After last month’s ‘mini-PhD’ in Network Rail’s finances courtesy the Office of Rail Regulation’s Periodic Review 2008, the March Informed Sources has everything, traction policy, disability politics squabbles over money, franchise bid analysis and trains old and new.
We kick off with one of those collective moments of enlightenment which the Railway Division of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers seems to generate. This time, an evening meeting in January on life extending IC125 turned into a fundamental appraisal of the role of its replacement, the shorthand for which is HST2.
Informed Sources has been writing about HST2 for several years now, going along with the general view that it would be a 21st century diesel train. But since that meeting, the realisation has begun to dawn that, with oil prices at record levels, basing your future traction policy on a diesel train with a 30-35 year life is not a smart move.
Of course, it’s one thing for engineers to question the future for diesel traction, but when a senior DfT Rail civil servant joins in from the same hymn sheet, saying that it’s hard to see a diesel train around in 2035, you start to feel the tectonic plates shifting beneath your feet.
Which is where the focus of the presentations at the meeting becomes important. The message was that IC125 still has a lot of life extension potential and that the 2015 withdrawal date quoted by DfT rail is simply linked to the end of the East Coast and Greater Western franchises.
Being optimistic, life extension to 2020, buys time for a strategy based on an electric HST2 with 26 m long coaches to emerge. While electrification was disparaged during the reign of the Strategic Rail Authority, a rolling programme could insulate the railway against long term fossil fuel shocks and improve performance and reliability.
And to support this thesis I have been into the archive and come up with something from 25 years ago which may be relevant again.
After this heavy policy stuff comes a light hearted romp through a potential clash of disability legislation as the home grown DDA and RVAR come up against the Eurocrat’s PRM TSI. In plain English, that’s the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 and its impact on the Rail Vehicle Accessibility Regulations versus the European Interoperability Directive’s Persons of Reduce Mobility Technical Specification for Interoperability.
This one is going to run and run, since much could hinge on whether the European Legislation supersedes the RVAR. In particular it could avoid the 2020 end date for all vehicles to be RVAR compliant. Meanwhile I have tried to explain some of the twists and turns – and money – involved. Expect some outraged letters in the April Modern Railways ‘Forum’ pages.
Meanwhile DfT Rail continues its struggle to get the Rolling Stock Companies to cut their collective lease rentals by £100 million a year. The target is the leases on the MOLA fleet – the traction and rolling stock bought from BR in 1996. DfT Rail is arguing that these rentals include allowances for risks that have never emerged.
In reply the ROSCOs argue that the risks are only just starting to bite, for example the Class 158 diesel multiple units coming off lease this year and Mk3 coaches having to be exported to Bosnia because they are surplus to requirement in the UK. According to Informed Sources, Porterbrook has set up a deal to provide 18 rakes of Mk 3 stock plus traction to Bosnia via a local finance house. The fleet will be split between the Federation and Serbska Railways.
If the ROSCOs don’t play ball, there is not much Government can do. It could bring in legislation to have the ROSCOs regulated or it could refer them to the Competition Commission. Neither of which is going to either bring them to heel or provide swift reductions in rentals.
Financial analysis can’t be avoided altogether and this month we have the Thameslink/Great Northern (TL/GN)franchise. DfT Rail finally released the figures on January 23. When you graph it you get another case of assumed straight line growth and it looks to me as though franchise bidding has come down to putting a ruler on the graph and deciding how steeply you dare draw the line.
A detail I explore in this latest analysis is the change in subsidy or premium between the last years of the existing franchise and the new deal. As an Informed Source pointed out you have to take the parallel change in track access charges into account. The impact on the Integrated Kent Franchise is considerable.
Finally there is news of potential new train orders. The cheap as chips Chinese Pacer replacement DMU story, which broke in Informed Sources 18 months or so ago, rolls on, with the CSR Ziyang Locomotive Works hoping for an order later this year. Yorkshire Forward is sponsoring the proposal and would also provide financial support for an eventual train operator.
With the Welsh Assembly also proposing to fund Pacer replacements, I thought it worth exploding the myth that annual rental on a Pacer is more than its original capital cost. What this analysis shows is that the capital rental alone on a new £750,000 DMU is around the same as the total rental of a Pacer, including engineering costs.
Pacers are the railway equivalent of the Douglas DC3. From the 1950s onward aviation people have been talking about a DC3 replacement, but any more modern equivalent is going to be much more expensive than a fully depreciated 1940s piston engined aircraft and need much more high tech maintenance support.
For a Pacer replacement there’s all the RVAR compliance, electronics everywhere, crashworthiness etc. You simply can’t make simple kit like Pacers or DC3’s or DOS-based computers with 20 Meg hard drives any more.
Also reported in the round-up is DfT Rail’s procurement of 17 four car Desiro electric multiple units for SWT. Neither DfT nor Siemens would confirm the order, but I was sufficiently confident in Informed Sources to publish.
My visit to Tube Lines’ Highgate test track to see the work on the Seltrac signalling system for the Jubilee and Northern Lines has finally found its way through my word processor and the article in the March issue of Modern Railways. In Blood & Custard you may also find a photo of the ultimate boiling frog.
Writing has tended to dominate recent weeks but I managed to attend the press conference announcing the change of name from the Rail Passengers’ Council to Passenger Focus. It seems as though they are pretending that it is an entirely new organisation and have started looking at Saver Fares from scratch.
More interesting was the visit to see EWS at Doncaster. Starting the day with a blast on the ECML. EWS Chief Executive Keith Heller has some ambitious plans to increase capacity. Look for a controversial lead story in the April Column.
One reason for the recent heavy writing sessions can now be seen on the web in the form of www.4thfriday.co.uk which was mentioned here last month. The Fourth Friday Club, sponsored by Modern Railways and the Railway Forum has been a big success – even inspiring a pale imitation for early risers.
If you haven’t been to a meeting, the new website will bring you up to speed on what the Club is all about and the remaining meetings in the 2005-06 Session. I know that some e-Preview subscribers are club members, but for those who are not, a warm welcome is assured.
There is one downside, though. To start each meeting I give a short warm-up talk. Then I go and sit at the first table I see with an empty seat. So be warned, if you have an empty seat at your table you are playing Roger Roulette.
Roger
PS You will have noticed a reference to the ROSCOs’ MOLA fleets above. When I was writing that part of Informed Sources, could I remember what the ‘O’ stood for? So I had to ask and then passed that acronym on to the Alycidon Rail webmaster for inclusion in TRAC.
He tactfully pointed out that it was there already. And readers continue to send in new entries, making TRAC the most up-to-date and topical railway abbreviation and acronym converter on the internet. I must remember to use it myself!