Responding to major changes.
AS a journalist for nigh on half a century, who has covered all kinds of extraordinary stories (big and small), I can quite easily say there has been nothing like this.
When I pop out for my daily jog or occasional forays into shops, I keep on having to pinch myself that I have not suddenly woken up in a John Wyndham novel. I almost expect to see triffids wandering past my window!
Frankly, words fail me in trying to describe what is happening. ‘Unprecedented’ or ‘extraordinary’ just do not cut it. As I write this, just before Easter, The Guardian reports that rail travel has fallen to 5% of normal levels and Eurostar is down to 1%. Note: these are not percentage reductions, but the actual numbers travelling compared with the same time last year.
So, the unthinkable has become the new normal. Franchising is already a long-forgotten concept and cannot be revived in anything like its former structure. The railways have been renationalised and no one has protested. The open access passenger companies have given up the ghost and suspended services. We are moving inexorably towards a reintegrated railway.
Poor old Jeremy Corbyn ( had he won December’s General Election) would probably not have dared to have been so radical so quickly as Grant Shapps (not known for any previous socialist tendencies) has been.
Network Rail, already in government hands, is leaching billions of pounds and no one is even questioning it. Tenants have been let off paying rentals in stations and the freight companies have been allowed to hold off paying their access charges, while still happily in receipt of the fees they get for providing traction and wagons for track work.
That’s because Network Rail is government-owned and therefore able to make these decisions. Who will pay in the end is (of course) a big question, but that’s for another day.
In trying to work out where we go from here, trying to patch up the franchising system seems both impossible and unworkable. With Network Rail now in the hands of a competent chief executive in Andrew Haines, who also understands operations, surely even an ideologically constrained Conservative government might see the sense of simply handing over operations to the infrastructure manager, given that vertical integration was high on the Williams agenda anyway. Running the system as one railway, with the flexibility that will be needed in the post-COVID world, would make sense.
For example, it is now widely accepted that not everything will return to normal at the same time. Indeed, whole regions might be allowed to emerge from lockdown while others remain under
restrictions. Therefore, rail services might be required to return to normal schedules in one part of a region, but not in another. Coordinating such a complex return can only be done centrally and working out any commercial aspects would be impossible.
There is also a wider role for the railways in a recovery. As I argued in RAIL 902, it would be a great mistake to close down the network - even with the small number of passengers it currently caters for.
Once the economy starts to head back to normal (a process that may well take a decade), the pattern of rail use may change. Certainly, all those season ticket holders will not all come back at once, but on the other hand there may well be a huge extra demand for leisure travel. If the restrictions are lifted early enough, I suspect this will be a bumper year for domestic seaside resorts, while few people will be ready to jump in an aeroplane. Again, in all these respects, only government can take the risk.
The one sector that has not been taken over by government is the rail freight industry, where there have been some big losses. Aggregates have largely dried up because work on housebuilding and other civil engineering projects has been suspended. And China stopped sending their big boxes some weeks ago, which meant a reduction in freight trains to and from Felixstowe, although there are signs that they may start arriving again towards the end of this month.
However, this will only serve to illustrate the topsy-turvy nature of what is happening to the world’s economies. As China begins to reduce its lockdown and fulfils orders that were made months ago, we are heading for an even tighter one - or at least, we are certainly not looking to relax restrictions.
This means that all those clothes for Primark or electronic goods for Curry’s will just sit in warehouses for months, as the retail outlets are currently shut. That will mean another hiatus for rail freight, and then quite possibly another boom when things start to return to normal.
Other parts of the rail freight industry are doing OK - notably the supply of biomass for power stations or minerals such as alumina for the aluminium smelter in Fort William, as these industries cannot be switched off. Indeed, the transport ministers have apparently been talking approvingly of the importance of rail freight as a vital industry to keep the lights on and key materials available.
As an anecdote, one freight manager told me that because fewer passenger services are running in Manchester, freight trains are now using the short cut via the Ordsall Curve - and it has become a key route for these trains. Will they just get forced back into using the long way round afterwards?
Therefore, given the recognition of rail freight’s vital importance, there may be opportunities for rail freight to capitalise on this situation and demonstrate its value in the new order of things.
Even so, parts of the rail freight industry are in trouble, given the cuts in the economy, and will need bailing out. But it’s not easy to see how this can be done as the rail freight companies may fall between the various stools of the government aid mechanisms - too big to benefit from the small firms programme, but not able to qualify for the help for larger firms.
Seeing easyJet receive a £600 million government loan for an industry that is certainly not on the side of reducing the impact of climate change should give the rail companies plenty of ammunition in their search for a bail-out. However, talking to people in the industry showed me that no one has any idea how this may work. Government is doing things on the hoof and making announcements which sound good in public, but when people or firms actually try to take advantage of these schemes they simply get enmeshed in the red tape. Rail freight is no exception.
The issues regarding rail freight point towards some of the ways in which some good will come out of this crisis. It is crucial to ensure that the world does not just revert to its bad old days. The decarbonisation of transport had just reached the agenda as the lockdown started and it must not simply be forgotten. Look at the improvement in air quality, which has probably saved more lives than the COVID-19 virus has killed. Do we really want to return to the polluted world we had before?
It’s not only travel patterns that will change after this, but the very way we look at transport. Even the president of the Automobile Association, Edmund King has questioned whether the £27 billion road programme is really necessary. He asked: “Once this crisis is over… rather than everyone jumping into their cars, I think some people might begin to think ‘do I really need to use my car every day’?”
There will be opportunities for rail, but the industry will need to be ready to adapt to a different world.