UK mileage

[NickBrad]

Hi, can anyone give me an approximate answer to how many miles of track there is currently on the UK railway network.

[slipdigby]

10,274 miles in Great Britain and 207 miles in Northern Ireland, give or take a few bits and bobs (so says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_trans ... at_Britain and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_Railways).

Slip

[johncard]

Could you imagine the hell that would have been travelling around the UK today if Beeching 2 was implemented. I dunno about creaking, the WCML would be sagging. As would the motorways.

I assume the Tyne Valley would be upgraded with the kinks ironed out, the M40 would be 10 lanes wide, the T&W Metro would be a little more, errrm, extensive (think Morpeth)...

[NickBrad]

Cheers Slip, I spent ages looking, obviously not in the right places though.

[arabiandisco]

That figure will be route miles, rather than track miles (which I think is somewhere around the 30k mark).

/pedant

[hitch840]

That figure will be route miles, rather than track miles (which I think is somewhere around the 30k mark).

/pedant

This is true, remember to take into account sidings, yards and depots etc, and anywhere where track would exist.

[dikkidee]

If Thatcher's Tory Government had got there way in the early 1980's they would have reduced it even further to just under 3000 miles. I saw the plans, it was devastating for example East Anglia would have been London Liverpool Street to Norwich and thats it no branches nothing, Kings Cross to Cambridge, again no branches nothing north of Cambridge into East Anglia Lincolnshire and the fens totally devoid. Euston to Glasgow and Kings Cross to Edinburgh just two spines with nothing going off them, nothing to Manchester, Liverpool or into Wales, Paddington to Bristol again just a spine and just the Southern Suburban Service around London. Nothing in Scotland other than the aforementioned spines to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Thanks goodness someone saw sense - perhaps the Road Hauliers Association had a hand in this crackpot idea, wonder who the shareholders might have been???.

Regards, Dick.

[mattvince]

The rule is - all Governments have their interest groups, the current one being the airline lobby: note how readily HMG proposed demolishing the entire village of Sipson, including 700 homes and a primary school, and blighting more areas of West London with continual aircraft noise for 16 hours-a-day - to say nothing of the pollution and destruction of wildlife habitats. Possibly correlated to the interests of the airlines are the high premiums being charged of inter-city type operators leading to high walk-on fares - and a consequent growth in the domestic air market.

And, unfortunately, the road industry (and other related industries) has long been accused of conspiracies when it comes to other modes (General Motors being the biggest company convicted of such behaviour). How many true accusations there are will remain in discussion, but certainly we should be concerned by vested interests being advanced ahead of the best interests of the people, or indeed the planet.