Halton Curve
A long campaign to reinstate regular passenger rail services on a small section of track in the North West may finally be drawing towards a successful conclusion. PAUL STEPHEN reports
The release of local funding could be the key to reintroducing long-awaited bi-directional running along Halton Curve.
Halton Curve is a key component, and something we’ve wanted to deliver for years. Frank Rogers, Chief Executive, Merseytravel
The campaign to restore regular passenger services to a small but overlooked part of the rail network has taken a huge leap forward, following the release of key funding by local government.
Council leaders in Merseyside took the decision in April to allocate an additional £ 5.67 million of the City Region’s Local Growth Fund money to the Halton Curve reinstatement scheme, topping up the £10.4m they initially pledged in 2014.
With the necessary financial backing now in place, work can begin next year to reintroduce bi-directional running on the 1.5-mile curve. This in turn should facilitate the introduction of a new hourly service between Chester and Liverpool once the new Wales & Borders franchise begins in October 2018.
Offering an alternative to Merseyrail’s Wirral Line via the Mersey Tunnel, the proposed new service will yield direct connections between Liverpool, Liverpool John Lennon Airport, Runcorn, Frodsham, Helsby and Chester, and then (subject to franchising negotiations) on to North Wales.
Estimated to cost up to £18.75m, the upgraded curve is expected to create more than 200,000 new rail journeys per year across the region, and deliver a benefit:cost ratio (BCR) of 1.9, reversing a lengthy period of declining importance for a section of track that has lain largely dormant for 40 years.
Connecting the Warrington Bank QuayChester line at Frodsham with the West Coast Main Line near Runcorn, by the early 1970s the Halton Curve had lost much of its intended purpose as a secondary route for freight and passenger traffic between the Cheshire/ Wales borderlands and South Lancashire.
With industrial output in full retreat across the North West, and with passenger numbers steadily falling, British Rail deemed its route to Liverpool via Birkenhead as more than sufficient to cope with demand, and regular passenger services were withdrawn or routed away from Halton Curve in May 1975.
For two decades the route soldiered on in a diversionary capacity, until further ignominy was inflicted in 1994 when the two-track chord was singled to reduce maintenance costs. It was also stripped down to one-directional running, by removing vital crossovers at its northern end at Halton Junction - allowing access to (but no longer from) the WCML.
To stave off the associated costs and bureaucracy of enforcing full closure, a single parliamentary service has continued to serve the line on Saturdays only in summer months, lending the Halton Curve its intrigue among rail enthusiasts keen to experience this sparsely used part of the network.
But far from being an isolated infrastructure upgrade, Halton Curve’s resurrection is just one of a wide range of transport improvement projects being pursued to support economic growth and increased connectivity across the Liverpool City Region.
Working on behalf of the Liverpool City Combined Authority, Passenger Transport Executive Merseytravel has been methodically preparing business cases for 14 prioritised road and rail schemes, which are in turn submitted for approval by the Combined Authority (CA). Once granted, cash can be accessed from the City Region’s £ 232m Local Growth Fund (LGF) pot, awarded by Whitehall in 2014 as part of its nationwide drive to devolve funding for major transport schemes.
Halton Curve was given the green light at a CA meeting on April 15, and forms a key part of Liverpool’s Long Term Rail Strategy. But it is only one of six schemes identified for delivery during 2016/17, and should be seen as part of a much bigger picture, according to Merseytravel Chief Executive Frank Rogers.
“The full business case for Maghull North is due to come forward in June or July,” he tells
RAIL. “It’s for the creation of a new £ 6.8m station on the Merseyrail network between Liverpool and Ormskirk that supports local development from a strategic housing perspective. So it’s not just: let’s build a railway station, it’s part of a long-term strategy.
“We need to deliver projects that are aligned to the strategic priorities of the City Region, and national priorities through Transport for the North. These are not schemes by themselves - they support other initiatives that maximise potential for economic growth. Halton Curve is a key component, and something we’ve wanted to deliver for years.”
Another project currently being delivered with Local Growth Fund cash is a £15.64m investment in the railway station at Newtonle-Willows (on the Liverpool to Manchester line), to improve interchange facilities with local bus services. This is scheduled for completion in March 2018 and will greatly enhance transport links to Parkside - a regeneration project to create a rail logistics hub and business park on a former colliery site.
And other schemes already in receipt of LGF support are junction improvements to the M58, high-level maintenance of the Silver Jubilee Mersey road crossing, and improvements to congested arterial roads such as the A570 and A5300 Knowsley Expressway.
The business case for Halton Curve had
been given a further boost in March, with the confirmation that £ 340m of dedicated funding is to be spent on railway upgrades over the next three years within the Liverpool City Region.
Some £ 229m from Network Rail and £111m from Liverpool’s Growth Deal funding will pave the way for additional trains, including direct services to Glasgow and Edinburgh by 2019 as set out in the new Trans-Pennine franchise agreement that began in April. New and longer platforms will be built at Liverpool Lime Street, and additional track laid between Huyton and Roby to increase capacity for Manchester traffic on the city’s western approaches.
Crucially for the project at Halton Curve, the West Coast Main Line will be resignalled between Wavertree and Weaver Junction (including the Halton Curve’s northern connection), in order to remove five signal boxes and transfer control to Manchester ROC.
Wayne Menzies, head of rail at Merseytravel, explains: “There are a number of things which have coalesced, one of which is the Local Growth Fund to allow us to get a contribution to the scheme, but also Network Rail’s proposals in respect of the development of the Weaver to Wavertree scheme at the WCML end of the curve. Sixteen miles of the WCML approaching Liverpool is being resignalled, and a fourth track being put in at Huyton.
“NR’s approach is to do the work at Lime Street and the work at Halton and Huyton in the same sort of timeframe, so they’re not causing endless disruption. That’s helped push the timeframe for doing Halton now. If we missed that window, we’d be looking at a minimum of another £ 2m worth of costs on top of the scheme, had we done it at any other time.
“Once they’ve done the signalling interlocking at the Halton end, we don’t want to have to go back and re-open it later on to do it again. Apart from the bits at either end of the Curve, you’d then have negligible interference with the rest of the network and you can do the vast majority of the work completely isolated from it.”
The preferred option in the Halton Curve business case prepared by Merseytravel
is for a single bi-directional route with a crossover and single lead junction at each end. Resignalling will also provide provision for the future construction of a 1,000-metre loop, to expand capacity as and when it’s needed.
Construction is expected to start in June 2017 and be completed by May 2018, in time for the start of the new Wales and Borders franchise beginning that autumn. In the meantime, Network Rail is required to follow its Governance for Railway Investment Projects (GRIP) procedure - an eight-stage management process for delivering enhancement projects on the network.
Menzies says that much of the work in GRIP 1 and 2 to establish scheme feasibility was completed for Halton Curve as long ago as 2007. Since then the project has remained stuck at GRIP 3 (option selection), in order to establish more accurate costs, to source funding and to ensure it aligns with the Weaver-Wavertree project.
Now that this has been achieved, Menzies says that the relatively simple task of bringing an existing stretch of track back into regular use will allow Halton Curve to move from GRIP 4 to GRIP 8 (single option development, detailed design, construction, handback and close out) in less than two years.
He explains: “GRIP 3 is option selection where you’d have a problem and NR would come up with a range of solutions to satisfy that problem. From that range you’d pick a single option and go to GRIP 4 and GRIP 5, which is detailed design and then construction.
“What NR does now is grab some of the work it used to do in GRIP 4 and put it into GRIP 3, so that it can have further development of the work required and greater surety of costs before proceeding to construction. The problem we’ve had is that it extends the timescale to get this project to fruition. We effectively got very early outline scheme development and option selection [GRIP 3], as we always knew what option we’re pursuing.
“We hope to get works on site in 2017 as part of the overall package of Weaver-Wavertree works, and completion in spring 2018. But if anything slips on that, then Halton Curve will slip as the timelines are so linked.”
Rogers adds that ensuring the work at Halton Curve fell into the Wavertree-Weaver time window unfortunately meant scaling back the scope of service provision included in the approved business case. Indeed, an outline business case published in May 2015 had initially considered a total of nine possible service patterns - including two trains per hour running from Liverpool, with one terminating at Chester and the other running through to Wrexham or Bangor.
By opting for just 1tph running only as far as Chester, it means that passengers from Wrexham and stations on the North Wales Line will still require an interchange at Chester to use the new service, negating the potential for modal shift as direct public transport connections will remain poor between the areas.
It seems that Merseytravel was left with little option other than to curtail the proposed service offering, as discussions with the Welsh Government to secure the requisite funding remain ongoing. Financial input by the Welsh Government is needed to relieve capacity constraints and the lack of available rolling stock on lines beyond Chester, and it will assume full franchising authority from the DfT in 2017.
Adds Rogers: “There have been questions over if it’s really worth it for one service per hour between Liverpool and Chester, but that’s not the end game. If we had had
to put a business case forward to justify this scheme that contemplated services to Wrexham (where there are still pathing issues) and Bangor (that require rolling stock considerations), it would have made delivery of the scheme a lot more challenging and we would have injected a lot more time into the process.
“It might have generated a better BCR, but we knew we had a scheme at an acceptable BCR and readily deliverable on the basis of 1tph. If we get the infrastructure built on the back of that, the rest will fit into a longer-term strategy.
“We had nine options when we started to look at this. But because of the complexity of rolling stock availability, understanding what would happen pre and post-refranchising, and challenges over path availability, it would have taken an awful lot longer to have further developed all of them.
“The critical bit is getting the line built and running a service we know we can justify, and then see what comes from that in respect of further extensions. The understanding is that this is not the end of it.”
Discussions with the Welsh Government also need to be concluded before an operator can be confirmed for the new service. Liverpool Lime Street to Chester would fit into both Northern and Wales & Borders franchises, but the obvious preference is for the latter, which lends itself far better to extending the route on to Welsh destinations in future.
Despite having the identity of an operator for the route still to be determined, Rogers has no doubt that services to Chester will begin as planned in 2018. Merseytravel is underwriting revenue support until 2021 regardless of the outcome of franchise negotiations, while the Welsh Government has publically endorsed the Halton Curve scheme in its current form, and pledged its commitment to finding a way to extend services from Chester to across the border.
He adds: “Our business case says that we will pick up revenue requirement for a minimum of three years, or less if the new Wales & Borders franchise picks that up. Our agreement with Welsh government is that we will get Halton Curve built, and start revenue funding but with the expectation that it gets picked up as part of the new franchise, and then you’re responsible for getting those further connections to Wrexham, Holyhead and Bangor.
“I personally think that there will be a lot of pressure in North Wales for Welsh government to make sure they accommodate those enhanced services in future franchise specifications. We think that once this line is
built you will see significant development of service provision using it.”
Merseytravel has also faced criticism for the rising costs of the scheme, which have increased to a top estimate of £18.75m from the £11.44m initial costing given when Growth Deal funding was first granted in 2014. Not only has this forced Merseytravel to seek £ 5.67m in additional funds, it also further erodes the BCR of the final business case.
However, Rogers does not believe that £18.75m will be the final price tag of construction, nor that all of the extra cash will be needed, because of the way Network Rail builds considerable margins for error into its cost estimates. NR also adds contingency charges for project management and a risk fee should anything not go to plan, inflating the far more modest amount needed to fund actual construction.
Despite any lingering uncertainties, for Merseytravel getting spades in the ground and delivering the project by 2018 is of paramount importance if the City Region is to realise any benefit from a scheme that remains good value for money.
“The Combined Authority has approved higher costs, but on the strict premise that we work with NR to drive the cost down. We could have gone on forever to drive down the cost of the scheme, but it might have taken six months of further development,” says Rogers.
“Because of the linkages with the Wavertree-Weaver work, we will be getting cost savings through efficiencies and economies of scale. We could have lost those benefits by honing in on the other numbers for the curve.
“£18.75m includes a 25% contingency, but that’s plus 25% on a number that includes plus 20% for this and plus 20% for that. We will look to ratchet that down and deliver the project in the most cost-effective way, but we were worried that if we kept going and going to hold the price down, it could end up going back up again.
“If this was a £ 200m project, we might be in a different position. It’s not a risk-free project, but we think it’s risk-managed. We’re 100% confident it’s the right thing to do.
“We haven’t yet got 100% definition of what it’s going to translate to, but we’ve seen it mentioned in the House of Commons and it’s been used in the Northern Powerhouse Growth Deal. It has enough political capital around it to see services developed.”
The critical bit is getting the line built and running a service we know we can justify, and then see what comes from that in respect of further extensions. The understanding is that this is not the end of it. Frank Rogers, Chief Executive, Merseytravel