Infrastructure funding must always come first
AS THE author of the original letter you kindly published in issue 272, I would like to respond to Paul Gibbons’ subsequent letter in issue 276. It is incumbent upon heritage railways as commercial organisations to run safe operations and so need to maintain their infrastructure accordingly.
No normal business would expect state handouts if it failed to plan for the capital expenditure required for any aspect of its business. If any organisation cannot fund such work, it fails. It’s a simple business truth in a market economy.
Likewise, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has a clear responsibility to ensure safe operations so could not and indeed should not be ‘benevolent’ in its approach to heritage operators if that means a lessening of standards. Customer lives are at stake in the worst case.
The challenge in consequence for many railways is funding significant capital expenditure for their infrastructure, but where income broadly just covers day-to-day operating costs (at best), there are options.
In many cases the railway owns the locomotives and fund repairs/overhauls as their clear priority. By contrast, infrastructure is usually the poor relation and often well down the pecking order of financial priorities.
One solution is such railways divest themselves of their ownership interests in locomotives and let owning groups fundraise to pay for overhauls, as the public/enthusiasts seem happy to fund such, but not infrastructure. This is exactly what the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway does (with who I have no connection I hasten to add)
The railway can then focus its own income upon expenditure for the ‘boring’ but vital bits of drains/railways ballast/bridges etc.
Management
It does of course require proper commitment from locomotive owning groups to fund such so they in turn need to be properly managed to ensure the railway has motive power.
The bottom line however, remains that infrastructure has to be properly maintained and therefore funded. What this is all driving in the end is a clear need for a substantially greater level of management/financial competence in the sector.
Turning to the question of track, Paul Gibbons raises the question of FI0 concrete sleepers. These are in fact now obsolete and indeed many sleepers are bespoke to the chairs/rails used so re-use can be very difficult. Rerailing may well require replacement of chairs/ fishplates/pads/bolts and ballast, as well as works to the cess/drainage. It is not a simple or cheap undertaking to keep a railway safe.
Bullhead rail would now be an expensive special order, but for a variety of reason the future in my opinion lies in the now standard Pandrol/flat bottom rail solution, not least of which is because of potentially reduced future maintenance liabilities. In this respect I am aware of at least one railway that is attempting to commit to relay with new flat bottom rail on new G44 concrete sleepers, which must be the ultimate future proofing investment that can be made at the present time.
Finally, with regard to modern systems of paperwork/computer systems, I can assure all there is an absolute need for such.
Having spent many hours looking for defective installations based upon chainages (imaginary lines used to measure distances – drains on a heritage railway are my forte – GPS based locational tools are a godsend and all such data can be downloaded to a master schedule. These tools are the future and indeed ORR expect to see properly maintained records.
Iain Harris, Swindon, Wiltshire.