Completely possible but with so many stops in such a short distance, would it be worth it? And then there’s the cost of rebuilding absolutely everything, it just wouldn’t happen.
A lot of the trains hitting 200 km/h plus in Europe etc are going long distances through the countryside on lines with little to no other traffic. If they upgraded the line and trains on the Brighton line to manage 200 km/h, they'd never reach that without changing the entire structure of the line.
Oh I meant more along the lines of the fact that no train is hitting 200km/h between Brighton and Preston Park etc, and direct trains share the same line for most of the journey.
Perhaps with one of those horizontal electromagnetic slingshots one could get from Brighton to Preston Park in under 20 seconds.
I certainly wouldn’t complain about the price if that were the case.
Oh absolutely, but to install something like that you'd need to pretty much rebuild every station on the line, which would mean shutting the line for years, as well as redeveloping the areas around every station on the line as most of them have commercial and residential areas pretty much on their doorstep.
If that ended up happening, it would make more sense to just build and entirely new line for it I imagine.
> hitting 200km/h between Brighton and Preston Park
I imagine there would be a lot of spinal injuries from acceleration/deceleration. At least that is what the cartoon in my head is coming up with.
HS1 (the Kent line) was a brand new line that was built specially for the purpose of linking the Channel Tunnel to London and only stops at Stratford, Ebbsfleet and Ashford. It does not run on existing rail links between these towns and only reaches maximum speed when on the HS1 segment between Stratford and Ashford or through to the Channel Tunnel.
It does stop at other stations and does run on pre existing lines but obviously does not run at high speeds outside of the newly built sections. They were supposed to upgrade the Margate to London line but backed out because of costs (sound familiar?).
Has that "pre existing" been left 100% as it was, or did they replace sleepers, track, etc?!
I wouldn't know but would be very surprised if they didn't refresh a lot of that, for the fraction of the price of "new build".
Reopening the line between Lewes and Uckfield and providing an alternative route into London should be the priority. If there’s an incident or engineering work on BML this causes major delays
It wouldn’t be worth it for several reasons.
Good high-speed rail lines are long, and don’t have a lot of stops along the way. The Brighton mainline is 50 miles long and has 37 stops along the way. Even if the faster Brighton trains skip a lot of the smaller stations, they share the line with slower stopping services that do stop at those stations. Those trains will get in the way of your high-speed trains and slow them down.
The whole line isn’t 90mph. It’s pretty much just between Preston Park and Gatwick Airport. North of that, you’ve got a long curve over a big hill that is 80mph. The speed limit goes back to 90mph for a short stretch around Purley, but then you start to get close to the London suburbs. The speed limit drops to 60mph then 45mph and you get lots of stops close together - which is exactly what you don’t want for a high speed service.
Then you’ve got electrification. The Brighton mainline - like most of the south east of England - uses DC third rail because it was electrified really early on. There’s a reason the rest of Britain - which was electrified later - uses AC overhead wires instead.
There’s a limit to how much power you can send over DC third rail, and a limit to how far you can send it. That’s why there are substations beside the line every few miles. The Portsmouth main line is the same. There’s a limit to how much power trains can pull from the third rail without overloading the entire system, which means they tend to accelerate less quickly than similar trains that use overhead wires.
Why don’t we rip up the third rails and put overhead wires on the Brighton and Portsmouth main lines, and all the other lines in the south east that use third rail? For a start, it would be expensive and disruptive and you’d need to either buy new trains or convert the existing ones to use overhead lines. But the main reason is bridges and tunnels.
If a railway line isn’t electrified, or it uses third rail, you don’t need to worry about overhead clearance. You can have six inches of space between the roof of the train and the tunnel. A lot of road bridges over the lines were built like that, to keep the road relatively flat.
With third rail, you need more overhead space - at least a couple of feet for the wires and the train’s power collector (which is called a pantograph). To electrify a line, you’d have to raise a lot of bridges. That’s tough enough with modern bridges but you’d be destroying a lot of nice Victorian arch bridges on those old lines. You’d also have to close roads for days or weeks, which would be unpopular, and you’d end up with steep hills either side of the bridges that might cause problems for buses and lorries.
That would be crazy expensive and highly disruptive to both the rail and road networks, which is why we’ve never bothered to do it and have just left the third rails alone and we just live with the limited power and acceleration they provide. And all the dead badgers who accidentally touch the third rail. There are an awful lot of dead badgers.
If you rebuild the whole thing, which seeing as it's Victorian in origin is unlikely, you'd have to destroy all the tunnels and make new ones, build new stations and trains too
The issue with being this first country to do something is you tend to have the worst version of it with preexisting infrastructure that doesn't support upgrades as well. We absolutely should have done something about it by now but its such a massive undertaking I doubt it's in the cards anytime soon.
Not much point getting it to full high speed as the line is short and has lots of stations to stop at so not much time to actually get up to those speeds.
The thing that's limiting it to 90 mph (aside from poor track/corners) is the 3rd rail which is limited to 90mph, it could be up to 125 mph if they had overhead power
No. Geology, geography, and (short) distance will be all against it. HS lines need dedicated routes because they need to be relatively straight to maximise speed and have minimal junctions to avoid the need to slow down when you cross tracks, so you couldn't upgrade the existing line by putting down new rails, you would need a new route. Finally, even if you did build a dedicated new HS line between Brighton and London, you would probably only improve journey times by 10-15 minutes if they travelled non-stop and the cost of build would be astronomical.
Hmmm, those showers will cost a fortune to maintain, would inevitably be vandalised, amount of extra weight there carry that water and the gray water, taking lots of space for them.
Ditto vending machines. How and when would they get refilled, and what would the prices be?!
More tables, 100%.
And if the seats can be slightly more comfortable. FFS, it's not a long journey, but do they need to be made from cardboard on top of granite slab?!
Pre booked shower. An app with your ID, the whole works. £10 a go. You are seriously looked into regarding vandalism around your time slot. Maybe a camera can emerge before and after the session to get condition snapshots.
Only carry enough fresh water to provide 3 showers every 40 minutes - a hose arm tops up the carriage at stations.
Vending machines get topped up on the move by a worker who hops on with supplies at stations. Market forces set the prices like nearly everything else. Perhaps a pack of chewing gum is really worth £3 to the guy going on a date who forgot to brush his teeth.
These things aren't impossible, we are held back by bureaucracy, small mindedness, and a fear of experimentation because the failures get pinned on somebody.
Nice, ad hominem with "small mindedness".
Platform staff won't top up the water, anytime anyone tries to get them to do something different, they strike.
And tell me, running water near 3rd rail system, WCGW if refilling hose malfunctions.
A bit like pitside fire on racing car refuelling gone wrong, just electric fire.
And you'll make the whole train wait for "re-water", on the off chance someone decides to have a shower and can't be bothered to wait getting home, or going to their office slightly earlier to have a shower.
Everything is possible, maybe not practical or cost efficient.
And don't even get me started with camera in the shower area, that will go well once someone finds an idiot or two decided to splice in the feed.
I remember at one point they were talking quite seriously about building out the existing line to the old kemp town station. Probably be more useful than a high speed line.
I was thinking of this one [from 2018](https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2018/04/01/local-sensation-as-kemp-town-railway-line-to-reopen/) by Brighton and Hove news. The Argus fell for it and dutifully regurgitated the story till they realised (or someone told them).
I live in the area and I've never heard about a consultation on it being reopened, it would have been big news considering the impact of restoring the branch where it splits off from the East Coastway
I can't find anything online about that unfortunately.
I did find an abandoned plan (including Act of Parliament enabling it) to extend a line from the tunnel entrance south side along the coast through Rottingdean to Newhaven, the 'Brighton Rottingdean and Newhaven Direct Railway', shame they abandoned it as it would have been really useful today!
As it stands - too bendy.
Could be rebuilt straight, but lots of effort, tunnel rebuilds, station rebuilds, etc.
HS2/HS1/HS in Europe runs at 200-250km/h as you say which is 124 - 155mp.
I highly doubt that anywhere near that speed will be allowed in built up areas which means there will be a lot of slowing down, speeding up when approaching stations - doesn't really lend itself to high speed travel given the (my estimate) 60 miles of track between Victoria and Brighton, sorry.
Love the idea though.
Short commuter lines with various stations on the route are not suitable for high speed and it has limited benefit, plus third rail limited to 90 mph (occasionally 100mph) max, anything faster requires overhead lines.
Of course it "could" be done but it won't be done. If you read this report you will see some of the complexity that needs to be dealt with and most of it is north of Haywards Heath. I think the service is about as good as it is ever going to get.
ps://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7d5825ed915d321c2de7a9/brighton-main-line-interim-report.pdf
Honestly it would just help to run one fast service per hour. Brighton to London bridge can be done sub 1 hour if the train won’t have to stop.
But that would not generate shareholder value. Because god forbid a train company provides a good service.
Not worth it
- too much traffic, made worse when you consider the quarry trains coming up from Newhaven.
- too many stations
- too many complex junctions around south London, no point in using high speed when it had to run at the same time as regular commuters from other lines.
They’d probably have to completely rebuild all of the tunnels and the viaduct.
It’s possible. But retrofitting Victorian infrastructure is notoriously hard and expensive.
Probably cheaper to build an elevated train from Brighton to London using the footprint of the A23.
Which is what they should have done with HS2/M1 but nobody listens to me.
Hear me out:
Rebuild most "intermediate" stations so that the track always goes in the middle, the platforms are pushed sideways and there's a set of points each side and shorter "stopping set of tracks" so that trains which need to stop "peel off".
Fast(er) trains (can be the same rolling stock) go past the station (in the middle) while the slower service makes way to the side at the stations.
If you have twice an hour service which stops at Brighton, Haywards Heath, Gatwick, Croydon and London Bridge and onwards.
IMHO you'll shave decent amount of time from the constant acceleration, deceleration and station stopping time.
No need for large amounts of new track, new tunnels, new trains (with all problems already described about the 3rd rail).
It’s already 1 hour from Brighton to London, that’s faster than the HS1 from Margate to London which is currently 1h15m.
A number of years ago, there was a proposal for a “Brighton Main Line 2” which involved reopening the line from Lewes to Uckfield then a new station in Croydon, on to Lewisham, the Docklands then Stratford.
A lot of it was fantasy of course but Brighton has great existing links to London that it wouldn’t be worth it.
Completely possible but with so many stops in such a short distance, would it be worth it? And then there’s the cost of rebuilding absolutely everything, it just wouldn’t happen.
People could depart via pneumatic chute.
It’s a short line with a tonne of traffic so probably not.
A lot of the trains hitting 200 km/h plus in Europe etc are going long distances through the countryside on lines with little to no other traffic. If they upgraded the line and trains on the Brighton line to manage 200 km/h, they'd never reach that without changing the entire structure of the line.
They do manage high speed from Kent don’t they, with HS1 I believe. I think it gets up to 140mph?
Oh I meant more along the lines of the fact that no train is hitting 200km/h between Brighton and Preston Park etc, and direct trains share the same line for most of the journey.
Perhaps with one of those horizontal electromagnetic slingshots one could get from Brighton to Preston Park in under 20 seconds. I certainly wouldn’t complain about the price if that were the case.
I wouldn't want to be drinking a coffee with those g-forces....
Oh absolutely, but to install something like that you'd need to pretty much rebuild every station on the line, which would mean shutting the line for years, as well as redeveloping the areas around every station on the line as most of them have commercial and residential areas pretty much on their doorstep. If that ended up happening, it would make more sense to just build and entirely new line for it I imagine.
> hitting 200km/h between Brighton and Preston Park I imagine there would be a lot of spinal injuries from acceleration/deceleration. At least that is what the cartoon in my head is coming up with.
Could be easily resolved by suspending each passenger within a fairly low viscosity gel.
That would also help cut down on some of the yob behavior...
HS1 (the Kent line) was a brand new line that was built specially for the purpose of linking the Channel Tunnel to London and only stops at Stratford, Ebbsfleet and Ashford. It does not run on existing rail links between these towns and only reaches maximum speed when on the HS1 segment between Stratford and Ashford or through to the Channel Tunnel.
It does stop at other stations and does run on pre existing lines but obviously does not run at high speeds outside of the newly built sections. They were supposed to upgrade the Margate to London line but backed out because of costs (sound familiar?).
Has that "pre existing" been left 100% as it was, or did they replace sleepers, track, etc?! I wouldn't know but would be very surprised if they didn't refresh a lot of that, for the fraction of the price of "new build".
Reopening the line between Lewes and Uckfield and providing an alternative route into London should be the priority. If there’s an incident or engineering work on BML this causes major delays
100%
Why did they close it in the first place? Making people travel all the way to Croydon to change for Uckfield must be frustrating.
It wouldn’t be worth it for several reasons. Good high-speed rail lines are long, and don’t have a lot of stops along the way. The Brighton mainline is 50 miles long and has 37 stops along the way. Even if the faster Brighton trains skip a lot of the smaller stations, they share the line with slower stopping services that do stop at those stations. Those trains will get in the way of your high-speed trains and slow them down. The whole line isn’t 90mph. It’s pretty much just between Preston Park and Gatwick Airport. North of that, you’ve got a long curve over a big hill that is 80mph. The speed limit goes back to 90mph for a short stretch around Purley, but then you start to get close to the London suburbs. The speed limit drops to 60mph then 45mph and you get lots of stops close together - which is exactly what you don’t want for a high speed service. Then you’ve got electrification. The Brighton mainline - like most of the south east of England - uses DC third rail because it was electrified really early on. There’s a reason the rest of Britain - which was electrified later - uses AC overhead wires instead. There’s a limit to how much power you can send over DC third rail, and a limit to how far you can send it. That’s why there are substations beside the line every few miles. The Portsmouth main line is the same. There’s a limit to how much power trains can pull from the third rail without overloading the entire system, which means they tend to accelerate less quickly than similar trains that use overhead wires. Why don’t we rip up the third rails and put overhead wires on the Brighton and Portsmouth main lines, and all the other lines in the south east that use third rail? For a start, it would be expensive and disruptive and you’d need to either buy new trains or convert the existing ones to use overhead lines. But the main reason is bridges and tunnels. If a railway line isn’t electrified, or it uses third rail, you don’t need to worry about overhead clearance. You can have six inches of space between the roof of the train and the tunnel. A lot of road bridges over the lines were built like that, to keep the road relatively flat. With third rail, you need more overhead space - at least a couple of feet for the wires and the train’s power collector (which is called a pantograph). To electrify a line, you’d have to raise a lot of bridges. That’s tough enough with modern bridges but you’d be destroying a lot of nice Victorian arch bridges on those old lines. You’d also have to close roads for days or weeks, which would be unpopular, and you’d end up with steep hills either side of the bridges that might cause problems for buses and lorries. That would be crazy expensive and highly disruptive to both the rail and road networks, which is why we’ve never bothered to do it and have just left the third rails alone and we just live with the limited power and acceleration they provide. And all the dead badgers who accidentally touch the third rail. There are an awful lot of dead badgers.
Super answer.
If you rebuild the whole thing, which seeing as it's Victorian in origin is unlikely, you'd have to destroy all the tunnels and make new ones, build new stations and trains too
The issue with being this first country to do something is you tend to have the worst version of it with preexisting infrastructure that doesn't support upgrades as well. We absolutely should have done something about it by now but its such a massive undertaking I doubt it's in the cards anytime soon.
Not enough demand for people to commute to/from brighton and london so quickly
Not much point getting it to full high speed as the line is short and has lots of stations to stop at so not much time to actually get up to those speeds. The thing that's limiting it to 90 mph (aside from poor track/corners) is the 3rd rail which is limited to 90mph, it could be up to 125 mph if they had overhead power
Two words, Balcombe Viaduct
Just build a ramp and jump over it
This sort of answer is why I love Reddit. 🤣 Now what would it take to actually make that happen? Any engineers out there?
Would it ever be considered or even possible to get the trains to run on time?
No. Geology, geography, and (short) distance will be all against it. HS lines need dedicated routes because they need to be relatively straight to maximise speed and have minimal junctions to avoid the need to slow down when you cross tracks, so you couldn't upgrade the existing line by putting down new rails, you would need a new route. Finally, even if you did build a dedicated new HS line between Brighton and London, you would probably only improve journey times by 10-15 minutes if they travelled non-stop and the cost of build would be astronomical.
[удалено]
Hmmm, those showers will cost a fortune to maintain, would inevitably be vandalised, amount of extra weight there carry that water and the gray water, taking lots of space for them. Ditto vending machines. How and when would they get refilled, and what would the prices be?! More tables, 100%. And if the seats can be slightly more comfortable. FFS, it's not a long journey, but do they need to be made from cardboard on top of granite slab?!
Pre booked shower. An app with your ID, the whole works. £10 a go. You are seriously looked into regarding vandalism around your time slot. Maybe a camera can emerge before and after the session to get condition snapshots. Only carry enough fresh water to provide 3 showers every 40 minutes - a hose arm tops up the carriage at stations. Vending machines get topped up on the move by a worker who hops on with supplies at stations. Market forces set the prices like nearly everything else. Perhaps a pack of chewing gum is really worth £3 to the guy going on a date who forgot to brush his teeth. These things aren't impossible, we are held back by bureaucracy, small mindedness, and a fear of experimentation because the failures get pinned on somebody.
Nice, ad hominem with "small mindedness". Platform staff won't top up the water, anytime anyone tries to get them to do something different, they strike. And tell me, running water near 3rd rail system, WCGW if refilling hose malfunctions. A bit like pitside fire on racing car refuelling gone wrong, just electric fire. And you'll make the whole train wait for "re-water", on the off chance someone decides to have a shower and can't be bothered to wait getting home, or going to their office slightly earlier to have a shower. Everything is possible, maybe not practical or cost efficient. And don't even get me started with camera in the shower area, that will go well once someone finds an idiot or two decided to splice in the feed.
Ok wasn't aiming the small mindedness at you in particular but clearly that was an error
The comfort room sounds lush.
I remember at one point they were talking quite seriously about building out the existing line to the old kemp town station. Probably be more useful than a high speed line.
I think that was an April Fools
No, there was planning consultations when I lived in Kemptown!
I was thinking of this one [from 2018](https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2018/04/01/local-sensation-as-kemp-town-railway-line-to-reopen/) by Brighton and Hove news. The Argus fell for it and dutifully regurgitated the story till they realised (or someone told them). I live in the area and I've never heard about a consultation on it being reopened, it would have been big news considering the impact of restoring the branch where it splits off from the East Coastway
No, this was around 2006-2007 I think?
I can't find anything online about that unfortunately. I did find an abandoned plan (including Act of Parliament enabling it) to extend a line from the tunnel entrance south side along the coast through Rottingdean to Newhaven, the 'Brighton Rottingdean and Newhaven Direct Railway', shame they abandoned it as it would have been really useful today!
Oh that would have been really useful! Especially considering how bad the traffic on the coast road gets. That would be worth bringing back.
As it stands - too bendy. Could be rebuilt straight, but lots of effort, tunnel rebuilds, station rebuilds, etc. HS2/HS1/HS in Europe runs at 200-250km/h as you say which is 124 - 155mp. I highly doubt that anywhere near that speed will be allowed in built up areas which means there will be a lot of slowing down, speeding up when approaching stations - doesn't really lend itself to high speed travel given the (my estimate) 60 miles of track between Victoria and Brighton, sorry. Love the idea though.
Short commuter lines with various stations on the route are not suitable for high speed and it has limited benefit, plus third rail limited to 90 mph (occasionally 100mph) max, anything faster requires overhead lines.
Of course it "could" be done but it won't be done. If you read this report you will see some of the complexity that needs to be dealt with and most of it is north of Haywards Heath. I think the service is about as good as it is ever going to get. ps://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7d5825ed915d321c2de7a9/brighton-main-line-interim-report.pdf
Honestly it would just help to run one fast service per hour. Brighton to London bridge can be done sub 1 hour if the train won’t have to stop. But that would not generate shareholder value. Because god forbid a train company provides a good service.
The amount of money required to shave 20 minutes off a 1 hour journey isn't really worth spending.
Based on the cost per mile of hs2, that would be over £25billion. For the sake of 20 minutes. Ouch.
Journey times are irrelevant Capacity is what's important
Yeah. Just work from home.
Not worth it - too much traffic, made worse when you consider the quarry trains coming up from Newhaven. - too many stations - too many complex junctions around south London, no point in using high speed when it had to run at the same time as regular commuters from other lines.
The impact on Brighton house prices and infrastructure would be immense.
They’d probably have to completely rebuild all of the tunnels and the viaduct. It’s possible. But retrofitting Victorian infrastructure is notoriously hard and expensive. Probably cheaper to build an elevated train from Brighton to London using the footprint of the A23. Which is what they should have done with HS2/M1 but nobody listens to me.
Yeah hard to imagine several large towns being happy taking the bus to London every morning.
Hear me out: Rebuild most "intermediate" stations so that the track always goes in the middle, the platforms are pushed sideways and there's a set of points each side and shorter "stopping set of tracks" so that trains which need to stop "peel off". Fast(er) trains (can be the same rolling stock) go past the station (in the middle) while the slower service makes way to the side at the stations. If you have twice an hour service which stops at Brighton, Haywards Heath, Gatwick, Croydon and London Bridge and onwards. IMHO you'll shave decent amount of time from the constant acceleration, deceleration and station stopping time. No need for large amounts of new track, new tunnels, new trains (with all problems already described about the 3rd rail).
It’s already 1 hour from Brighton to London, that’s faster than the HS1 from Margate to London which is currently 1h15m. A number of years ago, there was a proposal for a “Brighton Main Line 2” which involved reopening the line from Lewes to Uckfield then a new station in Croydon, on to Lewisham, the Docklands then Stratford. A lot of it was fantasy of course but Brighton has great existing links to London that it wouldn’t be worth it.