I suspect we all admire those who dedicate their own time to re-opening closed railway lines.
The motivations may be nostalgia and an interest in railway heritage, or an ambition to be re-connected to the national network with a ‘proper’ train service. Sometimes promoters want both, as in the Wisbech-March case . And why not? The funding routes are very different, and who knows at the outset which is most likely to succeed?
The Wisbech (Bramley Line) preservation group was launched in 2003. Positive support for service reinstatement (centred on commuting to Cambridge) from the county council, seeking redress for its own version of a north-south divide, came later.
Wisbech re-opening had already appeared in the Virgin/Stagecoach bid for the Intercity East Coast franchise in 2000 - the bid that had everything in it to challenge the incumbent franchisee GNER, to whom Sir Alastair Morton was intent on granting a long-term 20-year deal. In those days the ‘Peterborough Effect’ still had currency, so any feeder traffic to the trunk line seemed worth exploring. And as Tom Ingall points out, this was the year when freight use of the line finally disappeared. What could be so hard about introducing a passenger service?
Level crossings is the main answer - over 20 of them, large and small. Wisbech bypass (A47) will need to be bridged to access the town centre, it seems. And there is a worry about rail route capacity through Ely, although that problem may yet be solved by the Freight Network Study.
Creating a simple passenger service on a flat, level nine-mile right of way comes out at an astonishing capital cost of £100 million. The alarm bells are ringing - there had better be good evidence on benefits… and proper consideration of alternatives. On these key subjects, we are told very little.
The closest we get is the ATOC estimate in its 2009 Connecting Communities study, which found a Benefit:Cost ratio of 1.1:1. But back then ATOC had the capital costs at a paltry £12m. I recall the Rail Minister at the time (Andrew Adonis) greeting the ATOC report with scepticism, despite his own local rail service campaigning in the past. Why (he asked) was there such enthusiasm to restore old railway lines which typically had closed from lack of use, when we required backing for new lines where they were most needed?
What the ATOC report was primarily interested in (and Wisbech was a good example) was reconnecting places that had dropped off the railway map, and that usually means building or restoring a branch line. But as Professor Mark Casson has pointed out in The World’s First Railway System (OUP, 2009), branch lines were the bane of Britain’s rail network, not its strength. Secondary lines in the planned rail networks of continental Europe typically connected at both ends, at junctions with main lines.
A recent study by Greengauge 21 into the case for re-opening the ex-LSWR route between Exeter and Plymouth serves to highlight the importance of avoiding branch lines that don’t link at both ends. The study contrasted the current plan to open the route from Bere Alston to Tavistock (which would create two disconnected high-subsidy branch lines - Exeter-Okehampton and Plymouth-Tavistock) with a complete through route Plymouth-Tavistock-Okehampton-Exeter. Instead of two town/city pair connections, there are six - plus a diversionary route into the bargain. The benefits start to multiply. Through service to Waterloo anyone?
Take another example: East West Rail, the link between Oxford and Cambridge. I don’t want to discourage, but as long ago as 1994 I was engaged in the first study of this project by the multiple local authorities that the line serves (Ipswich BC was in the lead).
Here, the first (easy) stage involves re-opening an out-of-use line between Bicester and Bletchley. As with the Devon example, this connects two big places (Milton Keynes and Oxford) that are both parts of the national rail network already, as well as serving some key intermediate towns. It improves overall network coherence, providing a diversionary route for freight and even (DfT has mused) for long-distance cross-country trains as well as local services. Yet 22 years on, funding is still not in place.
Wisbech was on not one but two through routes. The March-Wisbech line extended to Watlington, on the Ely-Kings Lynn line. How much more worthwhile would route restoration be if it allowed Peterborough-Wisbech-Kings Lynn trains as well as Wisbech-Cambridge? OK, the cost would double, and penetration to Wisbech town centre would have to be ruled out, but the benefits could be so much greater. Kings Lynn-Birmingham New Street, anyone?
But we are assessing at this point a simple branch from March to Wisbech, designed to support (it is hoped) a new Wisbech-March-Ely-Cambridge train service. To make the investment case, I suspect it will be essential to think strategically and for Cambridgeshire County Council to find a way to commit to significant housing expansion in Wisbech, scoped (in part, at least) to respond to the Cambridge growth phenomenon. Meanwhile, let’s go back to that question of lower-cost alternatives.
Nowhere does Tom provide an account of the public transport that is currently on offer at Wisbech, or a discussion of how it could be improved. Surely there are some much lower-cost options that would have to be put up for comparison? After all, bus services, over distances like Wisbech-March/Kings Lynn/Peterborough are generally commercially viable and subsidy-free.
What’s on offer may surprise some readers. For starters there’s a half-hourly FirstGroup X1 express bus that links Norwich, Dereham, Lynn, Wisbech and Peterborough (the last two linked in just over 40 minutes). And then there are Stagecoach local routes 46 and 56 from Wisbech to March serving intermediate places, each running hourly through the day.
Can you commute from Wisbech to Cambridge? Yes, take the 0650 bus to March, and after a 13-minute connection take the 0731 train that gets into Cambridge at 0810.
The idea is that a re-opened railway could shorten the bus leg of this journey and potentially take out the need to interchange, taking 20 minutes off the journey time, leaving an hour’s commute. But what if the Wisbech-March bus segment was part of the Anglia Railways franchise, with through ticketing, a speeded-up bus journey and guaranteed timetable connections with facilities for luggage and disabled access, too? Dreamland? No. Standard practice in many European countries.
