Philip Haigh
PHILIP HAIGH sifts through the Railway Industry Association annual conference to determine the areas the railway will need to focus on to deliver the best possible product
Where the railway must adapt.
NETWORK Rail Chairman Sir Peter Hendy CBE is always good for a quote.
Back in 2010, at RAIL’s National Rail Conference, he riled RMT union leaders when he said: “If you want to read a lot of good novels, the place to do that is as a booking clerk in a suburban Underground station.”
At the time, he was London’s transport commissioner and planning to close booking offices as passengers switched to Oyster cards.
Fast forward to 2020 and Hendy told the Railway Industry Association’s annual conference: “We’re not working from home - we’re living at work.”
That’s a rather profound summary of the last nine months for many people who would normally be working in offices.
Looking forward beyond the end of the pandemic to a return to normality, the railway will surely be a different place. Hendy reckons that those workers may only spend two or three days a week in their offices.
This will reduce demand for rail travel, provided those office days are spread through the week. It should also reduce that sharp morning peak on which so many rail costs lie. But it will not change rail’s fundamental strength in moving people efficiently over decent distances.
In recent years, rail has specialised in shifting people to and from London, but it wasn’t always like this. A century ago, rail chiefly meant rail freight - shifting goods and materials around the country.
That role fell away as road transport developed, but Hendy noted that even within his lifetime, the railway used more stock on August summer Saturdays than weekday peaks.
Dive into British Rail’s peak summer Saturday (June 14-September 6) 1969 timetable and you’ll find an 0910 from Sheffield Midland to Mablethorpe (arriving 1230 and running via Worksop, Gainsborough Lea Road and Lincoln Central). Or a 1000 Scarborough-Plymouth (2005), which loaded at Filey Holiday Camp at 1035 before calling at Bridlington and Rotherham Masborough to reach the usual route south via Sheffield, Birmingham New Street and Bristol Temple Meads.
That world of summer Saturday trains is long gone - Mablethorpe closed in 1970, while Filey Holiday Camp clung on until 1977. There’s no reason to suppose that either will welcome passengers once more, but that’s not true for other lines and stations, with Rail Minister Chris Heaton-Harris telling the RIA conference of his excitement for reversing some Beeching closures. (There’s some irony that the closures Richard Beeching proposed in 1963 followed his appointment by Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, but we’ll leave that for now.)
One of these reopening proposals might involve passenger trains returning to Ashington in Northumberland. The former pit town still has its railway, with a freight line running off the East Coast Main Line at Benton, but its station closed in 1964.
The project could be a good test for the minister’s claim to want to “not just build back better but build at a decent pace”.
Work to investigate ground conditions along the route started in October, to ascertain what mine workings lie beneath the line. Announcing this work, Northumberland County Council reckoned passenger trains might be running in 2023 - for a project that Railtrack was talking about back in 2000 ( RAIL 377).
To weave politics into this line’s reopening for a minute, it’s worth noting that December 2019’s General Election returned a Conservative MP for Blyth Valley, through which the line to Ashington runs. In Ashington’s constituency, Wansbeck, the Conservatives cut Labour’s majority from 10,435 votes to 814. It’s therefore in the Government’s interest to deliver passenger trains back to the line before the next election.
Heaton-Harris told RIA’s conference that he wanted to see planning processes simplified, and Network Rail Chief Executive Andrew Haines told the same audience that he was planning to scrap NR’s GRIP planning process because it was no longer fit for purpose. He said that GRIP had agility, but that there was a whole generation of users applying it too mechanically.
That reflects a view that it’s become more important to comply with GRIP, rather than deliver a project successfully to time and budget. The tail has been wagging the dog for too long.
But that’s not to say planning is trivial. RIA heard its importance from Infrastructure Projects Authority Chief Executive Nick Smallwood. He urged railway planners to resist changing a project’s scope (“scope creep is a killer”), and to resist gold-plating, noting that “no one really owns gold-plating”.
Projects should also resist starting physical work - spades in the ground - before proper design work is complete. Crossrail Chief Executive Mark Wild made this point, while acknowledging that it was hard for politicians to resist. For Crossrail, Wild reckoned that taking an extra 6-9 months up front might have saved two years.
In this context, that other favourite political phrase “world-class” is dangerous. It fed through into Crossrail’s specification and a tilt towards gold-plating. In reality, world-class should mean a project delivered to delight funders and users, which means it must be on budget and on time.
For projects such as Ashington, the trick will be to deliver just enough, which means working out what enough is. That might be hourly trains with perhaps an extra couple at
busier times, with a good (rather than best) journey time. It shouldn’t necessarily be a completely rebuilt line with new signalling.
NR Eastern Region Director Rob McIntosh appears on side. He told RIA that railways were about jobs, people and economic growth, but noted that over the past decade compliance with processes had become more important than passengers. He promised an unrelenting focus on passenger outcomes.
Office of Rail and Road Chief Executive John Larkinson told the conference: “I think rail tries to do too much” explaining that he sees specifications set too high and high costs based on poor early assumptions. He gave as an example level crossings (the Ashington line has 22), where too often he saw designers replacing crossings with bridges rather than properly assessing the risks of retaining crossings.
Level crossings can add considerable time to projects. It’s just taken three years for Network Rail to secure ministerial consent to close or downgrade 25 level crossings in Cambridgeshire (longer when you consider than NR started formulating its proposals in 2015, before formally applying in 2017). The formal independent inquiry took almost two years and its report sat in the Department for Transport for another year. Without wishing to ride roughshod over peoples’ legitimate concerns and objections, this seems a very long time.
It might be something for the rail minister to consider as he pushes forward with Ely North ( RAIL 916) - a project that has sat on several ministerial desks, where costs have risen exponentially (according to Heaton-Harris), and which involves several level crossings. He added his voice to calls throughout the conference not to gold-plate rail projects.
Planners and funders must consider the effects of 2020’s pandemic. The immense financial problems it is causing Transport for London led to TfL suspending development of Crossrail 2. Yet the new commissioner, Andy Byford, has put resignalling back into the Piccadilly Line’s upgrade project, telling RIA that it would be madness to introduce new trains without upgrading the signalling.
Meanwhile, Hendy said that NR was looking at proposed upgrades that still worked with 80% ridership. NR Chief Executive Andrew Haines suggested that there might be a switch from capacity schemes to ones that help decarbonisation.
Haines told his RIA audience that the Government wanted to invest its way out of recession, but warned that rail would need to show it offered better value for money than other infrastructure projects.
Coupled with yet more comments about gold-plating, Haines’ words are surely a callto-arms for the railway industry to deliver projects for passengers and freight users that are on-time and on-budget. That will keep Britain’s railway in the position it’s had for nearly 200 years as a vital part of the country’s economic engine-room.
Having started with a Peter Hendy quote, let’s end with another: “We might only have 30% of normal peak traffic into central London, but the road network has over 90% of its normal volume, so there’s no prospect of getting significantly more vehicles on the road without hideous congestion.
“The only prospect is for mass transit and that to me is a very compelling reason why I think the railway, as a form of mass transit, will continue to survive even though circumstances are quite difficult.”
It’s sad to report the death of Stuart Baker. While best known for his railway atlas, he played a key role in rescuing the West Coast Route Modernisation in the 2000s. I’d sometimes bump into him on a southbound train from York on a Sunday evening, as we both headed to London. He’d be happy to chat and always held an interesting point of view. The railway has lost a good man. RIP.
“Haines told his RIA audience that the Government wanted to invest its way out of recession, but warned that rail would need to show it offered better value for money than other infrastructure projects.”