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Network Rail questions resilience of Governmentrun rail operator's 2022 plans.
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The timetable produced by LNER for the start of accelerated services on the East Coast main line from May 2022 has resulted in such a crescendo of criticism from stakeholders that the Government owned franchise is being forced to rework the proposals.
Network Rail has identified that this is exactly the set of circumstances that preceded the start of the Thameslink timetable in May 2018, when changes were made that brought a delay in finalising the timetable, leaving insufficient time for traincrew diagrams and resultant route learning to take place.
NR has realised that if a timetable rewrite is to take place it is likely that the system operator function responsible for the train planning and timetable production role will be unable to do the work in the time that remains to meet implementation timescales.
Despite the fact that the current timetable will remain in place as it is for now, the new First Group open access service between London and Edinburgh, which is aimed at attracting more passengers from the low-cost airline market, will not be affected, as paths have already been allocated for operations to start later this year.
MAJOR SPENDING
Although £1.2 billion has been spent on the East Coast Main Line upgrade, the proposed timetable revisions resulted in only a single additional train per hour running on the route and this has been allocated to provide a third train per hour between Newcastle and London, with the two Anglo-Scottish services retained.
However, to accommodate the additional Newcastle service, train planners deemed it necessary to cut the number of TransPennine Express trains between Newcastle and Manchester from two to a single train per hour because of capacity constraints north of York. This decision is in direct conflict with the expectation of Transport for the North and Northern Powerhouse Rail that any timetable revision between major population centres would result in an increased number of trains.
Connectivity between stations on the East Coast route and London is also to be reduced. The list of stations where service frequency cutbacks are proposed includes: Berwickupon-Tweed, Morpeth, Sunderland and Darlington.
The proposal for Darlington seems particularly illogical, given the intention to expand station capacity to cater for a hub of new local services using hydrogen power as well as the relocation of hundreds of jobs from the Treasury in London to the town.
There is also stakeholder disappointment on the southern section of the route, as the predicted hourly service between Lincoln and London has not materialised, which would have provided a stopping pattern to improve the service between intermediate stations. Instead, services that call at Stevenage will no longer call at Peterborough and, worse still, Huntingdon loses its status as a calling point altogether.
TRACTION CURRENT
It is blandly said that these last points don't pose a problem for passengers, given the availability of Thameslink services. It might not be too bad if these trains could be relied on, but at the current time trains operating between Horsham and Peterborough continue to suffer from reliability problems. This is a direct legacy of unsuitable diagrams for train drivers that have yet to be rectified to provide resilience.
The adverse reaction to the proposed timetable alterations is compounded by concerns about traction current supply capacity. An upgrade to the section of the route between Doncaster and London has been completed that provides the ability for more power to be provided from the National Grid and the provision of 23 new sub-stations.
On the section between
Doncaster and Edinburgh there is also a new connection with the National Grid and an additional 27 sub-stations, but the work has not as yet been completed and at present a number of trains operating on the electrified infrastructure using bimode rolling stock are running using diesel power.
Another uncertainty in the risk register for the future timetable is rolling stock availability. The Class
800 series trains built by Hitachi (LNER temporarily but speedily dropped the ‘Azuma' branding when the problems were first identified) have encountered potential stress fractures in the aluminium bodies and components that make up the design of the running gear. The concern is that this will not be a quick fix, given engineering doubts about the specification of the type of aluminium used.