On 17/03/2017 11:56, bert wrote:

Nor can they provide the capacity. Just imagine all the Pendelinos
thundering down the west coast mainline carrying 700+ people being
replaced by a snail of cars

Hm.. train every ten minutes with 700 people on

~70 people a minute

so 70 cars a minute.

three lane motorway will easily have more than that.

The M6 handles 130000 cars,buses and lorries a day in each direction.
That's a lot of trains call it 130 a day so one every 11 minutes all day.

Of course they all want to travel at the same rush hour so trains have
*no* chance of meeting demand when the roads are shut.