (at 3mph) through the carriage washer by the equipment, which will be built into the track bed and also installed on a gantry. The AVIS system, which will only be used on its Aventra commuter trains, works via remote monitoring and feeds back faults that need fixing via a data link to the train maintainer Bombardier. This should enable faults to be identified and fixed more quickly therefore preventing delays and cancellations while the trains are in service and avoid a shortage of trains in service because they are being repaired.


RAIL ROUTES
Network Rail paints rails and signalling cabinets painted whote to keep cool during high temperatures

Keywords: [ThameslinkProgramme]

Network Rail, supported by Greater Anglia, is proactively taking precautions against potential caused by the high summer temperatures that are forecast for East Anglia. This primarily relates to rails buckling as they expand in the heat either causing speed restrictions to be imposed or, in the worst scenario, closing tracks and routes. Track circuit failures, which arise the electrical current passing along the rail fails to be properly detected, can also occur. When the air temperature is 30 degrees, the temperature on the rail can be up to 20 degrees higher, which is the limit to which the continuously-welded rail has been stressed to cope with. Exceedingly low temperatures can cause the opposite effect although this is associated more with countries such as Russia rather than Britain.

To reflect rather than absorb the sun's rays, Network Rail has painted rails white at critical points around the network including at Norwich, Colchester, Ipswich and Shenfield, which are major locations on Greater Anglia's network. The white paint can keep the rail between 5 and 10 degrees cooler than an unpainted rail, reducing expansion and helping to prevent signalling problems and buckled rails. Network Rail is also keeping equipment cabinets cool with white paint and clearing vegetation and debris to prevent lineside fires.


RAIL FREIGHT
GB Railfreight to reopen disused sidings at March for stabling and servicing freight wagons

Keywords: [MarchFreightYard]

Operator GB Railfreight (GBRf) as secured a lease from Network Rail to operate in the disused March Up Yard rail sidings, which is located beyond the level crossing to the east of March station. It plans to stable and maintain its rolling stock there. The up yard (on the northern side), can cope with 320-metre-long trains and provides extra capacity, as GBRf is already using the Down Yard on the south side. Essentially, the two yards are on either side of the of the Ely (up) to Peterborough (down) main lines.

March is conveniently located on the route used on freight trains between Middleton Towers (east of Kings Lynn) and Yorkshire, to carry aggregates between the Peak District and East Anglia, and for container traffic from the Port of Felixstowe. The servicing of wagons there will avoid running trains several hundred empty miles each week, reducing both costs and emissions. It will also reduce congestion elsewhere along our routes and assist with timetabling flexibility, improving performance overall. GBRf has been operating Whitemoor Yard, to the north west of March station, for Network Rail since it reopened in 2004.

During privatisation in the 1990s, all of the British Rail freight facilities were sold off to individual freight operating companies, and often fell into disuse when traffic dried up. Network Rail had included March Up Yard in its 2014 freight estate acquisition portfolio when it decided to purchase various sites in the clear anticipation that it would have future use.


RAIL FRANCHISES
Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, James Palmer loses patience with CrossCountry over lack of any improvements

Keywords: [CrossCountryFranchise]

In a challenge to the Department for Transport, and taking its lead from devolved organisations such as Transport for the North, the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, James Palmer, is calling on Government to allow the Combined Authority to have sign-off rights in the awarding of any new rail franchises covering the area. He has written to the Rail Minister Andrew Jones MP to set up a meeting including train operator CrossCountry and Network Rail, as part of his attempts to secure better services to Fenland stations at Manea, March and Whittlesey.

The Mayor has been continually frustrated in attempts to bring forward a package of improvement to rail services at Fenland stations, having pushed for CrossCountry's Stansted Airport to Birmingham service, which runs via Ely and Peterborough to be expanded to give people in Fenland greater opportunity to access jobs in Cambridge and London via rail. Currently few of the services stop at Whittlesea and Manea stations (none at Cambridge North station), and do not run with enough frequency or late enough in the evenings to meet current ambitions. The lack of late trains, particularly between Cambridge and Peterborough, and early trains at weekends, is something that Railfuture has complained about for years. Mayor Palmer, taking advice from Railfuture about how a later service could operate, has proposed a rail 'shuttle' leaving Cambridge at around 21:30, arriving in Peterborough at 22.20, and then travel back to Cambridge, arriving at around 23:20, finally returning to Peterborough a little after midnight. Currently the latest CrossCountry train back to March from Cambridge from Monday to Friday is 21:01.

Mayor Palmer, who also wants the service to become half-hourly rather than hourly, was left exasperated by meetings with CrossCountry, whom he said were unwilling to come to the table with any service improvement, merely considering a review of services in in December 2021 (partly because of a national shortage of available rolling stock), hence his demand to have a say before a franchise, or extension to one, can be signed. The Combined Authority is bringing forward new stations at Soham and Cambridge South and putting a new rail link in to Wisbech. It is also delivering a series of improvements to upgrade facilities at our Fenland stations. However, these are local improvements that do not affect the wider network. The reality is that the government will not allow an individual or body (elected or otherwise) on part of a long-distance route to hold it to ransom.

The competition process for a new CrossCountry franchise was dropped in 2018 after the Government announced a root and branch review of rail in Britain, which became the so-called Williams Rail Review, in which Keith Williams is the independent chairman of a government review.


Railfuture East Anglia Branch News Snippets 315 - 30/06/2019

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