Infrastructure projects

Nigel Harris ( Comment, RAIL 881) and Wesley Paxton ( Open Access,

RAIL 887) both hark back to an era of black and white-coloured infrastructure upgrades.

Today’s reality is rather different. Firstly, the UK rail network is far busier than it ever was 60 years ago, especially during the evenings and weekends.

Secondly, today’s trains are all far faster and a lot quieter - thus every train is quite capable of silently ‘sneaking up’ on an unsuspecting trackside workforce.

Thirdly, and by far the most important factor, is that society now deems workplace deaths to be totally and utterly unacceptable.

However, we should be learning from the more recent past.

One key lesson from the £10 billion West Coast Main Line upgrade in the early 2000s was the importance of providing goodquality diversionary routes, and to have them in place and operating alternative timetabled passenger services before the main works started.

The principle is very simple: by completely separating the passenger trains from the contractor’s worksite, everybody involved is kept both happy and safe. OK, it needs some investment upfront, but the payback is remarkable.

Unfortunately, when work started on the very similar, but somewhat ill-conceived, Great Western Main Line project, the Department for Transport failed to learn those lessons.

And not content with making this mistake once, as we speak DfT, Transport for the North and Network Rail are all trying to build the Trans-Pennine Route Upgrade project without having a proper diversionary route in place first.

Is it any wonder that the upgrade is being forecast to take several years to build, cost £3bn, not actually deliver much of an upgrade, and cause several years of misery to those travelling between Leeds and Manchester?

If major projects are planned right first time, with proper diversionary routes in place, then better workforce safety can actually mean more efficient working practices, better quality control, far lower costs and far less earache from passengers.

Peter Bryson, Chairman, Skipton to East Lancashire Rail Action Partnership