Christian Wolmar
CHRISTIAN WOLMAR highlights how a properly-financed Tyne & Wear Metro can play a vital part in an integrated North East transport system
Metro’s vital Tyneside role.
NEWCASTLE both gave us the railway, and has become utterly dependent upon it. The site of Robert Stephenson’s works where the
Rocket was built can be seen from Platform 7 of the station, and there is a whole section of the town called the Stephenson Quarter in honour of Robert and his father George.
According to Tobyn Hughes, the head of the transport section at the new Combined Authority, the station’s frequent service to London (just three hours away on a fast train) is Newcastle’s economic lifeline. When I met Hughes on a sunny day in late July, David Higgins (the Chairman of HS2 Ltd) had just passed through, having addressed a meeting organised by local businesses to press for an early decision on ensuring that services to Scotland use the eastern leg of HS2. “Preston may object”, said Hughes, “but we think the case is strong”.
This, however, is the long distant future. Hughes has more immediate fish to fry. Top of his agenda is the need for new trains for the Metro system. The cost is estimated at a precise £537 million, and Hughes hopes that these can be in place by 2021 at the latest, greatly improving the reliability of the Metro, the present stock of which has a high failure rate.
Hughes has a great sense of history, and the tale of the Metro provides a fascinating insight into the failings of the politics underlying the British transport system at the local level. He has a presentation covering the origins of the lines making up the Metro system. This shows that part of it was in fact Britain’s second commuting route; the line between Newcastle and North Shields was completed in 1839, just a year after the London & Greenwich. Another section, on the other side of the Tyne to South Shields, was electrified by the LNER in 1937, only for it to be transformed back to diesel in 1963 by British Rail because of poor patronage.
It is, however, the more recent history that is relevant to the present state of the Metro. Until its creation more than 30 years ago, Newcastle’s local suburban services operated from bay platforms on the north of Central Station, which was an unsatisfactory arrangement since the station is a long walk away from the main office and shopping districts. Local politicians spent many years lobbying for a Metro in order to improve transport services in an area with low car ownership. While there had been a brief BR initiative to encourage use of these suburban services under the banner ‘Tynerider’, for the most part they were being phased out and used hand-me-down rolling stock featuring maps of train services in Lancashire or Cornwall.
The Metro would change all that. It was conceived as part of an integrated transport system serving the region, an innovative concept at the time. Effectively, it was Britain’s first light rail system, and it was hoped that it would set an example for other cities. But it was, however, the concept of integration that was most forward-looking. Hughes showed me photos of the stations on the system where buses in yellow and white livery would deposit passengers at ground level, who would then walk down beneath the station to catch Metro trains (with the same livery) to central Newcastle.
It was a triumph for the local politicians, who had been supported by a group of radical and enthusiastic transport planners and had written a key blueprint for the idea, Plan for the People, in 1973. It did not come cheap. The system required extensive tunnelling under the city centre, a new bridge over the River Tyne and an elegant S-shaped viaduct at Byker. It eventually cost £288m, rather than the original estimate of £65m. There is, however, little doubt that it was worth the extra outlay, as it provided an effective transport system and much better access to Newcastle’s commercial districts.
The Metro system opened fully in 1984 and in the first year of operation carried 60 million passengers. That figure has never been exceeded because almost as soon as the integrated system was created, it had to be dismantled. The Transport Act 1985 deregulated bus operations outside London, which meant that anybody could launch a service to compete with existing providers. The Tyne & Wear network had been designed to provide buses to feed into the Metro system, which would then take people into central Newcastle, reducing the pressure on roads and bridges. That, clearly, was too radical and, indeed, rational for the Thatcher government of the 1980s, and the result has been fewer Metro passengers (a recent upsurge has seen numbers climb to 40 million, still well below the peak at its inauguration) and declining bus patronage as fares have risen above inflation.
“Top of the agenda is the need for new trains for the Metro system”
Yet, the bus companies have stubbornly defended the system. After years of frustration Nexus, which was then the local Passenger Transport Executive, sought to change the system to create a Quality Contract allowing it to set routes, times and prices. However, the attempt to impose this ‘Quality Contract’ as it was known, had to overcome numerous hurdles set by the Labour government, which had clearly been lobbied hard when the legislation was passed.
The local councils were perceived by Stagecoach and Go-Ahead, the principal local bus companies, as wanting to ‘steal their bus routes’ and wreck their businesses. Rather amusingly, Les Warnford from Stagecoach said ‘Nexus and the transport authority were operating in the same camp as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky’. When the matter came to the arbitration court, Nexus could not match the panoply of lawyers put up by the bus companies, which were defending profit margins of up to 24%, and lost on the grounds that it could not show sufficient public interest – even though it would have resulted in a far more rational local transport situation. Hughes says that it was impossible to revive the case since ‘we had already spent a lot of money and could not risk more’. Clearly the strength of feeling from the bus companies – most of whom also run rail franchises – was such that they actually saw the case as threatening their very existence. Yet, on the Continent, the sort of arrangement proposed by Nexus is commonplace. The story of the Tyne & Wear Metro is probably the greatest indictment in the UK of our ridiculous insistence on competition rather than coordination. The reduced passenger numbers of both bus and Metro users is a direct result of the inability of local government to ensure that there is an efficient, integrated transport system in its area.
Hughes is now transport boss of the new North East Combined Authority, of which Nexus is just a small part. The Authority has a remit encompassing Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North Tyneside, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Sunderland, and was established as part of the devolution agenda promoted by the now departed Chancellor, George Osborne. As such, the precise functions and powers of the new organisation have yet to be determined.
However, this may be a new opportunity to recreate an integrated transport system in the North East. The Combined Authority will eventually have a mayor and powers to establish a transport network that could be franchised out. Moreover, Hughes hopes that this would also help to bring about long mooted plans for extensions of the Metro and the local rail network. The centrepiece of the projects set out in a brochure from the Combined Authority is the reinstatement of the Leamside Line, which would not only allow for a Metro-style service between Sunderland and the growing area of Washington, but would also be a diversionary freight loop relieving pressure on the East Coast Main Line. In the longer term, it could become part of a highspeed route from the North East to Yorkshire.
And here’s a pleasant irony. When the Metro system and the integrated transport concept were first signed off in the mid 1970s, it was in the aftermath of a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and the country was in the midst of a financial crisis. Yet somehow, the money was made available. Hughes is an optimist.