Train service thoughts

Having been away throughts do come a bit to transport as for many a decade the notion of getting further in less time has interested railway commentators and the people who dream of and design railway systems such as the ill-fated Inter-City 125 High Speed Train of the late 70's and early 80's, a idea that was obselete before the first engine was fully assembled.

Britain as a country is a mainly urban and inter-urban one with only Scotland having significant highly seperate rural communities, followed by Central Wales and then patches such as the Lake District in Westmoreland.

As a West Midlander, my region is highly urbanized from here in North Staffordshire, The Black Country, Birmingham of course and Coventry-Nuneaton so local stops are really quite important to getting about and dealing with the road traffic congestion we see every day.

The Marches are different with smaller villages between towns but in the main they are on a few lines that run from major centres such as Telford, Wolverhampton and Brum plus Crewe into the nearby bigger towns of Wales so again local stops matter, this time as part of the connectivity across Shropshire, Hereford and Worcestershire.

For us a high speed limited stop system doesn't really offer much and if anything issues around capacity on the lines cause problems especially when trains are delayed which is what happened while away recently.

Increasing that capacity by using the space that exists to reinstate an extra pair of tracks would achieve more for us than the much talked about, ever increasingly way over budget  and delayed HS2 system with dedicated trains going over very limited stops and track from London to Manchester in the North.

That would improve punctuality and enable small improvements on the premium pair of lines when it comes to speed that matter more on cross-country services while allowing services valued for local connections to run without some of the conflicts operationally speaking we presently have.