Yapton Level Crossing

Wednesday March 25 2020 at 15.23. The front half of the 14.06 London Victoria train heading to Portsmouth Harbour (16.05). The train divided at Horsham and the back half was due here 15 minutes later heading to Bognor Regis. This crossing was filmed in October 2011 when it was the busiest half barrier crossing in the UK in terms of trains. As you can see, it has since been seriously downgraded to a full barrier crossing and its efficiency has plummeted. The wait between the barrier fully lowering and the train arriving was 19 seconds before and now it is 626% longer. Unbelievably Network Rail’s Media Centre actually issued a statement at the time saying the change “is set to benefit motorists”. Why don't they understand that blatant lies only damages their reputation? The cost of the change was £4 million pounds!!!! What an appalling waste of money. There should be an independent inquiry into how it could possibly have cost 5% of that. The problem is that NR has no incentive at all to get any kind of grip of its costs and provide value for money. There have been no accidents here. In 2016 someone did drive on to the tracks when his Sat Nav said ‘turn left’ but that was an incident the railway created when it removed gates. It is a pity that the local press and, sadly, some filmers, swallow NR propaganda and promote it. A far worse service with much higher running costs cannot possibly be accurately described as an upgrade.

[@CoastwayCrossings]

There have been a lot of incidents here in the past of people jumping the lights and swerving around the barriers, therefore a 30mph speed restriction had to be imposed. This was an important upgrade because now all trains can run at 65mph/75mph instead of 30mph.

[@freebrickproductions]

Nice video!