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The Ely upgrade

Was mentioned around here in comments a few days back:

Transport bosses fear that a rail upgrade crucial to improving trade links between the North and South of Britain may fail to win vital funding in Rachel Reeves’s Budget.

The Ely Junction project in Cambridgeshire would remove the bottleneck facing the 5m containers that enter Britain through Felixstowe, Suffolk, the country’s biggest port, each year.

Much as HS2 aims to speed up passenger journeys bypassing the West Coast Main Line, upgrading the junction could speed up container traffic on the rails coming from Felixstowe.

So, what will be more important? Paying £300 bonuses to train gaurds for turning up to work? Or doing this junction? And, of course, isn’t politics such a great way to allocate resources when that can even be a reasonable question?

8 thoughts on “The Ely upgrade”

  1. Nice spot, Ely. Lovely cathedral. There’s a private school that an acquaintance swears saved his stepson from a deep educational malaise. (“King’s Ely can trace its origins from at least 970 AD …” – though shouldn’t that be “at most”?)

    Before Covid a friend used to drive out to Ely to catch the London train because if she boarded in Cambridge she’d rarely get a seat.

    There is one fly in the ointment of course. A stupid, ignorant, malevolent, near insane fly.)

  2. The same argument can be made against this proposal as for road projects; it’ll simply push problems along to the next bottleneck. We made the strategic decision to remove the bulk of the rail network decades ago. Move on.

  3. What a daft argument, PJF. If you are referring to the Beeching report, as implemented by Wilson’s Labour government (rather than “we”), it was written long before the rise of Felixstowe.

  4. A daft argument yourself, dearieme. Beeching was before lots of things but that doesn’t change the fact that the rump rail network is unsuitable for heavy goods traffic and (as HS2 shows us) major new rail projects are a form of insanity.

    If private freight companies can raise private finance to improve Ely Junction then the government shouldn’t stand in their way. But they won’t do it themselves because they know it won’t improve much in isolation. It’s cheaper for them to carry on using lorries along the A14, a nonstop dual carriageway connecting the port to the A1, the M1 and the M6.

  5. Quote – “remove the bottleneck facing the 5m containers that enter Britain through Felixstowe, Suffolk, the country’s biggest port, each year.”

    Which is, of course, essential for the supply of that famously landlocked nation of Scotland which depends on everything being supplied through England.

  6. “the rump rail network is unsuitable for heavy goods traffic”: but in that case why does Ely present a bottleneck? Why are goods routed to the midlands via London?

    “as HS2 shows us … major new rail projects are a form of insanity”: no, it only shows that HS2 is a form of insanity.

    I’ve no idea whether an Ely project would give a decent return on investment but I’m damned if I see any point in refusing to assess it on the grounds that HS2 is lunatic.

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