Badger wrote:Kevo00 wrote:Ameecher wrote:But you would have to keep closing the ECML every weekend for the next couple of years to "simply" move the stanchions.
If they worked nights, when the electric trains don't run, they could speed the process up somewhat.
Except for the freight, ECS and positioning moves ....... If you're working on the overheads, that means no trains, regardless of what powers them.
Well, I've been on trains on the continent where they've been doing engineering work, and they work on one line at a time and just run single line past the construction site....and that was on electrified lines. On the 4 line bits, surely they could virtually carry on as normal overnight using two lines.
JGR wrote:Some obscenely large integer, most likely. Not to mention the rail-time wasted.
I very much doubt that it would be sorted (in that way at least) in a private industry. It's just not cost effective to re-do the whole line's electrification.
It'd be more realistic to just fix any glaringly bad bits, and maybe fiddle the line tension if it's still sagging too much.
Well, its often quoted that it cost about £300m in the late 1980s for BR to electrify. I put that into measuringworth.com to convert that to present day prices and thats £977m in terms of share of GDP, which is their most pessimistic indicator. I agree that's not cheap, but its pretty cheap in the modern day NR scheme of things, and it should be cheaper than that, because you'd be re-using the present equipment. I don't see why a gradual fix couldn't be included in the ECML maintenance budget, say £100m a year over ten years.
Why should they fix it? Because firstly we're always being told (and even were being told at the time the original work was done) that extreme weather will become more common in the future, because secondly the bill to fix it each time is probably quite large, and thirdly the disruption caused to the economy and the railway's reputation will get worse every time. The railway has fought hard to win its customers back; in a just in time world, do freight customers really want that disruption? Erm no. And passengers even less so.
Back in the days when they still carried first class post by train, I spent a summer working for a company in Durham opening their post in the morning - one night, in August, there were high winds on the ECML and the wires came down. The company had to pay us all overtime for the extra time we had to hang around even before the post came in - great for me maybe, not so good for their bottom line. Interestingly it was only a couple of years after that that Royal Mail suddenly decided to stop using rail altogether...a major blow for EWS.
In comparison to other electrified lines that is.
