East Midlands.
Timetables and traction form the twin pillars supporting the next franchise, reports PHILIP HAIGH
BUILDERS of bi-mode trains rejoice! The Department for Transport insists your product runs London to Sheffield and Nottingham trains under the next East Midlands operator.
You’ll need speedy production, because the winning bidder starts on August 18 2019 and must have the first new bi-mode trains on test by December 31 2021 and in squadron service a year later.
Those deadlines appear in the DfT’s invitation to tender (ITT) for the new franchise, which it published on June 6. The ITT reveals that these trains must run to Class 222 timings, while Transport Secretary Chris Grayling wants up to 20 minutes lopped from the time from London to Sheffield (163 miles) and Nottingham (126 miles). That’s a difficult demand - most of the Midland Main Line will lack overhead wires, and bi-modes running on diesel are less powerful than electric trains and less powerful than fully diesel trains.
That’s because they need to devote room to electrical equipment such as a main transformer. This would typically take the place of one diesel engine from a modern multiple unit. A five-car Class 222 running today has a Cummins QSK19 diesel engine under each coach, producing a total of 3,750hp. One of Great Western Railway’s five-car Class 802 bi-modes has three more powerful engines (MAN units of 940hp each), but they give less power overall (2,820hp).
For longer trains, the difference becomes proportionately less, so the answer might be to go for longer trains. A second advantage of long trains is that they discourage splitting and joining trains at intermediate stations, which always comes with the risk that delays in one place radiate to another. The downside comes with timetable planners unable to use one scarce path from London to serve two destinations - perhaps splitting a train at East Midlands Parkway to serve Derby (128 miles from London) and Nottingham.
Whatever options the three bidders (Abellio, Arriva and current operator Stagecoach) choose, bi-mode trains should be running on electric power between London and Kettering North Junction (74 miles). Here the wires will split from the main line and run only to Corby.
This marks a remarkable return for the town, whose station was closed by BR in 1966. It will soon have direct electric trains for London, with a service that bridges the gap between Thameslink’s outer-suburban trains to Bedford and East Midlands’ inter-city services to Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield.
DfT’s ITT insists that electric trains enter service by December 2020. It doesn’t insist that they are new, which gives the owners of all the EMUs coming off lease from Greater Anglia and other franchises a chance to see their trains continue in service. This should lead to some keen pricing and clever engineering, to compete with new stock which has never been cheaper to buy and finance.
Bidders have freedom to propose appropriate stock for EM’s Norwich-Liverpool trains that currently run with Class 158s. They will need to balance customer demands for better trains with Rail Minister Jo Johnson’s wish to see diesel-only trains gone by 2040. They must also calculate how DfT’s decision to split the route at Nottingham and pass its western section to TransPennine Express or Northern affects the figures for new trains.
Central to bidders’ plans and numbers will be DfT’s decision to scale back its emphasis on quality over premium. DfT varies the
emphasis by varying a multiplying factor (n) in its calculations that combines premium offered with bid quality scores. For South Western in 2016, DfT used 130 for n. For EM, n is 30. Overall score comes from a bidder’s premium in millions of pounds added to n multiplied by quality score, which varies from one to 13. So every extra quality score point equates to £30m in premium for EM. It equated to £130m in SW bids.
DfT asks for parent company support (PCS) of at least £25m for East Midlands, plus 12% of the difference between the premium a bidder offers and DfT’s baseline premium (which it doesn’t reveal in the public ITT, but reflects how DfT expects the franchise and the economy to perform). For South Western, DfT set PCS at £45m plus 6% of the premium difference. The resultant sum is the cash pot from which the winner must support its operation if its financial predictions go astray.
Whatever precise figures come from bids, it’s clear that DfT is emphasising premium payments over quality of plans, in the way it did for East Coast in 2014 (when n was 25). Stagecoach’s optimism in winning East Coast quickly turned sour, and it must now hand back the keys several years early. East Coast PCS was £50m plus a 7% premium adjustment, and Stagecoach and 10% partner Virgin lost around £200m. Abellio bid a high premium to win Greater Anglia in 2015, when n was 33.
East Midlands’ premium payments are generally lower than other inter-city franchises. In its results for 2016, Stagecoach predicted 2017-18 payments for East Midlands of £59m and £340m for East Coast.
Today’s franchise runs 470 daily trains and carries 26 million passengers. The new deal that starts in August 2019 will run for eight years with a possible extension of two years. Bidders have until September 5 to send DfT their plans.
DfT has specified two levels of service. The first (TSR1) runs from December 2020, and the second (TSR2) runs from December 2021. For the main route northwards to Sheffield, little changes between the two. For TSR2, the western section of Norwich-Liverpool is cut from the franchise. DfT has considered other changes to its geography, but public consultation showed little support so it has dropped its ideas of switching Birmingham-Nottingham and Birmingham-Leicester/Stansted Airport services from CrossCountry to East Midlands.
The winning bidder will be asked to write a business case for returning passenger services to Shirebrook-Ollerton, where former colliery lines still exist to serve a Network Rail test track ( RAIL 853).
DfT has imposed some constraints on East Midlands’ timetable. It will allow it to flex Thameslink services on the southern end of the main line to St Pancras, but planners cannot shift the times when Thameslink services pass Canal Junction into the core section under London. This is because Canal Junction forms the entry to a section that will eventually carry 24 trains per hour by merging trains from Midland and Great Northern lines. Changing entry times would ripple across timetables in southeast England, as Thameslink’s recent timetable meltdown clearly demonstrates.
A second constraint comes from DfT insisting that EM trains crossing the East Coast Main Line on Newark flat junction do so in parallel. That is, EM services to and from Lincoln cross each other on the crossing, minimising the time that ECML services cannot cross. Planners must also leave room for East Coast’s operator to run to Lincoln from Newark North Gate every two hours, and occupy Lincoln’s Platform 4 for 25 minutes in every odd hour.
In deciding what to ask bidders for in the franchise, DfT ran a consultation. Of the responses, 39% came from Bedford with most complaining about DfT’s plan to improve inter-city journey times to Sheffield and Nottingham by cutting stops. This illustrates a classic friction between stations at the outer edge of suburban services, such as Bedford, that also have inter-city trains. The inter-city trains generally provide faster links into London, and so are popular with those users. But the stops lengthen journey time for those passengers from further afield.
DfT planned to cut stops at Luton, Bedford, Wellingborough and Kettering from inter-city trains, and serve them with a new electric service to and from Corby. It admitted this would force those travelling shorter distances such as Luton Airport-Nottingham or Leicester-Wellingborough to change at Kettering. Of 1,405 replies, 57% said no and 24% said yes. DfT decided to put longerdistance passengers first, and did not change its mind in the face of public opposition.