Dearman: we need to make electrification affordable
ELECTRIFICATION engineers received a sharp message of the disaster facing them at a conference in London on June 6, hearing that they were “sleepwalking into making electrification uneconomic”.
The bearer of bad news was Peter Dearman, Bechtel’s electrification advisor and a former senior engineer with Network Rail. He was very critical of rising costs and missed deadlines, and of engineers chasing perfection rather than adequacy.
He argued that engineers had made structural steelwork (such as masts) too heavy, and compared today’s work with that of British Rail when it electrified the Great Eastern suburban network during a steel shortage.
Dearman asked why systems were being specified for the electrical loads expected in 25 years’ time when they could be boosted later, rather than adding all the cost now. He also asked why engineers had not argued against the imposition of 3.5-metre clearances at public places, rather than the 2.75m measure used successfully for many years. He said the risk here was vanishingly small. The change has been blamed for adding considerable cost.
When ministers suspended BR’s electrification of the West Coast Main Line to Manchester and Liverpool amid rising costs in 1963, he said BR used the pause to fundamentally change the project’s scope so that it was successfully delivered. He argued that deferring parts of the electrification plan authorised in 2009 did nothing to address the economics behind the plan, and this had made them worse. “This is a disaster,” he claimed.
He suggested that the answer was not adding diesel engines to electric trains. “That makes trains sub-optimal,” he said, before adding: “We need to make electrification affordable. It’s our job to do this.”
Dearman said that electrification engineers needed to change their psychology and philosophy to place more emphasis on costs.
Network Rail’s current five-year Control Period started in 2014 with plans to electrify the Great Western, Midland and transPennine routes. The latter has been postponed, the Midland has been cut back to Corby and Kettering rather than Sheffield, and there are doubts that GW will extend beyond Cardiff and may not include the Bath route to Bristol. NR’s project is running three years late and is expected to cost £1.2 billion more than planned, according to a report from the Public Accounts Committee earlier this year.
Since the PAC’s report, NR has failed to electrify London’s 14-mile Gospel Oak-Barking line in a September 2016-February 2017 closure. It blamed faulty design of structures and late delivery of materials.