It’s all change for your rail service
Green light for devolution of Valley Lines:
THE Valley Lines north of Cardiff Queen Street are set to be fully devolved to Wales next month, triggering a sweeping modernisation programme.
The process of separating the infrastructure from Network Rail and handing it to the Welsh Government has taken longer than expected, partly because it has never been tried before.
But last Friday the formal transfer notice was issued, putting the Core Valley Lines on course to be devolved on March 28.
Engineers are poised to start on the £738m programme to electrify and upgrade the railways, which were built primarily for coal trains, but are now vital commuter arteries connecting residents of the Valleys and Cardiff suburbs to workplaces in the city centre.
The Core Valley Lines consist of the routes from Cardiff Queen Street to Treherbert, Aberdare, Merthyr Tydfil, Rhymney, Coryton and Cardiff Bay, along with most of the City Line from Radyr to Cardiff Central.
A new infrastructure depot for the modernisation works, in Treforest, is ready and waiting for kick-off.
Before passengers start to see electrification masts sprouting alongside the tracks, various preparatory works are needed.
These include construction of additional tracks in the upper Valleys, to enable trains to run every 15 minutes instead of every 30 minutes.
Managers at AmeyKeolis Infrastructure, the company which will operate the Valley Lines on the Welsh Government’s behalf, have found a way to electrify the lines with less disruption to passengers and communities than was seen recently when the main line was electrified from the Severn Tunnel to Cardiff.
On the main line, many road bridges had to be rebuilt to provide more clearance underneath for the high-voltage power cables, temporarily severing pedestrian and vehicular routes.
The new Valleys trains will have batteries as well as equipment to collect power from overhead wires. The wires will be electrically isolated under road bridges and through Caerphilly Tunnel, with the trains automatically switching to battery power instead.
This should enable the existing bridges to remain in situ, and the tunnel should not have to be closed for a prolonged time for full electrification inside.
If all goes to plan, tramtrains should take over the services from Cardiff to Pontypridd and beyond by the end of 2022, followed by hybrid trains on the Rhymney and Coryton lines a year later.
The hybrid trains will have diesel engines so that through services continue to operate from the Rhymney line to Barry,
Penarth and other places where the rail network will remain the responsibility of the UK Government, which has turned its back on further rail electrification.
This will give passengers from the Barry direction the choice of alighting at Cardiff Queen Street, as now, without having to change trains at Central.
However, completing the modernisation in the relatively short time available could prove challenging, particularly in the later stages when the new trains and systems have to be tested and shown to be safe.
In some areas of England, introduction of new trains – which do not have the added complications of battery and hybrid technology – has suffered major delays.
Completion of the large Crossrail project in London is delayed by about three years, partially because of difficulties with integrating new and old systems.
TfW chief executive James Price told AMs last week that the Core Valley Lines transfer, expected to take place last September, had been delayed for various reasons, but the extra time had been used for more infrastructure design work.
“We’ve spent a bit more time and money designing, so we should have designed out some of the issues that we would have faced in an earlier start,” he said. “We are now more tight on the programme than I wanted us to be.”