MetroWest meets a costly stumbling block

How will a massive rise in the projected costs affect the Bristol MetroWest scheme to deliver improvements to rail services across the heavily congested conurbation?

What next for MetroWest, the rail project designed to bring joined-up train services across greater Bristol to Bath and beyond? That it’s now projected to cost up to three times more than the figure forecast this time last year has a grotesquely familiar ring about it.

In summer 2016, MetroWest Phase 1 - with its headline component of restoring passenger services along the Avon Gorge to Portishead - was priced at £ 58.2 million. This includes a new station at Portishead and reopening one at Pill. Local services on the Severn Beach and Bath to Bristol lines are also to be improved.

But within nine months that figure had tripled - the sum now being bandied around ranges from £145m to £175m. Campaigners and project managers are still trying to digest the implications.

This raises two fundamental questions: why, and what happens next?

As to the first, we may never know, although that’s not for the want of trying by Portishead Railway Group, tireless and pragmatic campaigners. However, their efforts to find answers via the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act have been knocked back.

Cynics might be forgiven for thinking the reasons amount to a cover-up, to spare the embarrassment of Network Rail. In rejecting the FOI request, NR said: “Those responsible for taking decisions… need a free space in which… to consider a wide range of options. Disclosure of material still in the course of completion would… potentially adversely affect their deliberations.

“Disclosure would potentially have a ‘chilling effect’ on experts… if it caused an adverse press or public reaction, this would potentially introduce a more cautious mentality. Such a decrease in the quality of advice… would clearly not be in the public interest.”

We do know that Network Rail is due to come back with revised plans, probably in July. On that basis, NR declined to give

RAIL details of exactly how costs have shot up. According to Simon Maple, NR’s current Western Route Project Sponsor, such schemes

METROWEST PROJECT. 600,000 passengers are expected to use the Portishead Line each year if passenger services are reinstated. It remains open to freight only through the Avon Gorge between Pill and Parson Street Junction, including Clifton Tunnel.