• Plans to run West Midlands trams to Dudley delayed: Video (Transport Matters)
• Edinburgh should reopen its ghost line (A Letter from Scotland)
• New Plans to Accelerate Development of High-Speed Rail Across EU (Railway-News)
• Philly’s Weird, Undefinable Train: Video (Trains Are Awesome)
• The Badner Bahn: Vienna’s Only Tram-Train Line: Video (TSF Transport)
• When is the brain like a subway station? (Eureka Alert)
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Feels like now is the time for a Project Oval update and discussion.
Ianvisits, Diamond Geezer and others have partially covered the subject due to Stansted expansion but there is probably mileage for a discussion here, to cover ticketing changes and concerns, gaps e.g. Horsham via both Dorking and Gatwick/Crawley and Reading/Gatwick being contactless at both ends but not in-between–challenges both ways on that to achieve a fair fare calculation for that route–and what’s next.
the tiniest critique about the Edinburgh tram-train article:
It would be great if the map would include the name of existing stations.
Sure, anyone even remotely familiar with Edinburgh will most likely already know them, but anyone unfamiliar really needs to look at another map to find the station(s) and whichever busy section the text mentions.
Otherwise it seems like a great idea.
How about a pilot project? I.E. rent a few tram-trains during off-peak season from somewhere in for example Germany, and do a trial? Sure, it would cost money not only to transport the trams to/from Edinburgh, but a track connection (unless some usable connection already exists) between the tram network and the mainline network is needed, and some sort of reversing spur / switches / points would be needed where the proposed diverging to new tram tracks would be if this would go ahead for real. And obviously also some kind of platforms, but those could be really basic.
I would think that one of the most expensive things would be to put up fences between the two tracks at stations, as that might require moving tracks further apart (so anyone ending up between a train and the fence won’t get crushed). I know that in the UK people generally follow rules for not trespassing onto the tracks, but if the platform edges are low height for trams and it would be a really long walk to cross the tracks the correct way it will likely seem very inviting to just cross the tracks where you aren’t supposed to.
Or for that sake just have real level crossings for pedestrians. Since the article mentions a few daily freight trains it would mostly be trams.
P.S. the EU high speed article has a funny typo, where they accidentally wrote that the target speed would be like 2250km/h or something similar. 😀
@MiaM
We always strive to find and link to articles with maps, and the best map we can find if there are multiple such articles to choose from. But we are limited as to choice. LBM