Croxley link cancelled

Thanks-if that's the case then Watford Met's current 5,150 per day use will increase to just over 5,264 per day, spread over the new stations.

Heady stuff indeed. No wonder there's talk of little else throughout the Home Counties.

Personally I prefer the Forest Moon of Endor. Much nicer climate.

When they close or downsize the hospital in St Albans they certainly will be wanting to get to Watford.

Going back through some old TfL paperwork it is worth noting that the business case overall remains a HCC responsibility (content.tfl.gov.uk/board-20150701-part-1-item12-croxley-rail-link.pdf refers). It is not transferred to TfL so interestingly HCC have to appease the DfT and goodness knows how they can do that with costs at the level they are now at.

This old TfL paper from 2011 shows a b/c ratio of 2.6:1 which isn't bad but that was for a constrained scheme. THe paper also notes that the revenue from the extension is hypothecated to pay off their contribution and then any excess is shared with LU. At this rate it'll take centuries to pay off their share.

Not that City station is any nearer to the centre!

The single biggest wedge of cash in the project is for the viaduct. It's not even that it's particularly ambitious.

When I alluded to crayonista stuff above, I was referring to the original comparison of scheme options which included a busway (possibly guided) to either Watford Met or Croxley (using the old goods yard). That meant a viaduct was not required, that a stopping point could be included within the hospital / football ground area instead of down and up a hill, and the possibility of running bus services around Croxley Business Park. It did mean possibly losing one of the two tracks that the London Overground service runs over, from High Street onwards only, of course. There would have been either two platforms for buses and two for trains or the busses would have run down a slope into the bus station at the front of the Junction. An advantage to that would have been using the dive-under to gain access to the Abbey Line and replacing that with a bus service that could form an East-West Herts Transport corridor that they keep going on about. Of course, the consultation / comparison was limited purely to the CRL part of the scheme.

I would say it's time to revisit that idea, despite how onerous guided busways are.

The UK will not see trolleybuses. There is no government support for a scheme that would involve costly unfamiliar infrastructure and most likely require restraint of competition to make it viable. If you can't get them in Leeds you certainly won't get them in Watford. You won't get light rail either in somewhere as insignificant as Watford. The Chancellor has no great enthusiasm for infrastructure spend other than that which he has inherited and cannot stop like HS2. He has far bigger risks to manage.

If Croxley Link is scrapped then the local councils have to take a view on how much money they are prepared to spend / waste on seeking new powers to construct something. I rather suspect that the view will be they don't want to spend any more money on anything remotely radical or challenging. TfL will no doubt be delighted to save resources and bank the £50m that had been allocated to the project.

Hydrogen powered hybrids? Do such things exist? Why burn the hydrogen to drive a motor/generator to generate electricity, when a fuel cell can convert the hydrogen to electricity directly without all that inefficient combustion, rotation, and electromagnetic induction.

Nearly all hydrogen powered vehicles in production use fuel cells. Petrol or diesel hybrids use internal combustion engines to generate electricity.

Internal-combustion hydrogen powered vehicles do also exist, but these deliver mechanical power directly for propulsion, rather than using it to make electricity. Here is a typical example

OK, the battery storage makes it a hybrid - indeed the ability to use an external electricity supply makes it a plug-in hybrid!

The liquid oxygen supply in Saturn V is not just for added oomph. Without it, there would be no oomph at all. Saturn V had to operate at up to 120 miles altitude. The record for an air-breathing aircraft is less than 20 miles - where the density of air is already only about 1% that at sea level.

A little. Is there any "guided bus" trackway that is combined with rails?

Isn't that an external-combustion engine rather than internal? Anyway, perhaps we'd better get back on topic.

Check out the 'Disused Stations' web page

So just to clarify - theres no more official progress on whether or not the scheme is going ahead yet. ?

This was looked at during the original studies.

Little more than a bit of musing but part of me wondered if given that the railway was already grade-separated (the disused line passed under the Met, a-la: karenswalks.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/070120122651.jpg?w=480&h=640), could not a link be made between that and the "fast" lines on the Met route, enabling fast services from Amersham to bypass Croxley and Ascot Road en route to Watford Junction. I doubt there would ever be sufficient capacity constraints, let alone demand to warrant it, but that's pretty much the only reason you would ever want to use that route as it serves nowhere worth stopping at.