please empty your brain below

Insta-comment:
(1) Total waste of money
(2a) Bloody Sadiq
(2b) Bloody Boris
(3) Damned shame
(4) Good riddance
(5) Nobody cares
It's a 3 from me. :-(
Is the route and land safeguarded in case someone eventually comes up with the money and decides it's worth building after all?
For a friend of mine, it's a 4 - he lives near to the existing Watford LU station and happy to keep his station.
3 And 2b, although that has nothing to do with this posting.
2a, 2b & 3.
I blame LUL for loading the scheme with non-related costs, ie upgrade of electical supply for Met Line.
Totally agree with Martin @ 7.09am, failure to safeguard routes post Beeching has cost a fortune. Has anyone got any idea how much money has been lost (rather than squandered - too emotive a term for what was a good idea till the funds ran out) now the decision has been taken to totally cease work? It's a 3 from me.
6. What a xxxxing mess
Can we have a (2c) for bloody Osborne please?
(and a big (3) from me too)
Croxleyrail - out of time and off budget!
What would it take to install some sort of light rail/tram/guided bus route, rather than a full Underground extension?

Is that the sort of project Watford could do by itself?

dg writes: No, it's entirely impractical.
I'd vote a 10 for Len
(3)
2b and 3.

I walk to the Vic over the pointless bridge on Tom Sawyer way on a matchday and think about what might have been.

I often wonder the same thing walking back in the other direction, but for football reasons....

Had Watford been in Greater London, we'd be riding these trains by now.
I wonder how Johnson is to be blamed on this one. Wasting money on useless stuff? Advocating for a disastrous or even malicious movement?
Oops - I meant 2a and 3!

This is one of the few things I don't blme Boris for. Electoral maths meant he was quite keen on this one.
I fear for the Bakerloo line extension as well. That one doesn't even have funding as far as I am aware.
(3), meanwhile Watford's traffic worsens, Watford General Hospital's patients (and emergency visitors, not to mention football fans) struggle to get to where they want to be...
a) Given the amount allegedly spent on it what did they spend it on?
b) In reality wasn't is always obvious that to do this to modern standards not Victorian branch line standards would require essentially an expensive embankment for most of its length?
And all over the country, in non-large-city areas, the same situation was repeated.
Is allready known what the future of the line will be? In other countries such former rail lines are often converted to bike lanes or used for draisines. So they can be reconverted to rail.

E.g. railbike.be/fr/railbike.aspx or balkantrasse.de/die-balkantrasse
One former rail line between Matlock and Buxton has been (most of it) converted to a very popular cycle route and is thereby unavailable for reconversion to rail, though such reconversion might otherwise be a good way of getting freight off the roads. There may be others similar.
Financially it would never work - the extra farebox would barely pay the drivers, let alone any capital pay-off.

The original viaduct was to have been made to not resonate: the final (cheap) design would have been terrible - reverberation + flange squeal, well within earshot.

Cinnamond is not safe - it's in the District Plan for housing... Would a rail corridor along its side be safeguarded?

The Croxley BR station will likely be built on (no thanks) - will the old viaduct be demolished (yes please)?

Originally two extra trains were proposed to maintain the current service level: that quietly dropped to one so extra morning & evening semi-fast services would have vanished.

So Croxley-ites are likely better off without it!

The MLX would have been useful as a "diversionary" route from the WCML into London when the chaos of re-building Euston for HS2 takes place: people hate Bus-stitution which has to be from Hemel Hempstead. Or maybe the East-West link from Bletchley would provide this service, but when will that be running (via Aylesbury)?
I doubt the MLX could have been used as a diversionary route for West Coast Main Line services - the signalling on the MLX would have been to London Underground standards, requiring all trains to have tripcocks fitted (as the Chiltern trains operating through Amersham do, but Pendolinos, Voyagers etc do not). There is also the matter of electrification, not to mention that Marylebone has not got enough capacity.
I had understood that part of the cost was on 2 additional S Stock trains which are now in service?

Anyhoo I think it would have brought a number of social and economic benefits, not all of which are easily quantifiable in accounting terms.

The project is dead because

1. It was too expensive - for a relatively short line the minimal cost was still very high
2. It wasn't in London proper, so Sadiq din't care who he was upsetting in cancelling it
3. As DG says, the BCR was weak. It doesn't matter how much "good" it would have done if that good cannot be measured.

In sunnier economic climes, with the right mayors (Watord and London), the right chancellor, and the right local MP, and a slightly different funding mechanism (with some of the cost borne by the developers of the Health Campus), this would be happening. As it is, this project is dead and it will never, ever happen in any form. In 20 years it'll be some kind of cycle path.

Such a massive shame.
A shame but always an awkward scheme for TfL to justify unless they were flush with cash, as the benefit was basically all for the residents of a town outside of London.
Well id HCC and WBC want to commit some S106 cash into the scheme it would proceed but they still have to convince the Treasure, DfT and TfL os the benefits of it. The District Hospital, Campus, huge number of new homes and shops dont seem enough though?










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