rail + cycle, never rail v cycle!

A dinosaur comment near Bitton, spotted this week. Whether it's the work of a petrolhead hippy, a demented cyclist, an ironic trainspotter or a NIMBY local, it's very wrong! (Notice also the spelling error). In reality rail and cycle are the twin drivers for future transport. Cycling is low or nil energy intensive, healthy and has no great impact on the environment. Rail will serve other uses - carrying large amounts of freight between communities and taking people further distances than they can cycle. In many cases rail and cycleway will run alongside each other.

I used to be very active in a rail reinstatement group, but there was a huge amount of suspicion about Sustrans. But Sustrans have a clear policy on rail reinstatement which I'm unable to improve on!


This is the Bristol-Bath cycleway, which is apparently the busiest in the UK. For about three miles the Avon Valley Railway runs alongside. This railway will inevitably link Bristol and Bath again in the future.


This is the Norton Radstock Greenway between the two towns. This is built on an old railway track and is level and popular with both walkers and cyclists. Hopefully one day it will link Frome with South Bristol again - with both bikes and trains. The Radstock-Midsomer Norton conurbation has a population of over 25,000 but, incredibly, has NO railway. Once both towns had two stations each. Midsomer Norton South station has been magnificently restored and trains should return to Radstock from the south within ten years. There are also plans to restore the line between Frome and Radstock.


Seen yesterday on the walkway, a friendly robin! You'd probably neither have the time or chance to photograph this on a road.

a cheap way of getting trains from a to b!

Just run 'em down the road! This is done even today, and in the USA of all places. This is Michigan City where the interurban trains run right down the street - an incredibly cheap and easy way of introducing rail that avoids land costs and new engineering. Although this film is from 1995 this line is not only still running but flourishing, using electricity and hardly seeming to bother road traffic. After Peak Oil with far less traffic on the roads this will be an increasingly common sight, allowing railways to reach places easily and linking markets and populations quickly and cheaply.

relaunch!

Too many blogs, that's my problem! Which explains the long gap between posts. But this one (formerly 'rail revival') is now about to relaunch!

Yesterday we went to our first Transition meeting, for Transition City Bristol. It was clear that here were a group of people that knew what they were talking about and who were willing to look positively at the HUGE changes that lie ahead for us all. They were as far removed from the tree-hugging hippy lefty stereotypes that often haunt 'environmental' groups as possible! These were business people, academics, family types, good solid level-headed characters all. But then there is a big gap between environmentalists and those of us that look beyond everyday mundane issues like recycling and towards the huge economic and structural changes that the end of cheap oil, coupled with wildly unpredictable weather, are going to bring.

Transition is currently very much a horizontal development, but to my mind it also needs vertical structures as well, offering expert information and ideas on the elements of the transition that will be of great importance - food production, law and order, education, health, protection from the elements and, of course, transport.

I think Transition Transport UK is the first development along these lines. At the moment it's just a facebook group and a blogsite - but it will grow, just like the Transition movement has!