Modern diesels could deliver a sterling service
There has been much correspondence on these pages in recent weeks regarding the electrification of our main lines - principally the Great Western Main Line project.
Most of it has lamented the missed opportunities and alleged poor project management that has left the UK with a still only partially electrified system, some 50 years after the end of steam.
Fair enough, but I also detect a distinct anti-diesel bias in some correspondence, and a lack of knowledge of the overall performance of the modern diesel engine.
Time and again we are told that diesels pollute, diesels have a bigger carbon footprint, and so on. Depending on whose figures you believe regarding the UK’s carbon emissions, electric traction is cleaner, but potentially this is not by much, particularly when compared with the best that a modern diesel can achieve.
In any case, the pollution associated with diesel railway locomotives - if they all conformed to current best practice - is not a significant factor in the case for electrification.
Why is there such a fixation with electrification, when what we actually need is an effective (and cost-effective) railway?
Let us imagine that the West Coast and East Coast Main Lines had never been electrified, and that along with the GWML all had operated using HSTs from that train’s inception.
Let us further imagine that the original HSTs had been replaced with ‘Mk 2’ and ‘Mk 3’ versions following the same basic format, but using modern locomotives and rolling stock, in (say) the mid-1990s and again in the last few years.
Would journey times be any slower? No.
Would the trains be less comfortable? No.
Would they be any less attractive to the customer? No.
Would their availability be any worse? No.
Would they have cost more to deliver than the electric traction we actually have? No, not if their development and manufacture had been reasonably well managed.
Would they be more expensive to run? A bit, but then we wouldn’t have had to pay through the nose for catenary systems that blow down in a stiff breeze, so overall probably not.
There is no ‘sparks effect’, but there is a ‘clean, fast, comfortable, well-priced new train effect’ that is just as ably delivered by diesel as it is by electricity.
Electrification is clearly mandatory for commuter lines, and I don’t dispute its desirability for main line traction in an ideal world. But the world of UK railways since the war has not been ideal, and outside of HS1/2 there is no main line service today that properly designed modern diesel traction could not deliver. Bill Gysin, Whittlesford Parkway