Nigel Harris says Network Rail devolution is starting to deliver.

Eliminating a £100m overspend at King’s Cross is in reach

Excessive project costs have bedevilled not only Network Rail but Railtrack from Day One in 1994. I clearly recall press conferences where notoriously prickly RT Chairman Sir Robert Horton found himself on the back foot regarding ballooning project management costs of around 20%.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the costs of Great Western electrification soaring from a notional £ 800 million to £ 2.8 billion left pending OLE schemes pretty much dead in the water. Government reached for the opportunistic solution of bi-mode power instead, and while dual power has its place in a genuinely strategic plan, it is no wholesale substitution for properly conceived, designed, costed and constructed OLE schemes. Transport Scotland has shown us the way - again (albeit a year late) - with the launch of its Edinburgh-Glasgow scheme, which was inaugurated quietly, successfully and without fuss in early December. We either need to relearn old skills, work with contractors who still have those skills, or indulge in some new thinking pretty quickly on how we power our railways. Yes, battery power is coming along rapidly for rural or limited urban use, and yes, at some stage hydrogen will undoubtedly make an impact. But meanwhile, we really do need to sort out how we electrify suitable routes at the right price.

Which is why the news and interviews (on which I’ve collaborated with Assistant Features Editor Paul Stephen) in this issue about the paused but now progressing King’s Cross station throat upgrade are cause for optimism, if not outright confidence.

I first noticed indications of significant change in Network Rail about a year ago. I’ve commented on this a couple of times on this page - and suffered some slings and arrows as a consequence! The full story is in the interviews which Paul and I conducted with Route Managing Director Rob McIntosh and Route Delivery Director Rob Cairns - and the bottom line is that as a result of some bold thinking, courage and good old-fashioned professional judgment, they are seeking to turn the tide on the seemingly unstoppable cost escalation of precisely the kind that afflicted the Great Western Electrification Programme (GWEP).

What McIntosh and Cairns are spearheading is nothing less than a full-blown assault on the culture of unquestioning standards compliance, accompanied by top- quality engineering, software innovation and sharp, vigilant management. It is the first really solid example that I’ve seen of the elusive and frequently promised but rarely seen (until now) fruits of devolution. Although yet to be proved ‘on the ground’, McIntosh and Cairns’ team have seemingly not merely reined in, but eliminated a potential £100m overspend on the £ 237m scheme to remodel the King’s Cross station throat.

It was a close-run thing, however. It was at the end of McIntosh’s first week in the RMD’s job, on January 9 2016, that a NR ‘GRIP 3’ review took place. This was the point of no return for the King’s Cross project: approval at this meeting would have led to authority to proceed - and another major overspend would have been under way. Unhappy with the quality of the work presented to him, however, McIntosh had the cojones to pause the project, after confirming that the bespoke and maintenance-heavy layout off the platform ends could serve for a further year. With no devolution, the project would have gone ahead and we would now most likely be in the midst of another GWEP-style costs row. The importance of the combination of devolution of real power to an RMD with major capital projects experience, who also had the courage to call a halt, cannot be over-stressed. It is what made the difference at King’s Cross - and the lessons nationally are obvious.

The devil - or in this case, salvation - was in the detail. Using newly configured planning software which produced a 3D ‘virtual reality’ vision of how the project would actually look ‘on the ground’, the LNE team could check every 10mm along every platform, to identfy areas of non- compliance. They discovered that in only a handful of the places would the platforms be non-compliant, so management focus went into resolving only those areas. Using traditional GRIP 3 methods, it is likely that all the platforms - as well as the 2012 footbridge - would have been needlessly renewed at a cost of tens of millions of pounds.

I asked McIntosh if the absence of this approach is why GWEP costs soared to £2.8bn. It was confirmed some time ago that not a single standard on the entire project was flexibly challenged in the way that McIntosh’s team challenged similar standards at King’s Cross. The cost over-runs on GWEP were often the outcome of unquestioning compliance with those standards. Now McIntosh has shown there’s another way which really delivers lower cost. Why wasn’t this done on GWEP?

“GWEP got the way it was because of the lack of clear accountability. History and culture dictated that the people designing the system had no financial accountability. A devolved management does have that accountability. Devolution gives you a management that really cares about the outcome because there is a clear, single point of accountability. At King’s Cross, that’s me.

“Had King’s Cross cleared GRIP 3 in my first week, we would have gone ahead and at some point during detailed design and construction the real, higher costs would have emerged. And as by that time we would have been committed to a blockade in 2020, it would have just unravelled and we’d have been stuck with it. And I would have been fired about now...”

The 3D ‘virtual reality’ planning software is extremely exciting and important. You can walk through tunnels and measure exactly how long it takes to walk between signals. You can measure clearances accurately. You can check that equipment is in the right place. All before you wield a single shovel. McIntosh describes this as ‘hindsight in advance’.

“How often, as engineers, have we built a job and then walked through it and thought ‘Why did I put that there? How did I not spot that?’ You can avoid all that now,” he says.

So - the big question: could all NR projects save something like 50% if approached thus? After all, Scotland’s Paisley Canal electrification scheme slashed about half of the initial forecast £ 28m budget by similar thinking.

Mcintosh is cautious: “Every scheme is different - but yes, there has to be a significant saving everywhere if you apply this approach.”

Assuming it all goes according to plan at King’s Cross, we therefore need to see rapid take-up of this approach on all other Routes. The implied very significant savings would not only mean far fewer damaging headlines for NR, those savings could be constructively used to rehabilitate electrification.

“With no devolution, the King’s Cross project would have gone ahead and we would now most likely be in the midst of another GWEP-style costs row.”