Congratulations to engineers working during holidays

The public are complaining about the near-total shutdown of Britain's railways over the holiday period. It is an inconvenience, but allows Network Rail to carry out major projects in one go which would otherwise take months and cost a lot more. It takes a lot of time to bring equipment to the site and clear up afterwards, so this makes sense. People would complain even more if the system was allowed to fall to pieces.

Congratulations to the people who have given up their holiday period to do this essential work.

The imagined inadequacies of Göteborg C

The key flaw in the argument for Västlänken is that Göteborg C is a terminal and consequently dysfunctional.

This needs to be looked at in proportion. Göteborg C occupies a larger area than London Waterloo, also a terminus. Waterloo has only four tracks running into it, and the line is in fact only four tracks all the way from Basingstoke, about 60 km away, carrying both long-distance and commuter services. The approach to the station, on a viaduct, cannot be widened as there are buildings on both sides. The length of the platforms, mostly 180 metres, means that trains have only 8 cars, and remember that these are only 20 metres long ie 8 x 20 metres. Yet the station successfully handles 96 million passengers a year.

Göteborg C also has the advantage of six approach tracks. So any suggestion that Göteborg C, possibly with some enlargement, cannot handle all the traffic that is likely to use it with the next 50 years is ludicrous. At present there are only about 20 arrivals within the peak-hour period 0700 to 0800.

And as mentioned in an earlier blog, of the five routes approaching the city, there is no obvious pair to join up.

Two into five won't go

Railways approach Göteborg from five different directions. Starting from the twelve o'clock position, these are Strömstad-Uddevalla, Trollhattan-Älvängen, Stockholm-Alingsås, Borås and Copenhagen-Kungsbacka. There is no route across the city which has a significantly greater traffic potential than any other, and the connect must necessarily be arbitrary. Whichever lines are joined by a cross-city link, most journeys through the city centre will inevitably require a change just as they do now. If services from the two lines from the north continue onto the one line from the south, the result will be that the southern line will be unnecessarily congested and the potential traffic will be insufficient for the service provided. Or half the trains will have to turn round and go back.

A further drawback is that passengers travelling to and from the south to the city centre and northwards will actually experience longer journey times due to the detour they will now be making through having to make a trip all the way round the city centre through the expensively constructed tunnels.

In these circumstances, there is only thing to be gained from constructing a cross city link, is the reduction in the number of trains terminating at the central station, and the associated costs of platform occupation and train movements.

Against that is the disadvantage of joining separate networks: that delays and disruption are propagated from one network to another. A failure at, say, Alingsås will lead to cancellations at Kungsbacka an hour or so later. This was precisely the experience with London Thameslink, a long-distance cross-city route.