Philip Haigh
Train operators must demonstrate to the general public what they’re doing to ensure that rail travel is safe, says PHILIP HAIGH
Winning back passengers.
SO it’s September. We’re six months into a pandemic and passengers are slowly returning to trains.
From a low of 4% in April, rail usage has recovered to about a quarter of that seen last February (it had peaked at around a third in early August). London Underground usage hovers at around a third. Meanwhile, our roads are busy - indeed, Department for Transport figures show they’re back to normal, having dipped to about a third at their lowest weekday point back in April.
To my mind, that shows that demand to travel remains, but that potential passengers are yet to be convinced that trains are safe (with an element of London commuting still absent as offices remain closed).
It seems to me that people would rather travel in their own personal space - a space they feel they can control rather than one in which they’re in someone else’s hands. And that’s despite RSSB research showing that, even in this pandemic, the risks in rail travel are broadly the same as road.
RSSB says: “When the effect of the virus is taken into account and compared against the average road safety risk, the risks are almost the same (road is 1.14 times the risk of rail). Across all transport modes risks of catching the virus are very low, and certainly tolerable.”
Nevertheless, perceptions do not necessarily match statistical numbers crunched by a remote body. But they can be shifted by a concerted campaign in which rail companies demonstrate what they’re doing to keep passengers safe. They need to be, because I worry that rail is showing itself to be optional rather than essential, as well as (with another round of massive financial support coming) very, very expensive.
I don’t think I’m alone in this, judging by a conversation with a senior rail freight manager who, frankly, was flabbergasted at the way passenger operators were continuing to spend as if there was no tomorrow.
Further concern came from the response to a Tweet in which I compared the time taken to reopen the railway through Carmont with the time taken in other accidents.
At the time of my Tweet, it was 16 days since Carmont’s derailment and Network Rail had not yet received the site back from investigators, so that it could start recovering the wreckage (a task neither easy nor quick) and repairing the railway.
Ladbroke Grove’s awful accident took place on October 5 1999. Trains ran once more from October 21. Hatfield happened on October 17 2000. The line reopened on November 10 after investigators took three weeks to hand the line back to Railtrack.
RAIL 396 quoted Alan Hyde (train operator GNER’s corporate affairs manager) saying: “It does seem strange that the site has taken a month to reopen, especially as it was selfevident what the cause of the accident was. Compared with a road accident where the road would reopen within hours, it is puzzling.”
The cause of Carmont was known very quickly - the train derailed on a landslide. Despite this, my Tweet had plenty of replies saying that investigators should take as long as they need.
Of course, we should learn what we can from railway accidents, to take reasonably practicable steps to prevent them happening again or to reduce their consequences.
It might be that there is something to learn from this HST accident and fire that wasn’t identified after Ladbroke Grove’s accident and fire (following a high-speed, head-on collision). Or in the way Carmont’s trailer cars deformed that wasn’t evident in 1997’s accident at Southall or 2004’s accident at Ufton Nervet.
At Southall, a collision between an HST and a stone train tore away the side of power car 43173 and left the second coach (Trailer First 41050) bent almost double. It was cut up on site. Carmont’s investigators want the wreckage removed intact, just as they did at Hatfield.
The longer Aberdeen can manage without its railway south, the weaker the case becomes for having that railway. Tracks and trains exist solely to carry goods and passengers - there’s no other reason for a railway. Even at a time when passenger usage is so low, there needs to be a sense of urgency in returning to normal - whether that’s reopening lines closed by
“Even at a time when passenger usage is so low, there needs to be a sense of urgency in returning to normal - whether that’s reopening lines closed by accidents or encouraging former passengers from their cars.”
accidents or encouraging former passengers from their cars.
Rail has spent the last 25 years as a success. Passenger numbers have doubled and there have been a series of improvement schemes that seemed impossible in British Rail’s final days.
You can be a senior TOC or NR manager and have never witnessed anything but a growing railway. There’s only a dwindling band of old hands that recall BR stripping costs out - for example, by replacing double junctions with single-lead layouts to minimise the costs of maintaining trackwork. Over recent years, some of this has been reversed so that more trains can run or so that timetables can be more punctually delivered.
But there is another option. That’s to cut back services to a level that reduced track layouts can run. And ministers might even decide to go further, as they did in the early 1980s when they asked David Serpell to review the railway.
Fortunately for BR, MPs and others attacked Serpell’s report for being as shoddy as the report reckoned BR’s management to be. Yet Serpell’s report did have an effect. Railway historian Terry Gourvish noted: “It may be argued that the report did encourage the [BR] Board to pursue efficiency measures in operating and engineering and to firm up its investment management.”
Which is just as well, because the report put forward the prospect of cutting BR to 16% of its size. One option was to cut it back to be a commercially viable network of a West Coast Main Line to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, an East Coast Main Line to Leeds and Newcastle, and a Great Western Main Line to Cardiff and Bristol, plus a handful of lines in southern England serving such places as Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Brighton, Dover, Norwich and Southend.
Ponder that today. We would not be arguing about extending Midland Main Line electrification northwards to Sheffield (get on with it, minister), we would be arguing about reopening it.
September 1’s news that DfT has extended Great Western Railway’s Emergency Measures Agreement until next June suggests that ministers are happy to keep paying millions of pounds to run trains despite the lack of demand. On the surface, that’s welcome. But look deeper and it’s DfT perpetuating the prepandemic railway and feeding a bubble that must surely burst.
GWR’s example suggests that DfT will extend emergency deals for other operators. That’s certainly easier than carefully calculating where changes could and should be made. In essence, DfT is taking the superficially easy option of doing nothing. It lends credence to RAIL 908’s headline of ministers having ‘no leadership, no strategy and no plan’.
Extension kicks the can of Keith Williams’ reforms further down the cess, doubtless to be joined by the can of fares reform. It strengthens my view that his review should be in an archive, not an in-tray ( RAIL 906), and that fares reform will ultimately prove too difficult to deliver.
So, we’re left with what senior railway manager Michael Holden described in RAIL
908 as “the worst possible way to operate our railway”.
Surely the DfT can do better than this? If it’s paying for the trains, then the least it could do is encourage their use. If it’s paying, then how about borrowing Belgium’s idea of giving people a handful of free tickets between any two UK stations to use between now and next Easter? Take this opportunity to promote rail. Convert potential passengers from their cars. Don’t just sit there writing cheques to train operators.
After mentioning fibre optics to detect the sounds of landslides last time, reader Stuart Walker alerted me to a Network Rail trial of just this at Pass of Brander, in 2014.
NR Scotland’s Nick King confirmed that the trial lasted four years, but he explained that the kit had been too sensitive and triggered too many false alarms.
“We need it to be more effective and less sensitive” he said, adding that NR thought the technology still had potential but needed more development.