You want to close my line for nine weeks!!

According to the BBC news site yesterday, Network Rail are going to close the Ashford to Hastings line for nine weeks so that they can do work on Ore Tunnel, and a number of other different things at the same time. But apparently three local MPs are up in arms about it, saying it will cause a great amount of disruption, etc. So they say, it is "Frankly Unacceptable".

Now that line rings a bell. Oh yes, it's the "Marshlink" line. A 26 mile line, which has never been electrified, operated by Southern, and uses a cute little set of Class 171 Turbostar dmu's to run the service. 

According to the timetable on the Southern website, there is one train an hour between Ashford and Hastings. Not a lot then. Personally I can't see where the huge amount of disruption will be.

Now had it been a main line, with say three or four trains an hour in each direction, you could understand the levels of disruption for nine weeks. But this is a once an hour line.

And there is a reason why there is only one train an hour. Not enough people use it to warrant anything more than that. I bet you could take the whole years worth of passengers on the "Marshlink" line and put them on the concourse at Waterloo, and still have room to spare for a new branch of Starbucks.

So where is the disruption? Ok these people will have to take a rail replacement bus for nine weeks, but at the end, the Ore tunnel will have been made safer, and there will have been track improvements done, so that line speeds can be increased. Now that has to be a bonus.

I do wish that MPs would concentrate on the more important things, like oh I don't know, getting the economy moving a bit faster and creating jobs. This type of work has to be done, and benefits do come out of it. And anyway, in nine weeks, people will have forgotten about it - in fact I suspect most people have forgotten about it already.

One a final note. I do wish the Beeb would use the right pictures for their articles. I should be glad that at least they used a picture of a Southern train, but they could have got the right type of unit used on the line.

Not a Class 171 used on the "Marshlink" line

A couple of Class 171's, as used on the "Marshlink" line.
Big difference I think you will find.