The wrath of uppity

Final plans for a £900 million railway between the Great Western main line and Heathrow Airport have been released, BBC News reported on 11 May.

[‘Heathrow rail link plan unveiled by Network Rail’, BBC]

The most-detailed proposals yet for the link, subject to planning permission, include a 3.1 mile (5km) tunnel from the main line between Langley and Iver railway stations to Heathrow Terminal 5.

The proposal would allow people living to the west of Heathrow to travel direct to the airport, instead of having to go into London.

The consultation will end on 22 June.

Network Rail said journeys from Slough could take “six or seven minutes” to get to the airport, with trains from Reading taking 26 minutes.

The idea for the rail link has been on [the] table since 2012, but plans have been adjusted following previous public consultations and its cost has risen from £500m in 2014.

How does these official estimates compare with those for the government’s high speed rail project?

Scheme	Estimate as of 2014 (£m)	Estimate as of 2018 (£m)	Increase (%)
Heathrow, ‘Wrath’	500	900	80
HS2, ‘Core programme’	50100	55700	11

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Working at breakneck speed

Transport for the North is aiming to take ‘a fresh approach to transport’ in its forthcoming plan for transport in northern England, chief executive Barry White told the All-Party Parliamentary Rail Group on May 15.

[Railway Gazette, 18 May 2018]

A particular focus is on developing a transport network which would support ‘employment liquidity’, defined as making it easier for people to change jobs and lowering the risk of trying out new opportunities. White said London very successfully provides this liquidity, but in the north of England poor connectivity means people often feel they would need to move house to accept a job in another town, which creates a barrier that is holding back both employees and employers.

Mr White said TfN was ‘working at breakneck speed’ to prepare a high level plan for the cost, scope and business case for Northern Powerhouse Rail which will be submitted to the Secretary of State at the end of this year.

[RG]

He stressed these would be ‘high level concepts rather than detailed route options’. Speed is not an end in itself, White emphasised, and is often used in public discussion as a proxy for frequency and capacity. If you are going to build extra capacity, it makes sense to build for speed too, he believes.

The Beleben blog was under the impression that (absurd) ‘high level concepts’ have been in existence for years. In fact, they predate Transport for the North itself. So what this ‘breakneck speed’ cobblers is all about, is anyone’s guess.

Equally perplexing is the ’employment liquidity’ shizzle, which, apparently, was dreamt up after the TfN Strategic Transport Plan was closed to public consultation.

‘Employment liquidity’, for whom?

The roll of comparison

Ever wondered why UK railway electrification costs were high compared to the rest of Europe (aside from issues like density of use of the network), and if a rolling programme of electrification could reduce costs? A graph of annual kilometres electrified in the UK and Germany might start to explain the answers, @NoelDolphin suggested.

In Mr Dolphin’s UK – Germany graph, it is not immediately obvious whether ‘kilometres’ means route-km or track-km, or whether ‘Germany’ pre-1991 includes the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In the 1980s, the Deutsche Reichsbahn der DDR (DR) stepped up electrification of main lines across the country (not westwards, for political reasons).

Regarding the UK plot, questions might arise from the exclusion of HS1 and the effective  ‘re-electrification’ of significant portions of the West Coast Main Line, under its modernisation programme.

Third time unlucky

On 16 May transport secretary Chris Grayling announced the termination of the Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC) rail franchise — the third failure of Kings Cross intercity franchising in twelve years.

As previously discussed on this blog, the failure was caused by VTEC, and their consultants, getting their numbers wrong — in particular, forecast passenger numbers. The idea that Network Rail’s ‘failure to deliver promised upgrades’ was the cause, has no credibility.

So, why Network Rail’s press team did not come out fighting during this debacle, is difficult to understand. Surely Chris Grayling’s statement that VTEC had got their numbers wrong, meant they had carte blanche to tell it like it is, and rebut the ‘it-wuz-Network-Rail’ claims by Richard Branson, the Seat 61 chappy, et al.

Of course, consultants have been getting their rail passenger forecasts badly wrong for decades. The VTEC collapse is yet more evidence that predicting the future is not something they are getting any better at doing.

Released capacity for Whitlocks End

According to Midlands Connect, HS2 will release capacity on the Derby to Stoke railway, Birmingham’s Cross-City line, and, er, the North Warwickshire line.

This suggests that Midlands Connect does not understand what ‘released capacity’ is.

Perhaps not too surprising, given that they seem to think running a bubble car between Leamington Spa and Coventry once an hour is a ‘step change in capacity in the NUCKLE corridor’.

Nuckle enlightenment

Last Thursday (May 10) the co-leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas MP, met with Kenilworth Green Party members to celebrate the reopening of the town’s railway station.

Opened on 30 April, the station forms part of the ‘NUCKLE’ scheme, which is supposedly “designed to implement a step-change in the level of public transport provision along the Nuneaton – Coventry – Kenilworth – Leamington Spa corridor”.

However, the station has only one platform, and the offer is one single-carriage local train per hour to Coventry and one to Leamington, with no Sunday service.

Ms Lucas called for more frequent trains, and an additional station to serve the University of Warwick, the Kenilworth Weekly News reported.

But according to rail consultant William Barter, ‘getting more trains depends on HS2 freeing capacity in the Coventry corridor’.

As the Beleben blog has pointed out, HS2 would not release much, if any, capacity on the Rugby – Coventry – Birmingham line. Furthermore, providing Kenilworth with a frequent passenger service to Coventry, or Nuneaton, is not compatible with the current plans of Midlands Connect and West Midlands Rail.

The Beleben approach would be to avoid pathing conflicts by building a railcar bridge over the West Coast Main Line just east of Coventry station, enabling a frequent tram-like service between Nuneaton and Leamington. If this were possible, instead of stopping in Coventry station itself, these railcars would stop in the station forecourt before rejoining the Network Rail tracks.

Although Coventry city council favours ‘very light rail’ in general, there seems to be no plan to use such vehicles on the Leamington line. The council’s current plans seem to lack utility and realism.

Much less physical intervention

On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (10 May 2018) Network Rail chief Mark Carne explained the benefit of the ‘Digital Railway‘ as he saw it.
 

[MC:] The exciting thing about the Digital Railway is that it requires much less physical intervention than building new railways, and that’s really why I like it so much.

So, if it’s possible to ‘increase capacity on existing lines with new digital signalling’, and this new signalling

• requires much less trackside intervention on existing lines than traditional interventions,
• and is much less expensive than building new lines,

then what is the point of HS2?