The alternatives to the Dawlish route, and those getting in the way.

BBC News Online has a page up about the alternatives to the Dawlish route, for the railways in Cornwall and Devon.

Now, I’ve posted about this before, both on my radio show’s Facebook page, and here on the Viewpoint blog.  And I’ll be honest with you, this matters a lot to me.  After the closure of Plymouth City Airport, the loss of the helicopter link to the Isles of Scilly, and the continued situation at Newquay airport, which could close if subsidy isn’t made available, the fact that our only rail link to Exeter, Bristol, London, Birmingham, Scotland, and Wales is shut for 2 months, is a situation I want us to avoid in the future, AT ALL COSTS.

Let me say that again, at all costs.

With that said, let’s look at the routes proposed. 

The first three I’ll mention here, are new routes, which require a lot of work.  They basically by-pass Dawlish to rejoin the main line, either at Dawlish Warren, Powderham or Exminster.  These are not pre-existing lines, and would require a lot more work than any of the other routes.  In my view, these would only be any good if there had been no other alternatives.

The next route I’ll mention here is the old Teign Valley line, which connects Newton Abbot to Exeter, via Chudleigh and Christow.  It needs a little rebuilding, but it is a workable solution for when the Dawlish line is disrupted as it has been this winter.  I do have to agree with what the experts say though, it is of limited benefit really, but after the disruption we’ve had, I’ll happily take a limited benefit route over the messy situation that we as travellers have had to put up with.  This route should be put in place.

The last route is my personal favourite and should be running all the time, even alongside the main Dawlish route.  This is the over Dartmoor route that runs from Plymouth, up the current Gunnislake branch line to Bere Alston, then up an already committed line to Tavistock, then along a rebuilt stretch to Okehampton before joining up with an existing line that is currently used for freight, and Sunday passenger service during the summer, to Exeter.  This route should never have closed in the first place, and frankly, it shouldn’t be just an emergency route, it should be in operation all day, every day.

Unfortunately some people near the Tavistock route, seem to have very distorted priorities in this affair…

“…Colin Rogers, who owns the old Tavistock station - a mixture of holiday cottages and private homes - said property owners were concerned about how much compensation they would get…”

Compensation?  COMPENSATION???

Perhaps those property owners should consider compensating the business in their own area and everywhere westward for the loss of income that has resulted from the line closure at Dawlish.  If they invested in property without having a substantial cushion of liquid capital, then they’re playing in a class that they have no right to be in.  If they can’t handle the risk, they shouldn’t be playing the high risk, high rent district of property.

Dawlish rail link to re-open April 4th.

This is a story that pleases me no end.

It will be exactly 2 months between the line getting damaged by storms, and the line re-opening, and that is great news.

Network Rail has been working around the clock to make the repairs that are needed to restore the line to working order.  They deserve our thanks and our appreciation.

Also, First Great Western deserve a lot of credit, for how they have handled the entire situation.  They have worked very hard to make sure that, as much as physically possible, some kind of service remained in place, even if it wasn't the one they had wanted to run, as based on their published timetable.

However, the whole situation has shown up issues that need to be tackled without delay.

The first one I'm going to bring up, is the continuing debate over whether there should be an airport in Plymouth.

I'm going to make no bones about this.  THERE MUST BE AN AIRPORT IN PLYMOUTH.

Why?  You even need to ask why?  The old Plymouth City Airport to London service could transport people there in less than an hour, whjilst the train still takes 3 hours at quickest.

It was also linked to Newquay Airport, in fact the route started there.  The whole route from Newquay to London via Plymouth took no more than 90 minutes, and was run up to 5 times a day.  And if you think that is the only route that Plymouth had, think again.  There were many others to other UK domestic airports, which made for a speedy connection to many places.

Such services could be provided again.  Flights to the Channel Islands, Bristol, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast, Derry, Birmingham, St Mary's in the Isles of Scilly (via Newquay and Lands End[if they can tarmac it]), Leeds, Southhampton, Manchester, Liverpool and many more places are all possible, helping to create an air network that would be speedier than the train, and enable cross country travel between the South West and the rest of the country in no more than 3 hours.  Heck, even some limited international flights to places like Dublin or Paris would help no end.

Sadly, the airport's owners, Sutton Harbour Holdings, have shown no real interest in re-opening the airport, claiming it wouldn't be viable.  Yet it seems to be the case that the airport was viable when Plymouth City Council operated it.  And maybe a consortium could run Newquay and Plymouth airports together, making sure both remained viable and operational.

Because in many ways, when Plymouth City Airport closed, the routes that ran from Newquay became a problem, as the customers that were picked up at Plymouth made those routes viable.  Now the airport at Newquay needs subsidy to run.  If Newquay closes, then Exeter becomes the only major airport in the South West, and as we've seen with the railways since February 4th, getting to Exeter would be problematic.

So what to do about the railway itself?  Well, the favourite idea for creating a second route, has been the re-opening of the old LSWR line that ran from Exeter to Plymouth via Okehampton and Tavistock.  The route from Plymouth to Tavistock has already be committed to prior to this, and it does seem to make sense to re-open that old stretch of track.  The line was closed in 1968, and it was a shame that this happened.  The process of concentrating traffic on one line, the one that got damaged on February 4th, meant that old LSWR line was deemed surplus to requirements.  It doesn't seem surplus to requirements now.

There is also an old Teign Valley route which is being considered, and in my view, reviving this, AS WELL AS, the Plymouth, Tavistock, Okehampton, Exeter route, would be an ideal double solution to the problem.  The northern line needs to be revived anyway, and run as a regular service all the time.  The Teign Valley line would work as a back up should the line at Dawlish get damaged again.

There is one other point that I would like to make in regards to the railways around Cornwall and Devon.  The fact that some areas, especially around North Cornwall, have been cut off from the railway network and could do with being revived in order to create a second Great Western route.  The line between Newquay and Perranporth should be re-opened, as should the lines that connected Padstow, Bude and Launceston to the rail network.  Indeed, connections should be made between Penzance and Perranporth, possibly via St Ives, and between Newquay and Padstow, which would have the effect of creating a nice mini network of lines that since 1963 have only been served by bus services, and that has meant that the bus companies, First Western National and Western Greyhound, have something of a public transport monopoly in those areas, and it would bring competition back. 

At the moment, the lack of transport connections is reinforcing the old image of those of us in Cornwall and Devon as being in the sticks and cut off from the rest of the country.  We need to counteract that immediately.  Restore the lines that should never have been cut, the connections that are in danger need to be protected, and even enhanced as much as possible.  We must not rely entirely on roads, especially roads like the A38 where there are accidents every day, which close the road for hours at a time.

Newquay Airport must remain open.  Plymouth City Airport must be re-opened.  Lands End Airport must be tarmaced.  The old railway lines that were closed must be re-opened.  We must do whatever it takes, pay any price, to make sure our links with not just the rest of the country, but also the rest of the world, are not cut off.

Global buys Atlantic FM: There are no winners here.

I am disappointed at the recent news that Global Radio is buying Atlantic FM and rebranding it to Heart.

Programming will no longer come from Atlantic's studios in St Agnes but from the old Gemini FM studios in Exeter.  Programmes from Exeter, for a Cornish audience.  That's really going to get an audience... NOT!

You see Heart's owner, Global Radio, is a combination of all the worst parts of UK broadcast history.
It goes all the way back to 1980.  Back then, a radio station called Radio West started broadcasting in Bristol.  By 1985 though, it and nearby station Wiltshire Radio were losing money hand over fist.  The IBA, the regulator at the time, examined the situation and was presented by the stations with a proposal.  Allow the two stations to merge, and broadcasts could continue, otherwise, both stations would have failed and the licences would have to be readvertised. 

The IBA knew that re-adveritisng licences for areas where stations had failed could be problematic.  The IBA had previously disallowed a takeover of Centre Radio in Leicestershire in 1983, and the station had gone off air.  The owners of Radio Trent offered to start a new station in Leicestershire, called Leicester Sound, and 11 months after Centre Radio went off air, Leicester Sound signed on.  So the IBA had previous experience of the difficulties of re-advertising a licence.  They were determined not to make the same mistake again.

So the IBA basically allowed the merger to go ahead.  But in the process, a monster was born, that thought that expansionism was the way to go.  Once the IBA had been replaced by The Radio Authority and the ITC by Margaret Thatcher's government, GWR began expaniding it's reach.  GWR teamed up with Capital to buy Plymouth Sound and DevonAir Radio.  DevonAir was replaced by Gemini FM in a franchise auction, and Capital basically sold the rest of Plymouth Sound to GWR.  GWR continued to pick up stations including the Chiltern Radio network and would begin the process of slowly eroding localness from it's output.  First, all the AM stations were replaced by a networked Classic Gold service with just 4 hours of local output per day for 6 days out of 7, a total of 24 hours of local programming a week.

Then GWR tried to get local programming cut down to just 13 hours a day across their network, but the regulator said that it had to be 16 hours a day.  As a deliberate move, they made 3 of the local hours 3am to 6am in the morning, at the most unprofitable time of the day.  It was as though they were trying to send a message to the regulator that local doesn't work.  Network programming ran from 7pm till 3am.

Eventually, OFCOM backed down and basically local programming has been slashed on Heart ever since.  There is now only 7 hours of "local" programming on Heart on weekdays, and 4 hours at weekends, a total of 43 hours a week.  The company behind Heart, Global Radio, basically these days is a mixture of the GCap attitudes and the attitude of Charles Allen, who basically oversaw the downgrading of ITV from a serious regional broadcaster with a unique selling point, to a company that is little different from the myriad of digital TV broadcasters.  In short, it is the worst of all media worlds, joined together in one place.

People have said this will increase choice.  It won't.  Heart were already broadcasting in Cornwall via DAB Digital Radio, relaying the Devon service with Plymouth ads.  The least I can hope for is that on the Cornwall mux they arrange to playout the Cornwall ads instead.  Other than that, there would be no discernable difference in output, and we have lost the Atlantic FM sound on FM, to make way for Heart.  Jermey Scott called this an upgrade for Atlantic.  it is not, it is a downgrade, and most listeners in Cornwall will know this.
Expect the listenership figures for Atlantic/Heart to plummet from the current 71,000, to a level nearer 17,000 or even maybe nearer 7,000.

Pirate FM and BBC Radio Cornwall will undoubtedly be the beneficiaries.  There's enough history as well to back that up.  In 1999, Plymouth Sound AM was replaced by Classic Gold.   The figures dropped from 67,000 to 20,000.  Pirate FM picked up most of the listeners who deserted.  Now, history will repeat itself, and Global Radio haven't learned the lessons of the past.  If you don't learn from the past, you are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past, which is what Global will do.

The worst part is whilst Atlantic FM never made a profit, they were almost as well respected as Pirate FM.  They knew they were coming into a tough market with both Pirate FM and BBC Radio Cornwall being long established and successful stations.  That Atlantic FM couldn't be profitable despite their best efforts is regrettable, and understandable.  But the fact that Global haven't understood the dynamics of the area they are proposing to move into and are going to output to Cornwall from Exeter and London, shows how much the company is out of touch with actuality. 

Global Radio haven't even been profitable the last 2 financial years, yet Ashley Tabor has taken home about £6million in bonuses.  Bonuses for failure.  Failing to grow in terms of listeners, and failing to grow in terms of credibility and respect.

Global is about as hated as GWR Group and GCap Media were before them.  That sort of baggage only weighs a company down.  Global is a company that needs to change it's whole direction and priorities.  Being overfocused on cutting costs, does not lead to making profits.  Their whole mindset, has to turn towards growth, growing the company and investing in its future.  ITV know all about that.  Since Charles Allen left ITV, they have been trying to grow their business, but the market does not have faith in ITV.  It was in 2007 that ITV last saw their share price above the £1 level that indicates market confidence in a company, and even though they have recovered from their March 2009 lows of around 18p per share, they have still yet to recover above the £1 level.  Global is not a plc, unlike ITV, so it's shares do not trade.  But I would imagine that if they did trade on the stock exchange,they would similarly trade below £1.

This move is not good for commercial radio as a whole, and further reinforces the image that Global, through their actions, are slowly destroying local radio, in the same way that ITV decimated regional television.  And whilst that definitely isn't what they are trying to do, that is the perception they are giving off, and as I always say, perception IS reality.