Greater West Programme, Wales - Time-Lapse 

Thanks. Network Rail did the modeling and I edited it in amongst the time lapse footage.

@Wet vegetables No, the new one doesn't look better at all. It's a box of concrete. The old ones are dangerous, but they have brick arcs and they can reproduce them with new materials and they won't do it. That's the saddest part.

Cyka Blin. Well we started but cancelled to pay the DUP votes. Thanks Theresa.....

Well, it’s probably because you have a properly thought out rolling programme for electrification instead of the stupid stop-start attitude in England and Wales.

@@GarethJonesPilipala I would agree although even that is at least 50 years overdue. Switzerland was fully electrified in the 50s...

drawingboard82 Yes, although Switzerland is probably an unfair example as it’s so far ahead of any other country (apart, perhaps for Japan). Some of the former East European countries have very ambitious electrification plans. Slovakia, for example, has electrified many lines but they have benefited from being a special development area within the EU and have had massive financial assistance.

@@GarethJonesPilipala true. Italy or south Africa might be better examples

Gareth Jones what's a former eastern European country? Have th countries moved westward?

There was no need to repair them, they were just not large enough to accomodate extra space needed for electrification.

Thanks. Yes, I suppose things change so quickly that once you're half-way through a big scheme, the goal posts are moved and then things get cut short

Modern civil engineering is the fine triple arch bridge that was removed in favour of a pre cast concrete lego bridge. I gave up calling myself a civil engineer. In the end the train gets go the west in a comparable time to the diesel one. The whole project seems pointless to me. Unless of course you follow the money which most likely leads to the globalist EU.

Can we all *please* agree that after Brexit we can stop moaning about how the EU is the cause of all our woes, when the woes continue to come apace... nothing like sitting on your arse complaining rather than getting out there and changing your world in your own small ways.

@@OkenWS im not moaning but merely observing. And just because someone doesn't feel the need to take on the might of the eu doesnt make them any less of a person. But this isn't a brexit issue. This is a statement of fact. After all the work the train arrives in roughly the same time.

@@gulag8735 With lower emissions. The real issue here is not improvements but upgrading worn out kit. Track, switches, signals and rolling stock are decades old and a lot of the network needs replacing. I'm not laying the blame on any party or government , I just wish people would stop giving Network Rail a kicking for not only doing the upgrade work but also rectifying the lack of basic maintenance that Railtrack failed to deliver. Ultimately we'll have a safer, smother railway. How the various parties choose to operate it is down to them but at least the infrastructure will be sound.

third rails can't carry that high voltages as cantenary systems, so you have less power available in total.

Third rail is 769 volts dc

And overhead is 25kv ac

www.railforums.co.uk/threads/25kv-ac-vs-750v-dc.99783/

Hi Jasbinder. DSLRs, yes

The many old bridges are leading to gauging problems with rolling stock. People want and deserve better, more comgortable journeys and some of the older bridges are settling and reducing clearances between hard bits and the trains. The new bridges aren't pretty but road and rail users expect minimum disruption to their journeys. The cast concrete bridges go up in an incredibly short amount of time; to replace a brick built bridge would take many months if you could find enough competent Brickies. (Not a slight on Brickies by the way, it's just there aren't enough of them to cover building houses and civils)

Yeah. More ugly poles and wires.

I'd agree that third rail is less intrusive visually, but it's never used with line speeds over 100 mph. It also requires more substations because the sections are shorter. Overhead lines don't always look too bad but word has it that the GW electrification was over-engineered, thus it's rather heavy appearance (compared to, say, the ECML or high speed lines in Europe, where the gantries are less bulky.) According to a recent RIA report, all this could have been avoided had we had a more consistent electrification policy, but the politically-driven stop-start process of rail funding in the UK meant that it was over 20 years since the last major electrification project and some of the know-how had been lost.

@@tinkertaylor6965 It is actually easier to use a 3rd Rail for high speed trains as you have the weight of the train which can push on the mechanism, such as used on some test lines. Unfortunately, it is deadly.

@@10p6 That should read 'South Western Main Line', not 'mail' line.

Never seen a high speed third rail track personally. Always overhead.

Surely they could hve lowered the tracks instead of destroy the old bridges?

@@dougie8010 don't know what the answer is but destroying them just seems wrong

I’m a Bricky and hardly no trowels would know how to build a bridge like that. It’s a lost art that has now gone

@@dougie8010 Brunel's Great Western runs pretty much level the whole route. He'd turn in his grave if he thought generations later people would rather dip the track (and risk flooding) than build a new bridge.

@@dougie8010 flooding

Me! Concrete precast off site aint a brick triple arch bridge. Bet the concrete will need servicing in 50 years.

@@gulag8735 Good point. Like your username.