The Railway Clearing House (1936) | Hacker News Reader

The Railway Clearing House (1936)

railwaywondersoftheworld.com

56 pointsjpkoning18 comments

The Railway Clearing House’s Junction Diagrams are on Wikimedia Commons, and truly beautiful cartography:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Railways_Junct...

Wow, that's beautiful. Any idea how they did it? Were they all hand drawn? Is there cartography software that does this sort of thing these days?

Those are wonderful, aren't they?

My guess: Hand drawn, with frequent use of a French Curve.

https://www.google.com/search?q=french+curve

Always enjoy reading how these complex systems “emerge”. I found this part interesting:

> The railways included in the RCH system had increased by 1845 to sixteen, with 656 route-miles of track. The difficulties of obtaining cash settlement between the railway companies and the clearing house, led in 1850 to the passing of an Act of Parliament conferring on the RCH the right to sue in the courts. This ended the trouble and the companies subsequently settled all payments promptly.

It seems like just the right amount of regulatory power to get everyone on the same page and ensure the system works.

Modern equivalent: Rail Settlement Plan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Settlement_Plan

It's kind of an amazing tidbit (from the Wikipedia article) that this service has to interface with 8500 different ticket issuing systems. I hope they have a well defined communications protocol.

This is why, if you live in the UK, you'll have noticed that sometimes there's a much cheaper ticket available to you that specifically requires you to travel via some particular station (or e.g. "VIA LONDON" / "NOT VIA LONDON").

The Rail Settlement Plan will assign all the revenue for that ticket to the company that operates the trains you would need to take to perform that journey via the route described. Whereas even if that's the obvious way to make your journey, if any other operator could have got you there via a route in the big book of acceptable routes (roughly anything that doesn't involve going back on yourself or taking an obvious diversion but the book makes this specific rather than a judgement call) then RSP would give them some fraction of the money for your ticket, just in case you took that option.

For an operator getting 100% of a £40 ticket is clearly preferable to getting 50% of a £60 ticket and perhaps strategically better than getting 80% of a £50 ticket for which a rival gets £10 despite not actually doing anything.

Of course this doesn't actually serve passengers in any way, so it's at best an unhelpful inefficiency of privatisation and at worst one more example of how it is wasteful and made things worse. A single National Rail operator had no need of such complexities.

The cheaper routes are often ones that are slightly slower and/or less busy. So the idea behind offering cheaper tickets with specific routing isn't only about revenue allocation, it's about encouraging passengers to use less crowded routes and services. Often it will be the same TOC operating both routes so it doesn't make any difference to them in revenue terms.

Very interesting, I always wondered how that worked. Also the huge loss of track, - 23000 miles in 1936, 10000 today.

Yeah...we'll regret that at some point, IMHO. They've converted all the railway right-of-ways around here into running/biking trails, which is in no way terrible. But at some point we're going to wish we still had those railways as very-low-carbon delivery networks.

But that's my opinion...I could be wrong.

They did a lot of the "rails to trails" stuff around here as well, but the underlying deal is that it's all technically land-banked and the railroads can claim it back at basically any time as long as it gets put to active use.

You still have to rebuild the infrastructure from scratch. So yes, we can piss off all the new users by reclaiming the right of ways (technically). But there's still a huge cost in recreating what was torn up to make it useful for a different purpose. My own opinion is that between the "piss off new users" and "cost of rebuilding", these right of ways will stay "rails to trails" forever. Which, again, isn't a bad thing.

There are a few reasons for the mass abandonment of railroad track. Probably the biggest (at least in the US) is railroad consolidation--we've gone from ~100 Class I railroads to 7 (8 if you include Ferromex in Mexico). This consolidation means you don't need parallel mainlines. Additionally, train traffic has generally shifted from serving individual cars to customers along the tracks to a heavier emphasis on delivering to consolidated freight stations (with last-mile delivery handled by local truck), which means the utility of tracks in the suburbs is lessened.

In 1936 the UK was already consolidated down to 4 companies (IIRC). The big abandonment was deliberate government policy in the 60s, and the logic was exactly last-mile truck (or bus) delivery with rail for the trunk. But it turned out that once you put things on a truck, they tended to stay there the whole way, since changing modes has significant friction and the country isn't vast.

You can just .... build it back lol.

Yeah, we can just...build back the stuff that was already there that we could have used for the cost of renovation but now have to rebuild from scratch. lolimsosmartarntI!

This is what it looks like if you just leave the rails in... less than 10 years after last use.

http://wandel.ca/pic.cgi?a49c9652

The absolute key is to still have the right of way. Bonus if the bridges are still sound. Putting the rails back is trivial and all the other infrastructure (signals, level crossings, safety fences etc) has to be renewed anyway.

In the case of disused (bike trail) rail corridors around here (Ottawa) I think the chief concern would be NIMBY pressure. Going from a quiet bike trail to a busy commuter train route... OMG property values!

> In the case of disused (bike trail) rail corridors around here (Ottawa) I think the chief concern would be NIMBY pressure. Going from a quiet bike trail to a busy commuter train route... OMG property values!

About a decade ago, CN bought out the EJ&E to use as a bypass around Chicago. The communities near the tracks were outraged and tried to block the deal, since it would transform the railway from a low-traffic route to a much higher-traffic. Yeah, there's serious NIMBY pressure on merely upgrading a train route; reconverting a local trail is going to be seriously worse.

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