Should We Renationalise the British Railways? That's Not the Right Question

Let me start with a surprising statement: the Department for Transport (DfT) now exerts far more control on the British railways than they ever have before. And yet, the railways are more "privatised" than they have been since the start of the First World War. Welcome to the confusing, contradictory world of Britain's rail industry.

British Rail was privatised in 1994, and ever since there have been calls to renationalise it. But the biggest change wasn't that the railway network was privatised; the biggest change was that it was fragmented, broken down into literally dozens of separate companies all ostensibly trying to work together to provide a unified National Rail network, all the while each trying to extract their own little margin of profit.

What this means is there isn't a "British Rail PLC" that can simply be renationalised, but rather a whole multitude of companies which would need to be recombined were we to try and renationalise the railways.

What are these companies? In a nutshell, the privatised railway can be explained as follows: one company owns the tracks, three more companies own the trains, and about 20 other companies run the passenger services. In theory, they all work together to move passengers around, but are also in competition with each other...

How did we end up with this mess? To answer that we must turn to politics. In 1992, the Conservative Party included in their election manifesto that they'd privatise the railways if they won the election. To the surprise of everyone, they won, and then had to make good on that election promise. In 1993, the blueprint was laid out for privatisation: although ostensibly designed to generate competition between the different sectors, the cynic in me wants to believe that the government knew they'd probably lose the next election (they did), and thus set about privatising the railway in a way that couldn't ever be undone. (Nonetheless, I am reminded of the aphorism: "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice".)

The tracks, points, signals and stations were sold off to Railtrack. Railtrack were a profitable company, listed on the London Stock Exchange and part of the FTSE 100 index. But after a litany of accidents, including Hatfield and Potters Bar, Railtrack's assets and operations were transferred to the state-controlled not-for-profit company Network Rail in 2002.

Meanwhile, the trains were sold off to three rolling-stock holding companies (ROSCOs): Angel, Eversholt and Porterbrook. Between them, these three companies own practically all the trains, locomotives and carriages used on the British railway network, being leased back to the companies that operate them. In other words, all the trains that used to belong to British Rail were sold off, and about 11% of the ticket price you pay goes to leasing them back from the ROSCOs! And, unlike Network Rail, the ROSCOs are very definitely private companies and all make a tidy profit.

Most importantly, though, privatisation created 25 train operating companies (TOCs): each part of the country was carved off into a separate franchise, and each was awarded separately to be run by a private company. Each franchise controls the drivers, guards and other operating staff, and is responsible for running the day-to-day service with rolling stock leased from the ROSCOs. Minimum numbers of services per day are specified (usually quite tightly) in the franchise agreement, ensuring that passengers are provided with the service they expect.

One of the aims of privatisation in this form was competition: different companies should "compete" for passengers, driving down prices while improving quality. But that doesn't really work on a railway network with limited capacity, and with a complicated interwoven timetable. In many cases there's more than one company on each line - for example, both Virgin Trains and London Midland operate services on the West Coast Main Line out of London Euston to Watford, Milton Keynes, Rugby, Birmingham and beyond - but there are only a limited number of trains that can be run.

So how do they decide who gets priority? The short answer is that Network Rail does. Each TOC bids for "paths", much like air-traffic control slots, to run a train at a particular time, and then Network Rail decides which paths can go to which operators, and effectively the actual timetable is written, as a whole, by Network Rail. In cases of dispute, things can get referred to the Office of Rail Regulation; sometimes the dispute is resolved by the DfT specifying the exact timetable. This means that the DfT can specify exactly how much competition they want (often none at all).

Perhaps the most laughable way in which this fragmentation manifests itself is when trains inevitably get delayed. If London Midland say to Virgin, "Oi! You delayed our train!", it's not really good enough if Virgin just mumble "Sorry...". No, this is a commercial railway where London Midland must be compensated for the delay caused by Virgin. As a result, Network Rail employ hundreds of train delay attribution clerks, whose entire job is to monitor delays to trains and attribute every minute of delay to a specific cause, and thus determine who pays the compensation. (Operators get compensated when a train is delayed by just 3 minutes; sadly they have to be delayed by 30 minutes for them to pass such compensation on to the passengers.)

That basic structure has been with us now for 20 years, since privatisation took effect on April 1st 1994. There are a lot more details - such as all the subcontractors employed to clean the trains, run the catering services, upgrade the tracks, design the signalling systems - and I'm ignoring freight trains and open-access operators, but you get the picture: the railways no longer function as one, but rather as a myriad of separate companies.

In a small number of cases, that's led to a dramatic improvement in services, particularly with CrossCountry Trains, the long-distance services such as Bournemouth-Manchester and Plymouth-Edinburgh which avoid London and instead pass through Birmingham New Street. Under British Rail, CrossCountry was always the Cinderella of the network, passed from pillar to post with no investment to speak of for decades; with CrossCountry as a separate franchise, Virgin were able to dramatically improve the service. Although, it is now a victim of its own success and the trains are too short, and no-one wants to subsidise lengthening the trains...

And there lies the rub: subsidy. Ever since the then-Transport Secretary Barbara Castle decided in 1968 that some lines could remain open even though they would require permanent subsidy from the Treasury to operate them, all political parties have accepted the principle that the railways should be subsidised by the government. Even as privatisation was enacted, it was accepted that the franchises would, in many cases, require government subsidy to operate; conversely, some of the more lucrative franchises (principally long-distance inter-city operators like Virgin and GNER/East Coast) were required to pay premiums back to the Treasury. This ensured that the principle of cross-subsidisation - where lucrative services propped up loss-making ones - continued as it had done for years.

Of course, when it was all one British Rail, there was no profit to be made; every penny of subsidy went towards improving punctuality and upgrading services. But with the railway fragmented into lots of pieces, allocating subsidy is all of a sudden a trickier job. Previously the job of dishing out money to individual regions or services was the job of the British Railways Board, which operated at arms' length from the DfT, much like today's Network Rail. But without the BR Board, that function is instead fulfilled by the Department for Transport itself.

In other words, the DfT is now the one deciding that, for example, Manchester Piccadilly gets two extra platforms and freight trains to Southampton should be electrified, and that reopening the line between Lewes and Uckfield will have to wait. Network Rail can have their own say on small-scale track improvements, but for anything large-scale or anything involving a significant timetable change, it's the DfT's decision. Even under BR, the DfT didn't have this much control in the day-to-day running of the railway.

Yet, conversely, with dozens of companies involved in running the railways, all trying to extract a profit, the railway is nearly as privatised as it was in the days of Stephenson and Brunel. And while privatisation usually makes things more efficient and reduces costs, in this case the fragmentation has meant that costs spiralled massively, to guarantee each of the companies involved a share of the profit.

Where does this profit come from? Government subsidy (at least in part). Whereas subsidy to British Rail only rose above £1 billion per annum in 1991 (and even that was partly due to the recession at the time), in 2006-07 the total subsidy to Network Rail and the TOCs stood at a whopping £6.3 billion. To be fair, that's come back down to about £4 billion per annum as at 2012. (More figures here.) Nonetheless, what that means is that subsidy to the railways today is about three or four times what it was when it was nationalised; even adjusting for inflation, subsidy has at least doubled in real terms since privatisation.

The reasons for that are not at all clear, and nor is the solution. While some of that subsidy is due to the fragmentation of the industry, some of it may be due to the boom in passengers: passenger numbers troughed at about 700 million in 1995, but have since climbed to over 1.4 billion in 2012. As a result, the railways are carrying more passengers per year than it has since before the Second World War, and moving more people costs more money. Some of the increase in subsidy is also down to long-overdue maintenance; British Rail postponed a lot of maintenance (often even simple things like replacing worn-out track), and Network Rail is having to work overtime to clear the backlog.

It's also important to remember that, in spite (or perhaps in some cases because) of the fragmentation, the railway network has improved immeasurably in the last 20 years. The West Coast Main Line now gets 125mph trains every three minutes, and it takes less than an hour to get from Coventry to London (though the upgrade did cost £9 billion). And as my recent posts have shown, we're currently in the throes of one of the biggest programmes of upgrades to the railway network in decades, with Crossrail, the Thameslink Programme, Great Western electrification, the Northern Hub and the Electric Spine. Those upgrades don't come cheap.

On September 1st 2014, Network Rail was reclassified as a public sector body, meaning that its debt (some £34 billion) counted towards the national debt for the first time since privatisation. That debt is an inevitable side effect of wanting investment now but wanting to pay later; railway investment is a pretty safe bet, because there will always be lots of passengers to move, and if you can move them more efficiently then so much the better. (Incidentally, one of the few reasons the debt was kept off the public sector books was that Gordon Brown didn't want to breach his rule that the national debt should not exceed 40% of GDP, though that went out the window in the financial crash of 2008.)

In practice, this means very little else; the DfT will continue to exert the same control over Network Rail as they have done for years, and Network Rail will continue to ask for more money for improvements. It will probably mean that the salaries of the big bosses at Network Rail will have to fall in line with public sector limits (current chief executive Mark Carne receives an annual salary of £675,000), but the day-to-day running of the railway will change very little.

Does it perhaps signify a change in ethos at the Department for Transport, a desire to move towards a renationalised railway? I don't think so, or at least not under the current government. Indeed, the current government is trying to get East Coast, which was temporarily renationalised when the franchise held by National Express went bust, back into the private sector by the next election.

The Labour Party, however, have suggested that a state not-for-profit firm (such as that which currently runs East Coast) should be allowed to bid for franchises when they come up for renewal. Personally I think that's just making a dog's breakfast of a railway network even worse by trying to partially renationalise bits by the back door: it's not clear that partial renationalisation is actually better, since then you might have not-for-profit companies trying to compete with the likes of Virgin Trains, and that isn't likely to end well (for anyone).

Ultimately, no government since John Major's has had the guts to take any fundamental policy decisions with respect to the structure of the railway network; they've tinkered at the edges, but the railway is still basically that given to us in 1994 at the time of privatisation. A full renationalisation might bring costs down and thus enable more investment in the infrastructure for the same level of subsidy. But even British Rail struggled to find the right structure for the railways: they tried organising it by region, but in the 1980s moved to "sectorisation", where InterCity, Network SouthEast and Regional Railways were all subordinate only to the top management, without regions to get in the way.

Ever present in British Rail, though, was the knowledge that the tracks cannot be maintained without knowing what trains have run over them, and trains cannot be maintained without knowing where they've been. Perhaps the oddest thing about privatisation is that it has separated track from train, with virtually no "vertical integration" of tracks and trains for nearly 20 years. In recognition of that, South West Trains are experimenting with a "deep alliance" with Network Rail's Wessex Route: since 2012 the track and trains on the lines out of Waterloo have been brought into one management structure, for the first time since the days of British Rail.

But that won't work everywhere: even within the Wessex Route there are other trains run by CrossCountry, Southern and First Great Western, as well as a multitude of freight trains serving the port of Southampton. Try and make a vertically integrated railway around Birmingham or Manchester and you're in for a world of trouble, such is the number of different operators in the area. Indeed, the success of CrossCountry is precisely because there isn't vertical integration. Sadly, there isn't an easy one-size-fits-all solution, as British Rail found.

Let me be clear: on this occasion I don't want to try and argue either for or against renationalisation. My point is that renationalisation would require reintegration of the myriad companies that were created at privatisation, and that would bring about a complete restructuring of the railway. In other words, renationalisation is not something to be undertaken without a lot of thought put into the structure of any renationalised railway and - more importantly - how we get there.

Putting the railway network back together could be done: it would probably require the state buying out the train operating franchises (or letting them expire), getting the trains back into public ownership, and instituting a management structure more like British Rail. But that kind of shake-up would require more political will than I think any government is likely to want to expend on railways: unlike privatisation, which was achieved within a single parliament by a partisan government, reintegration and renationalisation might require a commitment over one or more decades to see it through.

For all its faults, the privatised railway has presided over one of the biggest booms in passenger use in history. After 20 years of getting used to a whole new structure, the rail industry has found its feet again, and a huge programme of upgrades, new lines and electrification is underway, with £30 billion being spent over the next five years or so to dramatically improve the railways in a way not seen for generations. Would that investment have come under British Rail? Possibly. But when the current structure has given rise to that much investment, it's hard to argue that now is the time for a fundamental shake-up of the railway industry.

There is undoubtedly scope to improve the organisation of the railways, but I think it's best achieved by the typical chant of the Englishman:

"What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!"

Whatever happens, though, I sincerely hope that it's not driven by blind ideology with no regard for the structure of the industry. Full-scale renationalisation rammed through without a plan for how to reintegrate the railways would be no better than John Major's privatisation. And until someone comes up with a detailed plan for how to renationalise the railways, the question of whether or not we should renationalise them is impossible to answer.

What is... the Electric Spine? (Or, Why Freight Trains Matter to Everyone)

The "Electric Spine" is a plan to electrify two key rail arteries from the port of Southampton to the north of England (via Nuneaton and Sheffield), creating an electrified trunk route avoiding London, principally for use by freight trains. The plan is, as yet, still not finalised; but it promises to have a huge (yet also subtle) impact across the country. So while this blog usually focusses on passenger trains, for this post I'd like to delve into the world of freight trains, and explain why we're spending over a billion pounds so that freight trains can run a bit faster...

Once upon a time, almost all freight traffic in Britain was moved by rail. While the vast majority of it is now hauled by lorries instead, for some traffic (e.g. coal) rail is still the "right" way to move it around the country. This is especially true of long-distance flows: for example, for taking containers from Southampton to Scotland, or cars from Merseyside to Dagenham Dock, rail has the advantage of bulk and speed that road just can't match. Indeed, container traffic has seen a marked shift from road to rail in recent years, and the challenge for the rail network is how to accommodate it.

Unlike passenger trains, which can be broken down into discrete services, even the destinations of freight trains can vary from day to day. Passenger trains between London and Birmingham are completely segregated from, say, passenger trains between London and Dover; in that sense, the electrification of the passenger rail network can be - and is - broken down into discrete chunks, one main line at a time. Freight trains, though, are much less frequent and tend to run to a wide variety of destinations, over a variety of different routes according to where there's capacity.

By its very nature, then, the network used by freight trains is huge and sprawling: indeed, it's quite hard to find a significant part of the network that isn't used by freight trains at all. As a result, while some freight trains running on key main lines can be hauled by electric locomotives, the vast majority of freight trains remain hauled by diesel engines, even when some of the route has electric wires, because having to stop and change engine takes too much time. And that's unlikely to change until a significant portion of the freight network is electrified.

So what is driving plans to try and do just that? The key advantage of electric freight trains over diesel ones is acceleration. Freight trains are mostly limited to 60mph, and while some container trains can manage 75mph, electric haulage can't really improve that. What it can do, though, is dramatically improve acceleration, so that when a freight train has to run between two passenger trains, it doesn't need as large a gap. Quicker acceleration, more capacity. Crucially, though, not just capacity for freight trains but also for more passenger trains.

This is especially true on mixed-traffic lines, where passenger and freight trains have to share the same tracks. For example, while the south end of the WCML has four tracks, north of Preston it's two tracks all the way to the outskirts of Glasgow. In particular, over Shap in the Lake District, where the WCML runs roughly parallel to the M6, the two-track line threads its way between the hills with gradients as steep as 1 in 75. For a 4,000-tonne freight train, 1 in 75 is a big problem! However, while diesel trains are limited by how big an engine they have and how much fuel they can carry, electric trains are basically limited only by how much current they can draw.

The difference between electric and diesel freight trains over Shap can be summed up as follows: from Preston to Carlisle (about 90 miles), a freight train hauled by an electric locomotive generally won't have to stop to be overtaken by faster passenger trains, while a diesel train almost certainly will. Having to have the freight train slow down, pull into a loop, wait to be overtaken, and then start up again costs a lot of time and capacity; converting diesel freight trains to electric over Shap would significantly increase capacity on this very mixed-traffic line.

The "Electric Spine" is the first major project in trying to convert freight trains to electric haulage: the broad intention is that almost all long-distance container trains to and from the port of Southampton will be able to run with electric traction. At this point, though, while the project is committed by the government, it's still being developed by Network Rail, and is unlikely to be fully complete before 2025. Indeed, more than any of the other "big projects" I've discussed recently, the Electric Spine poses the biggest unknowns: there are things in the plan that have never been done before.

Let's return to electrification in general (see my earlier post if you need a refresher). There have been many different voltages and both overhead wires and various forms of third rail in use for electric trains over the years, but two systems remain in widespread use in the UK: 750V DC third rail, mainly south of London, and 25kV AC overhead wires, mainly north of London. Because most passenger services are self-contained, most electric trains only need one kind of electric equipment, and for the small number of services (mainly Thameslink and London Overground) which use both, the trains can be fitted with both systems.

Both systems have advantages and disadvantages: third rail systems are better suited to dense suburban networks, while overhead wires are better suited to long-distance traffic. That said, most would agree that overhead wires are better than third rail - and if the network south of London were being electrified today there is no question that it would be done with overhead wires. The principal problem with third rail is that, because the rail is so close to the ground, the voltage can't really be made higher than 750V. (The National Grid uses 275kV DC to transmit electricity around the country, but the wires are high in the air.)

In order to provide enough power through the third rail, the current has to be higher than it would in overhead wires (power is current times voltage), and as a result a lot of power is lost in transmitting it down the rails; this means third rail requires lots more substations to provide enough power. In particular, providing enough power through the third rail to permit electric locomotives to haul freight trains is hideously expensive, and while it can be done, there are only a couple of routes which have been upgraded to provide enough power, namely those connecting London to the Channel Tunnel.

And here we encounter the major problem with the Electric Spine: Southampton is already electrified... with third rail. The plan for the Electric Spine thus calls for something which has never been done on this scale: the conversion of the line between Basingstoke and Southampton from third rail electrification to overhead wires. While this means freight trains will be able to run on overhead wires all the way to the docks at Southampton, the existing passenger trains which run between London and Weymouth would be required to change from third rail to overhead wires at Basingstoke and back again at Southampton.

For the sake of convenience to passenger trains, you might reasonably ask whether you could simply have both overhead wires and third rail between Basingstoke and Southampton. Clearly it has to be possible over short distances, otherwise trains would never be able to change from one to the other. However, in the section with both overhead wires and third rail, both systems must be carefully insulated from each other in other to prevent current straying from one to the other. As such, the existing third rail equipment would have to be heavily modified; it's certainly not as easy as just adding overhead wires on top of the existing third rail.

In any case, part of the justification for converting the line between Basingstoke and Southampton is that the third rail equipment, which was installed in 1967, will need to be replaced shortly anyway. Given that 25kV AC requires fewer substations than 750V DC, it is in fact cheaper - at least as far as the infrastructure is concerned - to replace the third rail with overhead wires. But this ignores the fact that the existing electric trains, run by South West Trains (SWT), would require conversion to work on overhead wires as well as third rail. These trains are about 10 years old, and most (the Class 450s) should be straightforward enough to convert (though the Class 444s may require more work).

And here is where the ugly truth of the privatised, fragmented British railway system rears its head: who pays? The Department for Transport are happy to pay Network Rail for the work to the infrastructure, but it is not clear who will pay for the conversion of the trains. The trains are operated by SWT, but are in fact owned by the rolling stock holding company Angel Trains. Why should either SWT or Angel Trains pay to change their trains because of Network Rail's infrastructure changes?

The issue is yet to be resolved, and it's still not clear whether the line between Basingstoke and Southampton will actually be converted. I suspect it will, but I suspect the government will have to pay for the conversion of the trains as well. However, if any of the electrification projects were to run over-budget, the quickest way to save money would be to kick the whole Basingstoke-Southampton conversion into the long grass.

The rest of the Electric Spine can be broken down into four distinct chunks:

• The section between Basingstoke and Oxford, via Reading, will be electrified as part of the Great Western Main Line electrification, associated with the Intercity Express Programme (see my earlier blogpost) - at least, the Reading-Oxford part will; exactly what will happen with Reading-Basingstoke isn't clear.
• The section between Oxford and Bedford is unusual in that part of the line that will be electrified isn't open yet! The "East-West Rail Link" is soon to be reopened; whether it will have overhead wires from opening (in 2017) or whether it will follow a few years later (by 2019) remains unclear. (See also my earlier blogpost about a railtour along part of the East-West line.)
• The section between Bedford and Sheffield amounts to electrification of the rest of the Midland Main Line (MML), the section between London and Bedford having been electrified in 1981 for suburban trains. This section will herald the biggest changes for passenger trains too, allowing the existing diesel trains running between London and Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield to be replaced by electric trains.
• The section between Oxford and Nuneaton, which will probably be the last part to be completed (apart from Basingstoke-Southampton), will link Southampton to the West Coast Main Line at Nuneaton, allowing electric trains to run all the way from Southampton to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. I wouldn't be surprised if this got pushed past 2020 (and it would make another easy target for cuts).

While this is a good start to an electric freight network, that's all it is: a start. For one, it's missing a key connection from Sheffield to the electrified East Coast Main Line at Doncaster. But it also leaves the other major deep-water container port - Felixstowe, in Suffolk - just twelve miles from the electric wires at Ipswich. Electrifying that branch could probably do as much for container freight as the whole Electric Spine project.

One of the other major freight projects in recent years has been to increase the number of trains from Felixstowe which can avoid London to get to the north of England and to Scotland. Currently much of the traffic runs through London: fitting freight trains through London is a perennial challenge, with most London Overground routes in fact being freight routes that some would argue would be more efficient without any passenger stations on them! In order to relieve the pressure, tunnels and bridges have been enlarged to permit container trains to run from Felixstowe to Nuneaton via Ely, Peterborough and Leicester. If that line could also be electrified, then we'd start to make major inroads into converting at least container trains to electric traction. It seems that that, however, will have to wait for Southampton to have its turn first.

Ultimately, the point of the Electric Spine is to increase capacity - both for freight and passenger trains - by using electric locomotives, with their impressive acceleration, to speed up freight traffic across the country. On the one hand, this should mean fewer lorries on the roads, making road travel easier for everyone. On the other hand, this will mean more capacity for passenger trains, and fewer delays caused by late running freight trains (hopefully). It sounds like a win for everyone - and it should be - but the devil, as usual, is in the detail. For now: watch this space.

Previous post: What is... the Northern Hub?

What is... the Northern Hub?

The Northern Hub is a £560 million project to upgrade and electrify much of the railway network in the North of England, particularly focussed on the cities of Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. As well as electrifying over 300 miles of track, the project will unlock one of the biggest bottlenecks in the country: Manchester Piccadilly station will gain two extra platforms, and the Ordsall Chord will allow trains to run directly between Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria. All in all, rail travel in the North of England will be transformed.

You may have noticed that, so far in this series of blogposts, the projects we've looked at - e.g., Crossrail, Thameslink and the Great Western Main Line - are all in the South of England. It's fair to say that the South - particularly London and the South-East - gets more than its "fair share" of investment compared to the proportion of the population that lives there. To a certain extent, the Northern Hub will help to smooth out that imbalance.

It's important to understand why there's an imbalance in the first place: the fact is that railways are most efficient in dense urban areas and between big cities. As a result, railways naturally gravitated towards London and the South-East, meaning more people used the railways in London, meaning they got more investment, and this created a "feedback loop" of perpetual investment in the South-East to try and cope with ever-increasing demand.

By contrast, while the urban areas in the North of England have received some investment, the railways in the North don't get used as much, so they don't get as much investment, and hence their use doesn't increase as quickly. While much of the South-East has 12-carriage commuter trains into London, four carriages already makes a long commuter train into Manchester, and most platforms can't accommodate more than six. This isn't in and of itself a problem, nor is it necessarily a sign of bias in investment priorities, but it is nonetheless a reality.

However, the use of relatively short trains does make the North's trains less efficient to run: a 12-car train doesn't cost six times as much to run as a 2-car train, not least because you still only need one driver and one guard. What's more, almost all of the North's trains are diesel trains: by contrast to the South-East, where the only major commuter line which isn't electrified is the Chiltern line out of Marylebone, so far there are just a handful of electric lines around Manchester and Leeds, and (as I discussed previously) diesel trains are more expensive to run.

Happily, though, an opportunity to make the North's railway network far more efficient came when then-Transport Secretary (Lord) Andrew Adonis hit on a bright idea. He reasoned as follows: Thameslink is getting a huge fleet of new trains, meaning the 86 4-car Class 319s will no longer be required. The trains could simply be moved to another already-electrified line to displace some older trains and allow them to be scrapped, but instead Adonis decided to invest in electrifying new lines, and send the Class 319s there.

This allows lines to be electrified without incurring the additional cost of a brand-new fleet of electric trains, a significant saving. One of those lines is the Great Western Main Line, where new electric inter-city trains will replace the existing HSTs, and the Class 319s would be used on suburban services in the Thames Valley between London and Reading, Oxford and Newbury.

The GWML alone, however, wouldn't account for all 86 class 319s, so in 2009 four lines in the North-West were chosen for electrification in a phased programme:

• Liverpool-Manchester via Newton-le-Willows (the Chat Moss line), with Manchester to Newton-le-Willows being electrified by December 2013 and Newton-le-Willows to Liverpool by December 2014;
• Liverpool-Wigan via St Helens to be electrified by December 2014;
• Manchester-Preston via Bolton to be electrified by December 2016;
• Preston-Blackpool North to be electrified by December 2015 (though this has now slipped to February 2017).

The Chat Moss electrification was announced first, in July 2009, with the other lines following in December 2009. The initial announcement came rather out of the blue: it is not entirely clear why the Chat Moss line was chosen, but if Adonis's intention was to start the ball rolling on significant investment in the railway network across the north of England, he picked the right line! Although they initially put the plans on hold thanks to the post-election Spending Review, the new coalition government reconfirmed the plans in October 2010.

The class 319s are to be cascaded to the North-West, permitting older diesel trains (such as the dreaded Pacers) to be scrapped. All told, about 35 Class 319s will be needed across the North-West. However, due to delays in the Thameslink Programme, while the first two phases of wiring will be completed by December 2014, there will only be three electric trains available to run the local services. A further 11 will follow over the following year, which will account for all the Liverpool-Manchester and Liverpool-Wigan services, with the remainder of the trains being available early in 2017 for the completion of the third and fourth phases.

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One of the most important diesel-operated services in the North, however, is the Trans-Pennine service between Manchester and Leeds, with five trains an hour running between these two huge cities. Most start in the west at Liverpool or Manchester Airport, while in the east the trains continue on to Hull, York, Scarborough, Middlesbrough or Newcastle. With one of the routes between Liverpool and Manchester now being electrified, and the ECML between York and Newcastle already wired, that leaves only a relatively short gap between Manchester and York; wiring that gap would permit a disproportionate number of services to be converted to electric operation.

Moreover, the Trans-Pennine services are some of the most overcrowded trains in the North, and as reasonably fast inter-urban services they are a plum candidate for investment, sure to bring more significant benefits than merely electrifying commuter lines. Sure enough, in November 2011, the government announced a follow-on to the North-West Electrification: the Trans-Pennine route between Manchester, Huddersfield, Leeds and York is to be electrified by 2018. The line from Leeds to Selby (though oddly not all the way to Hull) was added to the electrification plans in July 2012.

All the big stations along the way (Liverpool Lime Street, Manchester Piccadilly, Leeds and York) are already electrified, while Manchester Victoria will be electrified as part of the North-West Electrification, making this project relatively simple; instead the big challenge will be electrifying the 3-mile-long tunnels at Standedge (under the Pennines) without causing too much disruption.

However, before the benefits of a more frequent electric Trans-Pennine service can be realised, one of the biggest capacity bottlenecks on the network has to be sorted out: Manchester Piccadilly station. It may strike you as odd to learn that, in spite of its proliferation of short commuter trains, Manchester Piccadilly station is running more or less at capacity: there is no more room to run more trains.

Manchester Piccadilly is an odd station: it has 12 terminus platforms, all facing south, used by services long-distance from London, Bristol, Bournemouth, and Cardiff, as well as local services to Stoke-on-Trent, Crewe, Chester, Glossop and Sheffield. However, the station also has two through platforms at its west side, used by services to Liverpool, Preston, Blackpool and Scotland. That there are only two such through platforms is already a capacity constraint, and plans are in place to add two extra through platforms by 2018.

But that in and of itself doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that too many trains want to go through each other. In particular, all the Trans-Pennine services between Liverpool and Leeds have to cross the entire width of the station throat, from the westernmost platforms to the easternmost approach lines to the south. Trains between Manchester Airport and Leeds have to reverse in one of the 12 terminus platforms, requiring them either to cross everything on the way into Piccadilly, or on the way out. This diagram shows the problem:

Enter the Ordsall Chord. From 2016, a short piece of track will fill in the third side of the triangle in western Manchester and allow trains from Piccadilly to curve round and head through Victoria, Manchester's other major station. Once the grand centerpiece of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, Victoria is a shell of its former self, particularly since the Windsor Link was opened in 1988 and many services were transferred to Piccadilly. Access between the two has always been rather difficult, and while Metrolink has made it easier, the Ordsall Chord will provide a direct rail connection between the two stations for the first time.

Once completed, it will allow Victoria, not Piccadilly, to become the hub for Trans-Pennine journeys. The Ordsall Chord will permit trains between Manchester Airport and Leeds to run via both Piccadilly and Victoria, and avoid having to reverse along the way. While trains between Liverpool and Leeds can already run via Victoria without any capacity problems, to do so requires diverting them via Chat Moss instead of via Warrington Central; coincidentally (or perhaps as a rare piece of forward planning?) the Chat Moss is the route that's being electrified, while the route via Warrington Central will remain diesel-only.

But more importantly, it will de-tangle the services coming into Piccadilly, with services to Stockport and beyond able to run completely independently of the Trans-Pennine services, bringing significant improvements in punctuality for both groups of services, as well as allowing an increase to six Trans-Pennine services per hour. This diagram shows the solution:

As a result, by 2018 the rail network around Manchester will be transformed by two extra platforms at Piccadilly, the Ordsall Chord connecting Piccadilly and Victoria, and electrification across much of the North-West and the whole Trans-Pennine route from Liverpool to Newcastle. Put it all together and you have the "Northern Hub", whose total cost is about £560 million.

The only problem is the lack of clarity in what trains will be running on such lines: the letting of new franchises for TransPennine Express and Northern Rail has been delayed until February 2016, and only once the new franchise is announced will it become clear what, if any, strategy there is for rolling stock across the North.

One possibility is that the remainder of the Class 319s, perhaps together with some of the other trains released by Crossrail and the Thameslink Programme, could be used on Trans-Pennine services. Currently, however, the Trans-Pennine services run with Class 185s, modern three-car diesel trains which are less than 10 years old, ideally suited for inter-urban services. To replace those with commuter trains from the South-East which are nearly 25 years old is clearly a downgrade, and smacks of the North being handed the unwanted old tat from the South-East.

Unlike the North-West Electrification, however, which could only be reasonably justified by the use of existing trains, it's quite possible that the new Trans-Pennine franchise will decide to order some new electric trains to run across the Pennines. This would allow some (if not all) of the Class 185s to be transferred elsewhere, and trigger a rolling stock cascade that would ensure that many areas benefit from newer trains, while allowing more of the oldest clapped-out trains (hopefully all the Pacers and possibly some Sprinters) to be withdrawn from service.

In any case, the North is getting some much-needed improvements to its rail network, including a whole new railway line, new platforms and lots of new overhead wires. While we'll have to wait and see what trains serve it, it is clear that areas which have seen little investment for over 20 years will see dramatic improvements over the next few years. It could even be the start of a whole new rail boom across the North...

Previous post: What is... the Intercity Express Programme?
Next post: What is... the Electric Spine?

What is... the Intercity Express Programme? (and what does it mean for the Great Western Main Line?)

The Intercity Express Programme is a £5.7 billion order for building the next generation of long-distance train in Britain. Or at least, that's the theory: its critics would claim it's an overpriced, wrong-headed solution in want of a problem to fix. It all started when someone decided many of our long-distance trains were getting a bit old. It's since morphed into something quite unusual, involving the first major use of electric-diesel "hybrid" trains (though it remains to be seen if that's actually a good idea)...

The High-Speed Train, or HST, also branded as the InterCity 125, entered service in 1977 and will probably still be in service for the rest of this decade. It was and is the mainstay of long-distance inter-city services across Britain; they regularly reach Penzance, Aberdeen, Sheffield, Swansea and many places in between.

They are diesel-powered, and are thus not used much on those routes which are already electrified; but they provide all long-distance services on the Great Western Main Line (GWML), as well as supplementing the fleets used on the Midland Main Line (MML), East Coast Main Line (ECML), and the Cross-Country routes. These days, they are easily distinguished by being one of the last fleets of trains with slam doors. But the HST was never designed to be around for so long; it was a stopgap solution.

As is so often the case, this stopgap solution ended up being a lasting feature of the British rail network. The plan in the 1970s had been for something much grander: the Advanced Passenger Train (APT). Capable of tilting round corners and hitting speeds in excess of 150mph, the APT was forged in the "white heat of the [technological] revolution" so championed a few years earlier by Harold Wilson. Unfortunately, it proved to be a bit too "white heat", and after many setbacks it was finally launched in 1981 while it was still prone to failures. The launch was a PR disaster, and only three production units were ever built, before being scrapped in 1985.

As a stopgap, the BR engineers had decided to build something a bit more conventional; and thus was born the HST. The fleet of nearly a hundred trains, with their distinctive angular power cars at each end, have served the country well for over 30 years now, but they are starting to show their age. While the typical lifespan of a diesel train is 25-30 years, the HSTs have all had their engines upgraded or replaced; nonetheless, asking them to go much past 40 years in service is pushing it.

So, in 2005, the Department for Transport set out to replace the HSTs. In a spectacular lack of ambition, they seemed only to want a like-for-like replacement; one high-speed diesel-powered train replaced by a slightly newer, slightly fancier, high-speed diesel-powered train. Fortunately, someone in the Department woke up to the opportunity that total replacement of the fleet could provide: since the trains need replacing anyway, why not make them electric? And indeed, once the investment in electrification was forthcoming, the need to replace the HSTs like-for-like evaporated.

Rather than scrap the "Intercity Express Programme" (IEP) and simply order some new electric trains to a standard design, the DfT pressed ahead with a revised plan for the IEP. There would be three types of train, all to be built to roughly the same design: electric trains, diesel trains, and "bi-mode" trains, the latter being hybrid trains capable of running off the overhead wires where there were wires, but also carrying underfloor diesel engines to take the train where the wires won't stretch. Eventually the diesel option was dropped, once the full plans for electrification emerged, but the bi-mode option was kept.

Ostensibly, the point of bi-mode trains is to be able to utilise the overhead wires between, say, London and Edinburgh, and then proceed on to Aberdeen or Inverness under diesel power. This means that you don't have diesel trains running "under the wires" for long distances, which ought to save on fuel consumption. But the key benefit of electric trains is that, almost uniquely among forms of transport, they don't have to carry around engines to generate movement. Bi-mode trains, though, mean still carrying around the heavy diesel engines even when you're not using them, and so one of the great benefits of electrification (lighter trains) is lost. It should result in an overall reduction in fuel consumption, but the jury is still out on that.

After a long and torturous bidding process, which was interrupted first by a review into the project's viability after electrification was announced, and then by the General Election and the Spending Review that followed, Hitachi were chosen as the preferred bidders, and would supply over a hundred Super Express trains. They will be built in Hitachi's new factory in Newton Aycliffe, Co. Durham, and marks the first major entrance of the Japanese train builders into the European market.

A total of 866 carriages, in a variety of 9-car and 5-car formations, some electric and some bi-mode, will replace all the HSTs on the Great Western Main Line (GWML) and the East Coast Main Line (ECML), as well as the Class 91 locomotives and Mark 4 carriages on the ECML.

I remain somewhat sceptical of IEP, especially the virtues of bi-mode trains: there are those who would have preferred a standard fleet of all-electric trains, and perhaps use diesel locomotives to haul them where there aren't wires, but I will reserve judgement until the trains actually arrive. It must be said, though, that however you spin it, £5.7 billion is a lot of money for this many trains; standard electric trains would almost certainly have been cheaper.

---

Let's turn specifically to their impact on the Great Western Main Line. Combined with electrification, the new trains ought to bring a step change in performance and journey times; but on their own they cannot on their own provide the necessary capacity increase on the GWML.

London to Reading is perhaps the single busiest passenger flow on the whole railway network, with commuters flooding long-distance trains for the non-stop run to London, and making it near-impossible to get a seat in rush hours. If there is to be enough capacity to provide a meaningful increase in seats in the peaks, more has to be done. Fortunately, more is being done. For one, Crossrail's arrival in 2019 will free up a significant number of platforms at London Paddington, meaning they can be used by longer-distance trains instead.

But Paddington isn't the linchpin of the GWML: the biggest bottleneck, by a long way, is Reading. Reading has long suffered from not having enough platforms - fast trains out of London in particular had only one platform available - and too many conflicting routes, with freight trains between Southampton and the north having to cross the main GWML, and with Cross-Country services added to the mix there was never enough capacity. Here's Reading as it looked in 2009 (click to expand):

Reading station layout, 2009

Fortunately, for the last five years Reading station has been undergoing one of the biggest rebuilding and remodelling projects ever undertaken on the British railway network. In a £900 million scheme, five new platforms have been added, and two viaducts to the west end of the station will open next year to segregate east-west traffic from north-south traffic. The scheme, due for completion at Easter 2015, will dramatically increase capacity through Reading, permitting fast trains to run as often as every three minutes between London and Reading. Here's Reading as it will look in 2015 (click to expand):

Reading station layout, 2015

As you can see, the layout of the railway will be transformed. One of the most innovative features is the "Reading Festival Chord" (in light green above), a roller-coaster of a track that goes under the main lines and then over the "feeder" lines from Reading West. What it means is that Cross-Country trains between Birmingham, Oxford and Southampton will be able to reverse at Reading station without ever having to cross the path of high-speed services on the GWML, and that is nothing short of genius on the part of the designers of the scheme.

There is one last part of the puzzle for the GWML, and that is the question of what trains will provide suburban services into and out of Paddington. While Crossrail will take over the stopping services, and the Hitachi Super Express trains (from IEP) will provide the long-distance services, a fleet of electric units will be required for the semi-fast services to Oxford and Newbury, as well as for the branch lines to Windsor, Marlow, Henley and Basingstoke (which will also be electrified).

Here comes the clever part: by syncing up the electrification of the GWML with the Thameslink Programme, no trains need be built specifically for the GWML suburban services; instead, trains will simply transfer from Thameslink over to the GWML. Initially, those were planned to be the Class 319s that currently run on Thameslink, but instead the newly-built Class 387s - which are capable of 110mph, rather than just 100mph - may be transferred; that has yet to be decided.

All told, the Great Western Main Line will be transformed by 2019:

• 650 track-miles of electrification;
• brand-new Hitachi Super Express long-distance trains running between London, Bristol and Swansea;
• electric suburban trains providing fast commuter services from Oxford and Newbury;
• Crossrail services providing through trains from Reading and west London to the City;
• five new platforms and a completely new layout at Reading.

This will enable a "very high frequency" timetable to be introduced - with three or four trains an hour between London and Bristol, compared to just two per hour currently - which should bring a completely different experience to the GWML, just as the very high frequency timetable introduced on the WCML in 2008 has meant I can get from Coventry to London in an hour (a distance of 94 miles), and if I miss a train I only have to wait 20 minutes.

On top of that, following on from the electrification of the GWML, it is planned to electrify the South Wales Valley Lines, a dense network of suburban routes into Cardiff: another 200 miles of track should be electrified by 2020, bringing electric suburban trains to Cardiff and revolutionising rail travel in South Wales - though the details have yet to be worked out.

With all that said, I should point out that not all of the Great Western Main Line will benefit from these upgrades. The electrification will not extend to Gloucester, Cheltenham, Worcester or Hereford; but they will at least benefit from bi-mode trains, capable of running of the electric wires as far as Swindon or Oxford. More importantly, the overhead wires will not go south of Bristol or west of Newbury - meaning all of Devon and Cornwall will remain unelectrified, and indeed will still be served by (refurbished) HSTs, if current plans are anything to go by.

So while parts of the Great Western network flourish, Devon and Cornwall may feel like they're stuck in stagnation. With this kind of scheme, though, there are always winners and losers; in this case it's clear that Bristol, Cardiff, Oxford and the like will benefit from significantly improved journeys to London. And while Devon and Cornwall will not see so much investment immediately, that doesn't rule out the possibility of extensions to the electrification later; indeed, I'd count on at least one major extension to the GWML electrification before 2025.

The Great Western Main Line is going through a momentous phase in its history, perhaps the biggest change since the days of Brunel. It remains to be seen exactly what emerges in 2019, but it's clear there will be faster, more frequent trains - at least for some.

Previous post: What is... Electrification?
Next post: What is... the Northern Hub?

What is... Electrification?

Electric trains are cleaner, quicker, lighter, quieter and cheaper to run. So why is only 40% of the British rail network capable of running electric trains, and the other 60% is still suffering noisy, cramped, sluggish diesel trains?

The simple answer is infrastructure costs. While electric trains are cheaper to run, an electric train must be powered by electricity received through either overhead wires or a third rail. So while the second electric train is cheap to run, all the costs of putting up the overhead wires (or laying down the third rails) and connecting them to the National Grid must be borne before the first electric train can run. Putting up all the wires and transformers for a railway line to take electric trains currently costs about £250,000 per single-track kilometre.

Here's a map showing the parts of the network that are electrified:

British railway network, showing electrification (as at 2012)

First, let's look at the benefits that "electrification" can deliver. With a diesel train, the train must carry around fuel and then generate power by burning that fuel in a diesel engine. But with an electric train, the train can simply tap straight into the electricity, and use that electricity to turn motors. Motors are much lighter than engines, and combined with the savings on having to carry around the fuel, the train is much lighter.

As a result, electric trains can accelerate much faster than diesel trains, making them excellent for suburban routes with lots of stops. What's more, the improved acceleration permits trains to run closer together, meaning more trains can run. Time and again, newly-electrified railways see a significant upturn in usage, often known as the "sparks effect", as improved capacity and speed combine with modern, clean electric trains to yield a much more attractive way of commuting.

The benefits are by no means limited to suburban trains, though: electric trains can pack more power for the same weight, and thus much better performance for longer-distance traffic. It's no coincidence that all the world speed records for trains since the 1970s have been set by electric trains; specifically, by high-speed trains in France and Japan.

Nonetheless, electrifying small, dense, intensively-used suburban networks is usually most cost-effective, since you convert the greatest number of services to electric operation for the least total cost outlay. And thus goes the history of British railway electrification: first to be electrified, in the early 20th century, were suburban lines in Liverpool, Newcastle and south London - all using different (and incompatible) electric voltages and transmission systems. (Indeed, none of them still use the system they first pioneered!)

After the railways were "grouped" into four large companies in 1923, the Southern Railway became the undoubted pioneers of electrification. Having standardised on 660V (later upped to 750V) DC supplied through a third rail, they made a concerted effort to electrify their entire network: by 1939 the "Southern Electrics" covered almost all of south London, running as far afield as Brighton, Eastbourne, Hastings, Guildford, Portsmouth and Reading.

But a committee in 1921 had recommended the national standard should be 1,500V DC through overhead wires; a few lines were electrified using this system by the LNER, such as the Woodhead route between Manchester and Sheffield, but the Great Depression and the Second World War prohibited much progress being made. Overhead wires finally started appearing on the commuter route from London Liverpool Street to Shenfield and Southend Victoria in 1949.

By the time of the 1955 Modernisation Plan, technology had moved forward considerably, and 25kV (25,000V) AC became the national standard for all new electrification schemes. Over time, all the remaining 1500V DC overhead wires were converted to 25kV AC, except those on the the Woodhead route where the line was controversially closed in the 1980s. More importantly, the 1960s and 1970s saw the entire 400-mile West Coast Main Line between London and Glasgow electrified at 25kV AC with overhead wires.

As with many things on the railways, the story at this point inevitably gets tied up with politics. After the success of the WCML electrification and various suburban electrification schemes around London and Glasgow in the 1970s, British Rail wished to embark on a rolling programme of electrification, whereby all the major main lines would be gradually electrified over the course of 20-30 years. Unfortunately, the plan was formulated in 1981, and the Conservative government of the day declined to proceed with the rolling programme in full. To its credit, though, it did fund the electrification of the East Coast Main Line between London and Edinburgh, completed by 1991.

This relatively slow pace of electrification is in marked contrast to other countries in Europe, notably Germany, where they forged ahead with much electrification even before the Second World War, and were more aggressive in replacing steam directly with electric trains, rather than just building diesel engines. Over half of the French, German and Italian rail networks are electrified, while in Belgium and the Netherlands nearly three-quarters of the network is electrified.

Any long-term plans British Rail might have had for electrification were well and truly dashed when, in 1994, the railways were privatised and fragmented. The industry was left without a body like the British Railways Board to advocate for a coordinated national approach to things like electrification. As a result, between 1991 and 2010 only nine miles of railway were electrified: the short link between Stoke-on-Trent and Crewe received overhead wires as part of the West Coast Route Modernisation, to provide a diversionary route for electric trains while other lines were rebuilt.

It has taken the railway network most of a generation to find its voice again. Indeed, as recently as 2007, John Armitt, then chief executive of Network Rail, said that electrification was just another interface to go wrong: too often the overhead wires come down and cause disruption; better to not put them up at all and have a quieter life. In less than five years, though, the view has turned full circle and the government is currently demanding electrification faster than Network Rail can deliver it!

When the Thameslink Programme was approved in 2007, the initial intention seems to have been that the electric trains would simply be moved to a different line with older trains, permitting some of the oldest electric trains to be retired. This "cascade" of trains has long been standard practice, as it allows more than one line to benefit from better trains while only building one new fleet.

But in July 2009, instead of simply shuffling the trains about existing electrified lines, the then-Transport Minister Andrew Adonis approved a plan to electrify new lines in the north-west and the Thames Valley. Once the new trains had been built, the old electric trains from Thameslink would move to the newly-electrified lines; as a result, the lines could be electrified without the cost of building new electric trains. This significant saving is probably the only way electrifying some of the lines could be justified: the cost of new electric trains is not to be underestimated.

The plans were put on hold when the coalition government took over in 2010, but within a year it was back on track. Indeed, the present government has taken a huge liking to electrification, and rather than a rolling programme we seem to be heading for a "big bang", where a huge number of lines will be electrified by 2020:

• a triangle of routes in North-West England, namely the Liverpool-Manchester, Liverpool-Preston and Manchester-Preston lines, as well as the branch from Preston to Blackpool North, will be electrified by 2016;
• the Trans-Pennine route from Manchester to Leeds, York and Selby will be electrified by 2018;
• the Edinburgh-Glasgow Improvement Programme (EGIP) will see the main route from Edinburgh to Glasgow (via Falkirk) electrified by 2016, with other suburban routes in the central belt following by 2019;
• the Great Western Main Line (GWML) from London to Oxford, Newbury, Bristol and Swansea will be electrified in stages from 2016 to 2018;
• following on from that, the Valley Lines in south Wales will be electrified by 2020;
• the Midland Main Line (MML), already electrified between London and Bedford, would have its wires extended from Bedford to Corby, Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield in stages from 2017 to 2020;
• in a project dubbed the "Electric Spine", the lines from Southampton to Nuneaton and Bedford would also be electrified to create an electric freight route for containers from Southampton to the north of England and Scotland.

Let's see that on a map:

British railway network, showing planned electrification by 2020

In theory all of this should be electrified by 2020. However, some parts of the plan are further advanced than others, and you'll note I didn't put a date on the completion of the Electric Spine: it seems as if the Department for Transport saw an idea that Network Rail put forward for possible future electrification and said "ooh, yes, we like that", and approved it before Network Rail had really had a chance to scope out to the project. Nonetheless, the rest of the electrification schemes are proceeding apace, with part of the Liverpool-Manchester line already open to electric trains.

While electrification provides significant benefits - reduced running costs, faster journeys - it doesn't always provide a "step change" without other investment, and the most successful electrification schemes are usually accompanied by changes to track layouts and signalling to unclog bottlenecks in the route.

For example, when the southern part of the WCML between London and Manchester was electrified in the 1960s, a flyover was built at Rugby to allow trains from Birmingham to head to London without interrupting the flow of northbound trains. That one bridge did nearly as much for improving capacity as electrification alone did; together with major rebuilding projects at London Euston and Birmingham New Street stations, they yielded "total route modernisation", and provided for a doubling of traffic on the WCML between 1962 and 1975.

Each of the major electrification schemes planned comes along with various capacity improvements. In the next three posts, I will look in turn at the three big drivers of change on England's railways outside London:

• the "Intercity Express Programme" (IEP) will introduce brand-new Hitachi Super Express trains to the GWML which, combined with electrification, the construction of Crossrail, and the complete rebuilding of Reading station, will totally transform the Great Western Main Line;
• the Northern Hub, encompassing the electrification in the north-west of England and across the Pennines, will unlock capacity through the congested approaches to Manchester Piccadilly and transform rail travel across the north of England;
• the Electric Spine, which technically includes the MML electrification, will (hopefully) transform the future of freight movements by rail across the country.

In the meantime, if you'd like to learn more of the history of electrification in Britain, I'd recommend two booklets on the electrification of the WCML: the first was published in 1966, and the second was published in 1974. Both are preserved on the Railways Archive, a fascinating treasure trove of historical documents from 1830 right through to the present day.

Previous post: What is... Automatic Train Operation?
Next post: What is... the Intercity Express Programme?

What is... Automatic Train Operation? (And Why Do We Still Need Train Drivers?)

I'm often asked... sometimes asked... well, somebody asked me once: what do train drivers do? How hard can it be? Why can't it all be automated?

First thing: driving a train isn't like driving a car. The key difference is in braking. When driving a car, you brake on sight - you see something in the way, be that a pedestrian in the road or a car ahead slowing down, and you brake. When driving a train, unless you're going no more than about 20mph you haven't a hope of braking on sight, because trains brake much more slowly.

More starkly: a car doing 70mph can stop in 75m (plus thinking distance); a train doing 125mph takes about 2,050m to stop - nearly a mile and a half. So if a train driver sees an obstacle in front of him, he's going to hit it.

More than that, though, if the driver doesn't know where the signals are, where the speed restrictions start, or exactly where the stations are, he's not going to know where to brake. As a simple example, a fast train heading towards Coventry station from Birmingham will typically start braking before it gets to Canley station (which is 1½ miles out from Coventry). If it's been raining, there won't be as much grip, so the driver has to brake sooner. There's no sign telling the driver where to brake; the driver has to know.

The term given to this requirement is route knowledge: before a driver can drive a train unsupervised on any railway line, they must have sufficient route knowledge for that specific route. A typical, reasonably simple, route might require about 60 journeys back and forth before the driver can "sign the route", meaning he has been assessed as having sufficient route knowledge to drive a train unsupervised on that particular route.

Some drivers will only sign one or two routes; some drivers will sign hundreds. As an example, drivers based at Oxford sign the Great Western Main Line from London Paddington to Oxford, as well as the branch lines to Banbury and Great Malvern; in total, about 150 route miles. That may sound like a lot, but that means an Oxford driver can't drive a train to Swindon, Bristol or Newbury, all common destinations for a train from Paddington.

As a result, timetabling trains isn't just a matter of planning where the trains themselves go; it also involves ensuring that it's driven by a driver who signs the route. This isn't too hard to plan in advance, but it makes life complicated when things go wrong: if the controllers at Paddington want to send a train to Bristol and the only people around are Oxford drivers, they're stuffed.

So surely it would make life a lot easier if all the trains drove themselves automatically? In theory, yes, and we are at the stage where the technology is there that would allow almost all passenger trains to be driven automatically; this is generally called Automatic Train Operation (ATO). However, ATO does have its drawbacks: it's neither easy nor cheap to install the technology, and it involves modifications to both the tracks and the trains.

The modifications to the trains are particularly tricky: while it's easy enough to build trains with ATO equipment, retrofitting older trains with ATO equipment - even if they're just a few years old - can be a nightmare. It's not nearly as simple as, say, adding an after-market CD player to your car. A reasonable analogy would be converting a manual gearbox car to an automatic gearbox: it's technically possible, but for the amount of trouble it would be to convert the old one, it's often easier to just buy a brand new one.

Moreover, since one of the advantages of automating the driving of trains is more efficient braking, ATO requires every train on a route to be converted (or replaced) before there's any tangible benefit over human drivers. The capacity of a line is determined by how closely you can run trains together, and that's determined by how well a train can brake. When there's more than one type of train on a line, the capacity is generally limited by the worst-performing train on a given line.

For example, the line between Coventry and Birmingham has 7 passenger trains an hour in each direction, plus two extra that just run between Birmingham International and Birmingham New Street. Trains can (and do) run as little as 4 minutes apart, so in theory the line could take several more trains. The catch is that they'd all have to plod along as slow as the train stopping at all nine intermediate stations: currently the fast trains take just 20 minutes, while the stopping trains can take 35 minutes.

Now, ATO might manage to improve that a little, by safely allowing trains to be closer together; but it would require all the trains that run on the line to be converted. However, the trains that run between Coventry and Birmingham aren't self-contained: trains can start their day in Birmingham and end up as far away as London, Liverpool, Exeter or Edinburgh. I estimate there are 250 passenger trains which could, in the course of a week, run between Coventry and Birmingham. (Never mind freight trains, which are even more complicated.)

However, on self-contained networks with a dedicated fleet of trains, ATO can work wonders. Three London Underground lines have ATO: the Victoria line has had ATO from when it opened in 1968, and was in fact the first railway line in the world worked entirely by ATO. The Central line was converted to ATO in 2001, shortly after the introduction of a new fleet of trains. The Jubilee line was converted to ATO in 2011; in this case the existing trains were modified to work with ATO.

On the London Underground, the advantages of ATO can be seen very clearly. ATO's principal advantage is that it can stop the train at a station much more precisely: human drivers tend to be a bit cautious, since delaying people a few seconds is much better than crashing into something. Freed from human inhibition, the ATO system knows exactly where to brake, saving vital seconds.

Once the Jubilee line had been converted to ATO, the previous maximum frequency of 24tph (a train every 2½ minutes) was increased to 30tph (a train every 2 minutes). Now, 30 seconds may not sound like much, but that 30 seconds means a 25% increase in capacity (and, incidentally, a significant reduction in journey times as well).

The Central and Victoria lines operate at 33tph in the rush hours - about 110 seconds between trains - and are currently the most frequent lines in London; but such is the need for greater capacity that most other LU lines are being gradually converted to ATO: next will be the Northern line, which should be converted by the end of 2014.

That said, all the LU lines running under ATO still have drivers: although they can drive the train in an emergency, or when the ATO fails, their principal job is to open and close the doors. On the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), which has been completely driven by ATO since it opened in 1987, the doors are opened and closed by "train captains": they don't sit at the front of the train, but they are also available to drive the train in an emergency.

Truly unattended train operation, while technically feasible, often leaves passengers somewhat uneasy; the efficiency of ATO cannot be denied, but knowing that there's someone on board should everything go wrong affords a peace of mind - both for the operator and the passenger - that cannot easily be dismissed. Nonetheless, it does exist elsewhere in the world; Paris Metro Line 14 is completely driverless (and, incidentally, runs at 40tph - a train every 90 seconds!).

If you want to read more about the debate as to whether the London Underground should go "driverless", I highly recommend this post on London Reconnections.

What of Crossrail and Thameslink? In both cases the aim is for 24tph through the core. While many London Underground lines run at 24tph or more without ATO, it was decided to install ATO on Crossrail and Thameslink, with a brand-new fleet of trains brought in to operate the enhanced service from 2018. Due to the complexities of the National Rail network, ATO will only be used on the central core sections: on Crossrail, between Stratford, Abbey Wood and Paddington; on Thameslink, between London Bridge and St Pancras.

In a sense these are the only parts of the line which justify ATO, since further out the frequency of services is less; nonetheless, having part of the journey run by manual driving and part by ATO is an extra layer of complication, and it remains to be seen how it will work in practice. Crossrail, with only two branches to east and west, should work well. Thameslink, though, will have many more branches and has a much shorter core section; one late train could have significant ripple effects.

Thameslink will be served by a fleet of 115 trains (designated Class 700), which will be built by Siemens: of these, 55 are 12-car trains and 60 are 8-car trains. While the core will be capable of taking 12-car trains, there will be too many stations (particularly those on the Wimbledon loop) which cannot be lengthened beyond 8 cars. It will be interesting to see how the ATO system copes with different train lengths; all ATO operation in the UK so far is confined to a single type of train.

For Crossrail, 65 9-car trains (designated Class 345) have been ordered from Bombardier, with the option of a further 18 trains for future extensions. Although built by different firms, the two fleets will look quite similar internally: both will have fewer seats and lots of standing capacity, with full-width gangways between carriages to maximise capacity.

Of course, Thameslink is already served by a large fleet of about 110 4-car trains, most of which (the class 319s) date to the late 1980s and have plenty of serviceable use left in them. Once replaced by the new class 700 trains, these will be surplus to requirements for Thameslink and will be available for use elsewhere. Similarly, once Crossrail opens, it will displace a number of trains from existing services on the GWML and GEML.

The ideal solution is for these trains to move to another line to replace some of the oldest trains on the rest of the network, which can then be retired: this kind of "rolling stock cascade" means that more than one line benefits when new trains are introduced. There's just one slight problem: the class 319s are electric trains.

With the arrival of the new trains for Thameslink and Crossrail, the supply of electric trains will exceed the demand from electrified lines for them to run on. In the next post, I'll look at how electric railway lines work, and the benefits and disadvantages of electric operation; I'll also explain the programme of lines planned for "electrification" to rectify the imbalance.

One day, no doubt, automation will take over from human drivers in almost all aspects of driving trains. For most of the railway network that won't come soon; Crossrail and Thameslink are but the first tentative steps into automating the entire railway network. In the meantime, the cascade of rolling stock resulting from the new fleets for Thameslink and Crossrail will have more immediate impacts across the country: in the next post I'll begin to explain exactly where the ripples will be felt.

Previous post: What is... The Thameslink Programme?
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What is... the Thameslink Programme?

The Thameslink Programme is a £5.5 billion project to triple the capacity of the Thameslink line, which runs north-south through central London via St Pancras, Farringdon, Blackfriars and London Bridge. If you have no earthly idea what Thameslink is, I suggest you start by reading my previous post, which explains the history and background of the line. In this post, I'll try and explain how the £5.5 billion will be spent.

Until 2009, the Thameslink core between Farringdon and Blackfriars could only cope with a maximum of 8 trains per hour (tph) in each direction. Furthermore, the platforms at King's Cross Thameslink, Farringdon and Blackfriars were only long enough to take 8-car trains, even though many of the stations further out could cope with 12-car trains. As such, the Thameslink trains are horrendously overcrowded.

Indeed, Thameslink was horrendously overcrowded within just a few short years of the line opening in 1988: passenger numbers quadrupled within the first year. So in November 1991, a major upgrade, then entitled "Thameslink 2000", was announced. Through numerous delays, first due to privatisation and then to complex planning inquiries, the programme was only approved in 2006 and funding was forthcoming the following year. It was quietly renamed "the Thameslink Programme" to hide the fact that it was running about 18 years late.

The plan had a simple aim: convert Thameslink into a proper RER-style cross-London line with 24 trains every hour, most of them 12 carriages long, running in each direction in the rush hour. This necessitated a variety of modifications:

• more destinations, both north and south, were needed to send trains to;
• longer platforms were required in the Thameslink core;
• the branch to Moorgate had to close;
• most importantly, London Bridge had to be rebuilt to give it the necessary capacity.

The need for additional destinations was simple: while the core could be upgraded to cope with 24tph, there wasn't any need for 24tph to Bedford or Brighton. To the north, Thameslink connected only to the Midland Main Line (MML) out of St Pancras, but that took it quite close to the East Coast Main Line (ECML) out of King's Cross. Peak-time services on the MML already amounted to 14tph, so a connection to the ECML would provide enough capacity to the north to run 24tph through the core.

As luck would have it, such a connection used to exist: the lines now used by Thameslink - the "City Widened Lines" - had not one but two historical connections to the ECML (as seen in this diagram), one of which had only closed in 1977. Thought was given to simply reinstating one of these connections, but ultimately it was decided against just putting back the old connection, for one simple reason: it would have to be a flat junction, and that would have constrained capacity too much to ensure that 24tph could be run reliably.

A flat junction on the railway is much like a right-turning lane on a dual carriageway: trains wanting to turn right must wait for a gap in trains coming the other direction to make the turn. Grade-separated junctions, usually called "flying junctions" on the railway, is akin to a proper motorway junction: the conflicting movements are replaced with a bridge or a tunnel.

The principal downside to having a flying junction is space: even in the diagram above it can be seen that a flying junction takes up more land, and land in central London is nothing if not scarce and expensive. And while the old connections to the ECML could have been used, there wasn't the space around them to make them into flying junctions.

Instead, a plan for something much grander came about: St Pancras would be comprehensively rebuilt for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link so that Eurostar trains could use the station. In the process, two new underground platforms would be provided for Thameslink services under St Pancras, replacing the inconveniently-sited and impossible-to-enlarge King's Cross Thameslink station. Just north of the new station, a flying junction with a connection to the ECML would be built - not an easy task given the incredible honeycomb of tunnels in the area, with six London Underground lines serving King's Cross-St Pancras.

In spite of the fact that the Thameslink programme still hadn't been finally approved, the construction at St Pancras was given the go-ahead as part of the Eurostar upgrade, with Thameslink services split in two for nine months while the new station was constructed. Thameslink duly moved into its new home at St Pancras in December 2007, with King's Cross Thameslink closing at the same time. The tunnels for the flying junction were bored, but left without track for the time being: they won't be needed until 2018.

At Farringdon, the platforms were only long enough to take 8 carriages: extending them to the north was impossible, due to the severe gradient. Extending them to the south, however, would entail removing the flat junction to Moorgate. From the point of view of improving Thameslink services this was actually a benefit: without the trains to Moorgate, there would be more room for trains to Blackfriars and beyond. Passengers for Moorgate would still be able to change at Farringdon and get the Metropolitan line to their destination.

At Blackfriars, there were five platforms, all only long enough for 8 carriages; but three were bay platforms, only accessible to trains terminating from the south. Unfortunately the bay platforms were to the east of the through platforms, meaning any terminating trains had to cross the path of Thameslink services (another flat junction). Ideally the bay platforms would be to the west of the through platforms; to achieve that, the plan involved extending Blackfriars considerably to the south, to permit the through lines to be slued across.

In fact, extending Blackfriars to the south came up across a large obstacle: the River Thames. The platforms already encroached a little onto the bridge carrying the railway over the Thames; the Thameslink Programme called for them to be extended all the way across the river. Indeed, the plans included a new entrance to Blackfriars station on the South Bank, with the station having four platforms - two bays on the west side, and two through platforms on the east side.

Phase 1 of the Thameslink Programme, begun in 2009 and finished in time for the Olympics in 2012, involved shutting the Moorgate branch and the bay platforms at Blackfriars and diverting those services through the core (increasing peak services to 15tph) to facilitate the construction works at Farringdon and Blackfriars. In addition, the line was completely resignalled to permit trains to run much closer together. The works were not without disruption, requiring nearly three years of weekend closures through the Thameslink core.

But the disruption there pales in comparison to that caused by Phase 2: begun in 2013 and due for completion in 2018, Phase 2 is focussed almost entirely on London Bridge. Currently, Thameslink trains currently have to share tracks with trains to and from Charing Cross, and then cross over to the line towards East Croydon in a double flat junction. Prior to the works, the layout looked like this:

London Bridge track layout in 2009

By 2018, Thameslink will have its own dedicated platforms and tracks through London Bridge, and the layout will look like this:

London Bridge track layout in 2018 (provisional)

(To see clearly exactly what's changing, try opening both and flicking back and forth between the two.)

As can be seen, Thameslink had pretty much no track of its own through London Bridge. In a hugely complex plan, two extra tracks will be constructed between Metropolitan Junction and London Bridge for Charing Cross trains, with Thameslink taking over the existing two tracks. The lines run over the top of Borough Market, and finding space for the extra viaducts has been an absolute nightmare: the formation for the new tracks was put in place in 2011, involving one of the most complicated bridge slides ever done (see these pictures).

A couple of miles out at South Bermondsey, a flyover will be constructed to permit Thameslink trains to jump over the Charing Cross trains without interrupting them. This involves completely reconfiguring which track is which, and will not be an easy task.

Crucially, though, there aren't enough through platforms at London Bridge for those lines on their own to actually be any use: there were 6 through platforms and 9 bays for services terminating from the south. That will be turned into 9 through platforms and just 6 bays, through a massive gradual reconstruction; only three platforms will be closed at any one time, and a full peak service will continue to run throughout (though some trains will not call at London Bridge during the works).

Over the course of 2013 and 2014, the nine old bay platforms will be shut and the six newly-repositioned bay platforms opened in their place. From January 2015 to August 2016, no trains to and from Charing Cross will call at London Bridge, to permit the new through platforms 6-9 to be constructed. From then until early 2018, no trains to and from Cannon Street will call at London Bridge, permitting the rest of the through platforms to be reconstructed. Notably, only five of the six existing through platforms will remain: platform 1 will be removed, permitting all the platforms to be straightened somewhat (they are currently quite curved).

Perhaps the most annoying thing during the work will be the diversion of Thameslink services. As discussed previously, there isn't enough capacity for Thameslink services to serve London Bridge in the peak, and so instead they run via Elephant and Castle. But for the three years from 2015-2018 when the through platforms are being reconstructed, no Thameslink services will run via London Bridge at all, even in the off-peak.

But once the rebuilding is complete, Thameslink trains will be able to run through London Bridge all day, with up to 18tph serving London Bridge (with the rest going via Elephant and Castle). Beyond London Bridge most trains will continue to head south towards East Croydon and on to various destinations off the Brighton Main Line, but the capability will be there for trains to head towards Kent as well (with a flying junction at Bermondsey). Once London Bridge is completed, the connection to the ECML will finally be opened for use and Thameslink trains will serve a wide variety of destinations.

You might notice I'm being slightly coy about exactly where it's going: that's because it hasn't really been decided yet. While the infrastructure upgrades for the core are clearly defined, the end network is not (unlike Crossrail). Describing the probable destinations, and the politics involved therein, would be another article in itself; I'll leave it to the good people at London Reconnections, who have a fascinating article on the possible destinations of Thameslink post-2018, which I highly recommend.

In the meantime, though, we are right in the middle of a hugely exciting but also horrendously disruptive upgrade of London Bridge, that will unlock the potential of Thameslink in a way that this country has never seen before. The London railway network post-2019, once both Thameslink and Crossrail are operational, will be quite a different place, and I look forward to it all coming to fruition. To keep track of what's going on, you can check the Thameslink programme website.

Both Crossrail and Thameslink will achieve their 24tph through brand-new fleets of trains running with Automatic Train Operation (ATO). What is ATO, I hear you cry? Head on over to the next post...

Previous post: What is... Thameslink?
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