More space for steam on the ‘Big Railway’
Finding paths on the national network has become a lot easier following massive fall in public travel.
EVEN A YEAR AGO YOU’D NEVER HAVE THOUGHT IT POSSIBLE
ARE ALL our fears over the years about pathing steam on the main line… well, wrong?
Strong evidence that they might be came with Tornado’s trip from Edinburgh to York on September 12 – when No. 60163 ran non-stop the whole 97 miles south to Morpeth… where it went inside for water.
As the A1 Trust’s Graeme Bunker points out, the ‘Queen of Scots’ schedule sliced the best part of 1½ hours off the ‘normal’ path. And in case you think it was a one-off, the northbound spin over the West Coast Main Line was similar too; the Peppercorn machine hauled its train “non-stop from Carlisle to Edinburgh.”
“Nobody thinks that’s been done since, well, a long time ago.”
Two of our premier main lines – and what amounts to a free rein on both. Even a year ago, you’d never have thought it possible. So, why? “Because the normal level of trains weren’t there.”
For yonks we’ve been told that the trend is just one way – the railway will be ever-busier, ever-faster. Available timings have grown longer – and the logic was clear: steam faced being squeezed. Trips ever more difficult.
That was before Covid-19.
Figures just released by the Office of Rail & Road show lockdown drove rail passenger numbers down to a point not seen since around 1850 – when the ECML and WCML were new (in fact the latter wasn’t even complete in terms of what’s there today). In April-June, the figures were just 35 million, rather than the 439m the year before.
Usage on much of the system currently resembles something little better than a disused line. Oh, for sure, trains are still running – but many are little used. Indeed, on one or two branches there’s not even that. They really are unused – because buses are carrying the fresh air around instead.
So has a tiny virus reversed a 20-year trend and done what thoughts of secure paths, or the A1 Trust’s now abandoned target to run at 90mph, so far haven’t? Namely, secured our place on the main line? It seems very likely. In fact, this column suggested that it could happen right back near the start of the pandemic (SR505) – and while nobody is arguing that passenger numbers will stay at their recent numbingly low level forever, you’d be pretty brave to suggest they’ll be back where they were any time soon.
In a previous life, Bunker was himself involved with timetabling on the West Coast (and Cross-Country routes) while responsible for such matters at Virgin. He says the alteration in schedules that’s been sparked by the pandemic “changes the game”.
For an example, take that spin Up the East Coast on the returning ‘Queen of Scots’. First there was the non-stop from Waverley to Morpeth. Then, Graeme says, “we basically ran in our path without any pathing time of any great note, all the way to Northallerton with stops at Newcastle, Durham and Darlington.” At Northallerton, the ‘Pacific’ was turned onto the Slow Line – but “whizzed along at a nice 65mph, a couple of fast ones went by, and then we pulled out into York.
“It was like ‘thank you very much!’” Oh, and the southbound ‘Queen of Scots’ was seven minutes early into York too, making the travel time a dead five hours for the 205 miles from ‘Auld Reekie’ – including those stops for water and dropping people off. That might not seem so fast if you’ve been watching Elizabethan Express any time recently, but chew on this: compared with when the ‘A1’ did the same itinerary last December, it set its train in motion from Edinburgh 48 minutes later, but arrived in York 34 minutes earlier. That’s a difference of 82 minutes… well over an hour you could be wandering the Royal Mile – or being earlier to bed. Long days just got shorter.
Not every engine will be able to take full advantage of such freedom of movement, because not all will have 6,000-plus gallons aboard and the range to reach Morpeth without stopping for a refill. But as Graeme
points out, that’s a moot point (other than saving the cost of a tanker) if you are forced by the timings to stop whether you can keep going or not.
So what’s actually changed? Pre-Covid-19, Bunker explains, coming south from Edinburgh would have meant mixing on a twin-track route with a halfhourly 125mph LNER London service, as well as CrossCountry departures that are generally hourly.
There’s no point leaving after the CrossCountry service, because “if you go in that slot you’ve only got a 20-minute head start at best on the next ‘London.’”
“So, if you go after the London that doesn’t have a CrossCountry behind it, if you’re lucky you’ve got a sort of 27 to 28-minute head start… you’ll probably get a bit past Berwick, but you won’t get to Morpeth.”
That was the ‘old normal’ for a 75mph-limited train. But for this trip, LNER’s 6pm for King’s Cross was “not there”.
“It doesn’t run now. Because why were you running so many long distance trains on a Saturday evening? Nobody wants to use them… So that’s where there is definitely potential.”
It’s a similar thing on the East Coast route’s old rival, where the ‘A1’ was able to drift into Edinburgh in just a minute over two hours from Carlisle. And let me say it again: that was non-stop. That’s because, in pandemic-land, after two fast trains run bunched together from the ‘border city’ there’s then nothing… for 40 minutes.
“So when the next one was coming out of Carlisle, you were already on Beattock.
“You only had to get to Carstairs and you won – and we did.”
Those paths, says Graeme, “didn’t exist a year ago. Now, will they stay for a number of years and we can do interesting things? I don’t know.”
As a professional railwayman – today as a consultant – Graeme’s caution is understandable. But the potential is there.
And in fact I’ll go a step further… and say yes, chances like these are probably here to stay. You only have to listen to increasing whispers about the benefits of running fewer, longer trains (nobody’s thought of that one before…) to see how it could come about.
Yet even if we’re not gifted quite such a playground, the more salient point is this: steam’s place should be secure. With reasonable timings. Which is great news.
However… there’s still more to all this…
The railway is broken. Franchising has now properly fallen apart, nobody knows when
(or if) the cash-generating pot that is London commuting will recover, and keeping the whole edifice upright is currently swallowing billions that nobody reckoned with – and which makes BR’s much maligned but relatively small subsidy look like what you might find down the sofa with the biscuit crumbs.
Unless UK plc can be persuaded that people travelling less is actually a great opportunity to get people out of their cars onto better types of transport like trains – then the Treasury is coming for rail, as for much else. That on its own would likely mean timetable cuts.
And so back to steam. A bit of extra traffic might actually be welcome, especially if it’s selffunding. But the last time we were here – in the ’70s and ’80s – BR also knew that steam was great PR; as chairman Sir Peter Parker famously asserted, it ‘warms the market for railways’.
That’s been proved again lots of times since – from the Underground’s ‘Tube 150’ celebration in 2013, something current NR chairman
Sir Peter Hendy was intimately involved with – to 2017’s Plandampf on the Settle-Carlisle.
Happily, his commitment is unwavering, telling SR last month that steam is “good PR”.
“The railway has a huge place in the affection of Brits,” Hendy adds, “and so one thing to give confidence at the time of national crisis is to run a few steam trains and I would welcome that.”
Steam can punch above its weight – and it may just have been given the space it needs.
We just have to get on with it.
THE SALIENT POINT IS THIS: STEAM’S PLACE SHOULD BE MORE SECURE