The iconic L&MR
DAVID CLOUGH examines the iconic Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and discovers how the route has changed since opening in 1830
DAVID CLOUGH examines the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and discovers how the route has changed since 1830.
When it was built, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (L&MR) was an engineering marvel. Over time, it became just one part of an ever-changing railway network, although - unlike some of its local contemporaries - it has at least survived.
As the canals were a response to Britain’s inadequate road infrastructure to meet the demands of the Industrial Revolution, so in turn was the L&MR built to address the shortcomings of the waterways linking the two cities.
Enacted in 1826 and opened on September 15 1830, the original route was 31 miles long, linking Wapping Dock on the Liverpool bank of the River Mersey with its goods and passenger facilities at Liverpool Road in Manchester.
Although the route forward from Edge Hill cut virtually due east in a straight line to Manchester, a number of engineering issues had to be tackled that would not have been faced had the original plan been passed by Parliament.
This had proposed leaving Liverpool in a northerly direction, to avoid the high ground behind the docks, and then across the western section of the railway as built. Opposition to the northerly course came from local nobility, whose land had to be crossed when the railway turned east to serve St Helens.
Leaving Wapping, the line was on a steep incline in tunnel. This posed an operating challenge because it was beyond the capability of contemporary steam traction, and called for the use of stationary engines and rope haulage.
As part of the rundown in rail-related dock activity during the 1960s, Wapping Goods closed in 1965. The site remains as derelict land, closed off by high retaining walls - a symbol of the lack of demand for such land close to the city centre.
Crown Street was the original passenger terminus in Liverpool. A short tunnel took the railway from there to meet the one from Wapping at Edge Hill. The station closed to passengers in 1836, when Lime Street opened as a more central alternative. The site continued in use as a goods depot until May 1972 but has been landscaped in recent years, leaving no real trace of its former use. One report says the station building suffered bomb damage during the Second World War.
Edge Hill today bears no relation to the 1830s scene. Chatsworth Drive and Tunnel Road cross the deep cutting where the Wapping and Crown Street tunnels emerged, and it was here that the original station was located. The Moorish Arch at the Tunnel Road end of the site has long gone.
The present Edge Hill station is on the opposite side of Tunnel Road to the one it replaced, but the course of the 1830 railway is quite evident on the southeast side. From here, the 1836 route dives down in tunnel to Lime Street.
Although extended during the 19th century, several original features remain. These include the cobbled driveway from Tunnel Road and some of the buildings. These are claimed to be the oldest buildings in use on an operational railway in the world, although another station on the L&MR stakes a similar claim.
Metal Culture Ltd, a charity, completed a major renovation of the previously empty historic buildings in 2009. The original Engine House, Boiler Room and Accumulator Tower now serve as a cultural and creative hub for artists, the neighbourhood and Merseyside. Tesco has provided grant support to Metal Culture to finance the planting of a flower and herb garden.
ambitious scheme that seems to tick a lot of the market-led initiative’s boxes. Then there is Crossrail to Ebbsfleet (C2E), a plan to extend the existing Crossrail route out to Kent. Both are already in the public domain. Not much else is!
C2E is really a publicly backed scheme, so strictly not a market-led proposal. But its submission is symptomatic of the Hunger
Games competition that all these initiatives create. C2E’s backers probably feel they have no choice but to throw their hat into the ring now because it is competing for recognition with all Category 2 MLPs, all enhancements that are already in the RNEP, and whatever Network Rail is still allowed to do.
And that’s really the point of all this: not to create new enhancement ideas, but to create a focal point for the DfT to marshal them.
In contrast, the SRLtH imposes no such deadline. However, while ring-fenced from the wider call for ideas, SRLtH is effectively the first concrete manifestation of the market-led proposal initiative. It invites interest in discussing market-led ideas for a southern rail link, and overlays A New Approach’s RNEP Framework to DfT decision-making.
The mainstream press has spoken of five proposals for southern Heathrow rail access: Heathrow Southern; the Windsor Link Railway; a light rail solution; an unspecified proposal by MTR; and another proposal where the only thing known publicly about it is that nothing is known publicly about it. It’s not HS4Air.
The SRLtH proposals that are known about seem innovative and genuinely distinct from each other, making the DfT’s job of assessing their relative strengths and weaknesses challenging and tempting for the DfT to cherrypick.
Does the DfT really want you to build your own railway? Too contestable perhaps?
The DfT said in the Call for Ideas that it will protect valid intellectual property (that is, intellectual property protected by legislation and common law). In that context, that means not sharing that intellectual property with others.
Heathrow Southern’s proposal links the south to Heathrow Airport by building, operating and maintaining eight miles of new railway, over which DfT-chosen train operators operate franchised services. The new route its backers have identified joins up Terminal 5 with the South West Main Line, Paddington and HS2. They claim a proprietorial interest in their ideas, and want to operate the railway they hope to build.
But at the SRLtH market-sounding day to promote SRLtH, when Heathrow Southern challenged the DfT about the protection of intellectual property in market-led proposals, the DfT’s spokesman pointedly said that
“It looks a bit like an obstacle course. To those familiar with government-led procurement, it probably conjures up images of a ‘tough mudder’ with caged crawls, electric shocks and butter-smeared monkey bars.”
“there is no intellectual property in a line on a map”.
That sounds like while the DfT may not have a monopoly of ideas, it wants one. Some allowance must be made for an off-the-cuff response at a public consultation event, and it will be interesting to see whether the DfT continues to formally hold that line. For now, it puts investors in a poker game where they must show the dealer some of their cards, but are probably reluctant to show all of them in case he then lets the other players see them.
And it begs the obvious question: just what is protectable intellectual property in the context of designing new railways? Because if that is the DfT’s position, not much is. And if you can’t protect your ideas, you may as well not have them.
If it has created a market of private-sector proposals, the DfT must now be sorting out the genuine finds from the upcycled tat.
On SRLtH, the DfT is only exploring options at this stage. It is not the start of a procurement process. In fact, part of the exercise is to determine whether to commence a procurement at all. So, for SRLtH the DfT has commenced an open-ended conversation, but for the wider market-led initiative it might not converse at all. Neither approach helps investors who crave certainty.
But even if the DfT does end a conversation to start a procurement, who knows what it will procure? It may compete the best idea for a railway; or it may simply take the best line on a map it receives if it does not believe there is any intellectual property in drawing them, then compete the best design of that, then the best delivery. Quite simply, to the pure investor, that looks like a lottery ticket at this point.
Or, if all this is the start of an obstacle course, it looks like the kind of obstacle course that requires more luck than anything else - less tough mudder, perhaps more the kind you used to find on It’s a Knockout.
You know the kind: promoters are shoved into oversized comedic outfits, each carrying buckets of water with holes in the bottom, jumping over and diving under obstacles, edging along rolling greasy poles over pools of foam, while the DfT’s procurement team throw wet sponges at them to try and knock them off, before they trip over each other’s enormous feet in a sprint to the finish line to pour a few dribbles from their buckets into a plastic tube, which the DfT’s lawyers then evaluate to see who has deposited the most and so won the race.
Poker game, lottery ticket or comedy obstacle course? If that is how it’s going to be, you have to wonder whether promoters who want to profit directly from their ideas might just leave playing railways to the DfT. If they do, where does that leave real contestability?
If the messaging around market-led proposals continues to be unclear, or the market interprets these initiatives as just a means of appropriation or the processes as death by procurement, then the DfT’s drive to promote third-party interest in rail enhancements is dead on arrival.
So, here’s an idea. Don’t sacrifice investor confidence on the altar of competitive tendering. If you genuinely want to encourage the investment of new ideas and money in the railways, perhaps the best way to do that is to let people run with those ideas… not run off with them.
There are parallels in this method of procurement with the approach taken on Thames Tideway Tunnel, the 15 ½ -mile sewage/rain water tunnel that is currently under construction under the Thames. Helpfully, the DfT seems to recognise this fact in the Call for Ideas, so there is hope yet.
Because if the private sector understands that there is a fighting chance of getting a return on its time and money investment, the DfT is surely going to receive more and better ideas than if the perception is less so.
No one is suggesting the DfT loses oversight - and so value for money - in avoiding slavishly competing everything itself. It could use the RNEP Framework decision points to act as oversight opportunities to compel procurement best practice. If a usage undertaking or other guarantee features, the DfT could attach conditions to it which could be withdrawn if not met at any point. The threat of withdrawal would keep finance-backed investors honest.
The DfT could even establish a procurement board, steering committee or project company - much like East West Rail, Crossrail or PF2 - if it wished to retain a more hands-on role to ensure value for money. The DfT and the chosen private sector promoter could work in partnership that way (a word the DfT uses a lot of these days in other contexts).
Reading the Call for Ideas, it seems this initiative might work for those players who want the railway enhanced, but who aren’t interested in playing railways. Those promoters who don’t claim a proprietorial interest in their ideas or who aren’t concerned with how it is delivered or by whom - for example, ports or housing developers, and even C2E perhaps.
From a pure investor’s perspective, it may not seem worth the candle if you contest the best market-led proposal for a given rail scheme, then contest the best design of that best proposal, then contest the best delivery of that best-designed best proposal, then contest the best operation of that best-delivered, bestdesigned best proposal. It will certainly get on promoters’ wicks if they perceive that the DfT will not protect their ideas, but instead compete the hell out of them.
If they do, there’s a danger that what the DfT might be left with is a market where the only proposals are owned by real believers… those who aren’t deterred by process, odds or reality - like those who might propose a tunnel-less Atlantic seabed railway, or magnetically levitating trains in low-vacuum tubes. No, wait, I’ve actually heard that last idea somewhere!
In the end, it’s commendable to try and plan future enhancements and to get third-party money into the railway to enhance that plan. But if you invite that money in, you have to accept that it is not free. It has to see a way to a return, otherwise it goes elsewhere.
At the moment, the opportunity to enhance tomorrow’s railway seems like… what’s the word? A contestable one at best.