South West fights on
The Peninsula Rail Task Force is forcefully making the case for extra rail investment in the South West, but little appears to have changed since the Dawlish Sea Wall breach in 2014, and progress reamins slow. RICHARD CLINNICK reports
Two years on from Dawlish, the Peninsula Rail Task Force is continuing the fight for railway investment in the South West.
Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw summed up the situation in the West Country in Parliament on June 30.
The Labour politician, asking Secretary of State for Transport Patrick McLoughlin about rolling stock, said: “The Secretary of State will know that the rolling stock serving the South West of England dates from the 1970s, and we are eagerly updating our new, updated trains. What assessment have he and his Department made of the impact of Brexit and the economic shock from Brexit on his overall investment plans for our transport system?”
However, the new trains Bradshaw discusses are only part of the plans. The South West is hugely ambitious - it wants improved journey times, better infrastructure, and resilience built into its railway.
The Peninsula Rail Task Force (PRTF) has a 20-year blueprint for the region, designed to boost its economy through better connectivity.
Yet it has heard promises before. When the railway re-opened on April 4 2014 after a two-month closure caused by the damage to the Dawlish Sea Wall, Prime Minister David Cameron said: “This cannot be allowed to happen again. We will ensure that we invest to make it resilient.”
But in the two years since, what has actually been done?
Concerns remain that the region is being overlooked. PRTF Chairman Andrew Leadbetter highlights a very recent example of when things have gone wrong, and how connectivity is the key to opening up opportunities.
“We had great numbers of tourists coming down over the recent May Bank Holiday, but being stuck in traffic for over six hours will not persuade them to come again. With the roads blocked and limited trains running, our network was very severely compromised for hundreds of thousands of visitors, never mind the communities that are based here.”
Leabetter argues that businesses in the region feel forgotten, and that this perception is nothing new on the railway. His incredulity at the age of the High Speed Trains that run from the South West to London is a constant thread during our conversation. Journey times are a real bone of contention.
“It is not sustainable,” he states. “Exeter could be an hour and a half, and Plymouth in
We had great numbers of tourists coming down over the recent May Bank Holiday, but being stuck in traffic for over six hours will not persuade them to come again. Andrew Leadbetter, Chairman, Peninsula Rail Task Force
two hours and 15 minutes.”
Currently it is around two hours to Exeter, and a further hour to Plymouth. Leadbetter points out how people drive from north Cornwall to Tiverton to catch trains to London, rather than to Plymouth, because of the journey time. However, this does not guarantee a seat, while working time is also lost by driving rather than working on the train. He says too many compromises are currently being made.
Additionally, he highlights the price of fuel and the green issues as reasons for the growing passenger numbers in the West Country. “It is really social here - people want choice.”
The Peninsula west of Exeter is particularly vulnerable to weather, and never was this better illustrated than on the stormy night of February 4 2014, when 80 metres of the famous Brunel sea wall at Dawlish was washed away. The damage was compounded ten days later when another storm smashed a further 20 metres of the wall, leaving a ten- metre hole in Brunel’s iconic structure. Trains were terminated at Exeter, and buses ferried passengers west. Trains ran from Newton Abbot, but local communities suffered. It was, perhaps, the shot in the arm the region needed regarding the decision to campaign.
It could be argued that the railways of the South West are overlooked - that is certainly the impression derived from reading some of the correspondence in RAIL’s Open Access pages.
For example, there has been much gnashing of teeth and passenger complaints regarding Pacers, to the point that Government made the promise to remove the trains from the Northern franchise. Yet that was not a promise made for the Great Western plans - it was up to current operator FirstGroup to come up with a plan to remove the trains. Even then, the trains replacing them still date from the 1980s.
Leadbetter also highlights that £ 31 million of promised investment for flood alleviation,
been encountered with schemes on the Great Western Main Line to Bristol and in the North West, the wires are nevertheless being erected, with talk of more across the country… but not in the South West. Leadbetter tells RAIL he still wants overhead line equipment to be installed in the region, stating it offers better performance for trains.
And when the Intercity Express Programme was first launched in 2009, and then when IEP trains were ordered in 2012, no mention was made of the hi-tech trains running to the West Country. Instead, HSTs dating from 1976 onwards were to remain the staple diet of long-distance services from London to west of Exeter. It was only last year, when the GW deal was announced, that First was able to order new bi-mode trains that could serve the area.
But the South West does not just want new trains for the sake of it. Between February 4 and April 4 2014, when the railway was closed because of the damage at Dawlish, there were 50 working days when the railway could not operate. Losses were estimated at £ 20m per day, equating to £1 billion denied to a region that is increasingly dependent on its railway. It was estimated that Plymouth businesses alone lost £ 600,000 per day (£ 30m over 50 days).
At Dawlish itself, there has been a £ 5m investment into a study into the sea wall and cliffs along the route. However, PRTF says that there are not enough funds to take this beyond the design stage in mid-2017.
The South West Peninsula’s Gross Value Added (GVA) per head is £15,519 (72.9% of the UK average). Campaigners argue that a
following the Somerset Levels flooding two years ago, has yet to be fully delivered. Meanwhile, £ 35m was spent on repairing the sea wall at Dawlish, yet CrossCountry cannot run its Voyager fleet west of Exeter when there are rough seas because of the risk of damage to the equipment on the roofs of the trains. “We expect the rail industry to maintain the line to the same levels of reliability as the rest of the UK,” he says.
Electrification has been promised around the country, and although problems have