Campaigners, MPs and industry experts criticise Government decision not to electrify East West Rail.
CONFIRMATION that the East
West Rail project to reconnect Oxford and Cambridge will not be electrified has been condemned as a “mistake” and a “missed opportunity”.
The widespread criticism from campaigners, MPs and industry experts has formed an uncomfortable backdrop to the Government’s latest funding announcement that some £760 million will be committed to delivering the project’s next phase.
Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps made the announcement on January 23, so that construction can be completed to reinstate direct services between Bicester and Bletchley for the first time since 1968.
This will enable two trains per hour to run from Oxford to Milton Keynes, via Bletchley and a new station at Winslow, by 2025.
The construction work is expected to create 1,500 jobs and has already been started by the East West Rail Alliance (comprising Network Rail, VolkerRail, Atkins and Laing O’Rourke), following the granting of a Transport & Works Act Order in February 2020.
The publicly owned East West Railway Company (which is acting as the Department for Transport’s sponsor for this stage) added that Aylesbury cannot be included in EWR until further options are explored, as incorporating the Buckinghamshire town currently requires “more investment than originally planned”.
Meanwhile, a funding bid will be submitted to government to extend services from Oxford to Bedford as part of the 2021 Spending Review. A non-statutory public consultation will also launch later this year to hear views on proposals for the route between Bedford and Cambridge.
Shapps said: “Restoring railways helps put communities back on the map and this investment forms part of our nationwide effort to build back vital connections and unlock access to jobs, education and housing.
“Progressing work to reopen even more lines and stations shows our commitment to levelling up journeys across the country.”
Although the economic and strategic case for building EWR has never been disputed, the environmental impact of delivering it as a diesel-only railway has come under renewed and intense scrutiny.
Pointing to the UK’s legally binding commitment to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, and to the rail industry’s target to eliminate all diesel-only traction from the network by 2040, MP Daniel Zeicher (Labour, Cambridge) said: “In a time of climate emergency, we really shouldn’t be building railway lines for diesel. It has to be electric.”
Anneliese Dodds (Labour, Oxford East) added: “As well as being a disaster for our environment, I am worried that this is just more wasted money, as it costs more to electrify railway lines later.”
The decision to proceed without electrification was not entirely unexpected, with RAIL first revealing the removal of overhead line equipment (OLE) from the scope of the scheme almost three years ago ( RAIL 834).
The East West Railway Company subsequently launched its rolling stock procurement process last March to lease a fleet of 12 or 14 three-car self-powered units for a period of four years, with an option to extend by a further two.
It described the move as an interim approach that would allow for the exploration of a wider range of green energy technologies to power trains or for a “smoother transition to electrification”, so that EWR could operate a net zero carbon railway by the time services commence along the entire route from Oxford to Cambridge by the end of the decade.
Shapps repeated this message on January 23, when he told the BBC that battery or hydrogenpowered trains were likely to replace diesel units on the route at a later date. He made no mention
of electrification.
“We’re building it in such a way that we can use, probably, the very latest technology potentially in the future,” he said.
“The most important thing is the infrastructure. It’s about building the stations, things you need no matter what kind of trains you’re going to run on there, if it’s going to take passengers.”
However, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers was quick to point out the environmental and financial folly of the Government’s failure to commit to erecting OLE from the outset.
It has consistently called for a rolling programme of electrification around the network in order to retain skills, supply chain capacity, and to achieve economies of scale.
Matt Rooney, head of engineering policy at IMechE, said: “The fact the Government is to forego electrification and run diesel-fuelled trains is a mistake and a missed opportunity. By choosing high-carbon infrastructure for short-term cost savings, it would also send the wrong message in a year when the UK is hosting the UN climate change conference COP26.”
David Clarke, technical director at the Railway Industry Association, added: “While the line will have passive provision for electrification, and the main priority should be getting the project delivered so that passengers, businesses and the wider economy reap the benefits as soon as possible,
RIA would ultimately like to see EWR electrified - given, as RIA’s Electrification Cost Challenge report shows, that this is the optimal form of train traction for intensively-used lines.”
The East West Rail Consortium of local authorities that has campaigned for EWR since 1995 said that the £760m funding announcement was “a milestone worth celebrating”, although it believed that EWR’s full transformational potential could only be delivered once all stages are completed. This includes currently unfunded parts of the route to Aylesbury and from Bletchley to Bedford.
EWR Consortium Chairwoman Sue Clark said: “We will continue to press the case for the investment in these two sections by working with the EWR Company to ensure that their proposals meet the requirements of users and communities for decades to come.
“We will continue to press the Government for an early decision on the investment that will allow those sections to be delivered as soon as possible.”