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Trains: Taking the Strain?
By Andy | January 8, 2008
As a regular long distance traveller on the rail system I was rather relieved to have a week or so off over the Christmas period. Sadly, this week things get back to normal and tomorrow I’m back, heading north, on the West Coast line.
Living in Birmingham it’s been a little like Groundhog Day as we’ve again seen the West Coast line grind to a halt. It’s easy to reach for easy platitudes every time there’s one of these crisis but there is a real problem with the rail network that Labour hasn’t tackled over ten years now. As Gordon Brown looks to stress commitment to long term planning he must acknowledge that, after 10 years in power, there are some areas where we are still not clear where we are going.
The Guardian had it right last week when - in one of its leaders - it pointed out that the real problem with the rail system was that it has been a great success; the rail system, they argued, is full!
So sharp have been the problems in the South East that it is probably easy to ignore what is happening further north. The scale of maintenance on the Underground and the struggle to get the Cross City Line commitment are well known. But at least things are happening here in a way they are not elsewhere.
Study after study has accepted that there is a need to increase the capacity between the south and the north and yet it is still not clear how we are going to achieve this. Last week’s chaos saw loads of people reminiscing about British Rail which seems to me to be more than a little unwise.
It is fashionable to moan about Branson and Virgin Trains but they’re worthy of some support I think. Virgin commissioned new rolling stock and more or less this was delivered on time. Yet the new West Coast trains will never run at the speeds they were designed for; track capacity and poor signaling make this impossible. Also, the trains are shorter than envisaged partially as a result of concerns over wether the power supply to the track could cope with new demands and new speeds. The current failure - and most recent ones - have been those of the track managers. Simply bringing all maintenance in house seems to me to be an odd solution. It is Network Rail that scopes and commissions work and not the contractors.
We’ve now had almost twenty years of barmy dreams on our main rail routes. We were going to have Eurostar services from many cities that connected with the tunnel route. The trains were ordered and you may have sat in one as it zooms up and down the East Coast Line. But the trains will never run as envisaged. Platforms are too small for one thing and we don’t have the money to extend them.
The West Cost line, for example, needs upgrading to four track from Wolverhampton to Rugby. Government doesn’t like this and feels it is to expensive. So for the second time they have put their faith in new signaling systems that can shove more trains per hour along existing tracks. But, once again, signaling was at the centre of the recent crisis again.
But assume for a while that the new systems will work. Virgin will be able to run four trains an hour between Birmingham and London. But to do this local commuter services will have to be cut. Whatever else this plan is it is not win, win. Some win and others loose.
As our Victorian infrastructure proves so difficult to upgrade we’ve looked for whizzo technical solutions. For a while everyone got very excited about Maglev, train running on magnetic tracks. Maglevs can climb higher gradients and could go - very quickly - over the high bits of the Peninnes. But this is futuristic technology only really works on one stretch track in Japan; in the UK it was used for a couple of hundred yards at Birmingham Airport but has now been superseded.
These hi, hi tec solutions just push solutions further and further away. Some think this deliberate as - ultimately - the Treasury feels that it can’t pay for it. Transport exports suggest something similar is at the heart of the fare increases. In the days of BR, the argue, fare rises were used to dissuade people from using the lines that were at capacity or which needed work that couldn’t be programmed - they worry that the same thing is happening today, that we are effectively pricing people off the train system. For others this is an outrageous comment, but it makes you think.
Current thinking on the north south problem is to construct High Speed II - another line based on Eurostar technology - essentially that of the French TGV system.
Much of Europe now uses this system. It is tried and tested and available now and so High Speed II is probably a good call. But we are still a million miles away from a commitment to development. This, in itself, will be an extraordinarily difficult project to pull off.
And yet the need for investment is current - this isn’t something that is concerned with trend over ten or twenty years. What is needed now are decisions on future infrastructure spending. Tweaking the management of the existing system may be desirable bit it won’t solve the underlying problem. The government needs to make a decision and get on with it.
There are other areas like this where Brown, instinctively, sees a long term solution yet this will not resonate with commuters who see a need for improvement now. Somehow the Brown platform has to take this into account. Being brave about decisions doesn’t just mean taking difficult decisions on public sector pay - it means bravery over public investment.
Thinking about all of this last week I became quite depressed. I heard many people talking about rail problems -operators, regulators, track owners, business organisations, commuters and civic authorities. But I never heard the transport secretary once.
Good government - changed government - means that Brown and his team have to take responsibility and take risk. And they must move in some areas at speed.
We - the users of the system - are well aware that Labour has now been in power for a decade.
Topics: Development, Infrastructure |
