INFORMED SOURCES e-Preview December 2010-
Back in the early 1980s the Advanced Passenger Train was always going to enter service in a year’s time. And ever since the Comprehensive Spending Review (
Comprehensive Spending Review maintains spending – for now
McNulty – Armageddon in the wings.
Invensys modular signalling ready to go
Eurostar train order – Alstom’s complaint dismissed
Bombardier recovering from multiple unit hiccups
With exquisite time timing the
Crossrail is going ahead ‘to the original scope’. High Speed 2 will also go ahead ‘subject to consultation’. Spending on the project during the Review period will be ‘over £750 million’.
Having concluded that unpicking Network Rail’s settlement for CP4 would be too difficult, most infrastructure projects funded in the 2007 High Level Output Specification (HLOS) will continue.
There is funding for the North West triangle electrification. But with electrification comes the waiting for the other shoe to drop ‘next Thursday’ – or Tuesday.
This is what DfT Rail said about the ‘big bang’ announcement. ‘The Government is currently considering revised proposals from Agility Trains for the Intercity Express Programme. An announcement will be made in due course. Because aspects of Thameslink and HLOS rolling stock programmes, as well as projects to electrify the Great Western Mainline, and the rail routes around Manchester and Liverpool, are interdependent with the IEP decision, a full announcement on all these programmes will be made at the same time’.
And so we wait. Informed Sources reckon that Network Rail has found a solution to London Bridge within DfT Rail’s Thameslink budget and that Key Output 2, with its 24 trains/hour, will get the go ahead. However, with Bombardier and Siemens waiting on revised requirements for the new train fleet, we will be lucky to have an order by this time next year.
Similarly, with the GWML electrification not in the
McNulty – interim thoughts..
Actually the man in the flat above must be Jake the Peg, because there is a second shoe waiting to fall. In September Sir Roy McNulty’s Rail value for money study submitted its first Interim Report to Government. Publication of this has also been expected ‘next Thursday’ for some time.
And, of course, while the
According to Sir Roy ‘It is clear that something has to change’. Rising ridership plus increasing unit costs has produced the current level of public subsidy which Sir Roy describes as ‘unsustainable’. That won’t come as a surprise to e-Preview subscribers.
An early conclusion of the review is that the current ‘micro-management’ of the industry by DfT Rail is the result of a void created by industry stepping-back from setting strategy. Recreating a value for money railway will mean the industry taking on greater responsibilities and working ‘more maturely’ so that government can hand back strategic issues.
I still find that even major players are sitting on their hands over vital issues because they are afraid of getting on the wrong side of DfT Rail. But when industry had spoken truth to power with one voice DfT Rail has crumbled – as with electrification
When it comes to restructuring industry to reduce costs, the McNulty Review’s current ‘direction of travel’ assumed devolution or decentralisation within Network Rail leading to alignments or partnerships with the Train operators. Four models are being considered for re-structuring. These are: modifying incentives; a radical reform of franchising based on partnerships; structural change based on joint ventures; and a return to vertical integration. Sir Roy emphasises that ‘one size does not fit all’. You read it here first!
For the McNulty team ‘Plan A’ is a substantial reduction in costs. Plan B is a smaller network with less investment. Sir Roy has dismissed ‘rumours that we are working on a list of branch line closures’ as ‘absolutely untrue’. But he went on to warn ‘although we are not working on Plan B, someone, somewhere will be’.
Modular Signalling Invensys style
Back in September I went to Chippenham for Part 2 of my introduction to Modular Signalling. And very impressive it was too, with a new assembly facility, known as the ‘hangar’, created inside an existing building on the Invensys site. With clinical white walls and ceilings it was more akin to a satellite assembly facility than a traditional signalling equipment production line. And, of course, factory assembly and testing is what ModSig is all about.
Network Rail’s ModSig challenge, to cut costs per Signalling Equivalent Unit (SEU) by an initial 25% sent Invensys back to first principles, A key realisation was that with ModSig the hardware is generally the enabler: the real cost reductions come from major changes in processes.
So we have ‘template’ applications data to configure the interlocking software, rather than developing bespoke data for individual layouts as is currently the case.
Similarly, all the hardware and software for a signalling ‘island’ will be assembled in the hangar, the linking cables having plug couplers. After Verification and Validation the components are uncoupled, taken to site and reassembled. With no wiring involved thanks to the plug couplers, all that will be needed will be correspondence testing.
Technology
For those interested in signalling technology there is an interesting difference between the Invensys Crewe-Shrewsbury ModSig pilot scheme and Signalling Solutions’ approach to Norwich-Ely. Where
Invensys reckon that making each island completely self contained, including the interlocking, should cut process costs and simplify on- site functional testing.
Installation
Invensys is working on the basis of three visits to resignal an island. The first visit will provide the site survey and construction mark-up. Then comes the installation of the equipment. On the final visit the system is powered up and commissioned.
Each site visit will be organised like a motor racing pit stop with each member of the team having clearly defined roles and tools for the job. The aim is to fit all visits within a Rules of the Route possession.
Meanwhile it is becoming clear that ModSig is about much more than resignalling rural routes. And the main contractors and their equipment suppliers report that the philosophy is already spilling over onto main line schemes.
Alstom fighting on
There’s much simple fun to have in these dour times from watching the French imploding over decision to buy ten high speed trains from Siemens, with an option for a further 13. And at the end of a four day hearing in the High Court in London. On 29 October, Mr Justice Vos rejected Alstom Transportations claim for an injunction blocking the order.
But that was not the end of the matter. While Alstom came badly out of the hearing, not least with the release of an internal memo reading ‘I find it hard to understand why an offer which no-one believed in a few weeks ago is now becoming a priority’, Mr Justice Vos was also critical of Eurostar’s procurement process.
When the news of the order broke, I was not alone in wondering why Eurostar had maintained total secrecy. Instead of a formal invitation to tender through an OJEU Notice, Instead, in January 2009, Eurostar issued a pre-qualification questionnaire to six potential bidders through Link-up. Three bidders qualified and Eurostar then issued an Invitation to Negotiate) to Alstom and Siemens.
While Mr Justice Vos accepted that this procedure was in line with European Regulations dating from 1996, he was unhappy with the scoring system used for evaluation the bids. In particular an addition banding system for evaluating the financial bids that gave almost a 10% difference in overall marks to lowest bidder, irrespective of the difference.
Mr Justice Vos would have expected a system which awarded marks equally if the bids were equal and then in proportion to the percentage difference between them. In his judgement he said that Eurostar’s system ‘was not transparent’, and it is at least ‘arguable that it breached the relevant regulations’.
Whether knowledge of the banding could have made a difference to Alstom’s preparation of its bid is debatable. But it might have done and Mr Justice Vos thinks that ‘there is a serious case to be tried’.
The statement is also critical of Eurostar’s failure to disclose the criteria, such as interest rates, used for the financial evaluation. Had this information been available, particularly the interest rates being used by Eurostar, it could have affected the preparation of the bid. Whether the effect would have been important can only be determined at trial.
So on 10 November Alstom went back before Mr Justice Vos did what it should have done in the first place - question the fairness of the tender. Alstom claims that during this preliminary hearing the court set the date of the trial for October 2011 and ordered Eurostar to disclose the documents relating to the evaluation of the offers, ‘which it failed to hand over during the previous injunction proceedings’.
Eurostar challenges this claim saying that ‘the hearing simply established that if there were to be a trial the earliest date it could take place would be October 2011’. I’m still trying to bottom these competing claims.
What Alstom hopes to gain from this I don’t know. But I have some sympathy with the remark by Patrick Kron, Alstom’s Chief Executive ‘We have no problem with Siemens. We have a problem with the way in which Eurostar managed this contract’. Mind you, that could be sour grapes because I only found out about the contract when the kerfuffle started!
Bombardier - troublesome multiple units
Remember that in the July column I reported that a new exhaust system was causing the latest version of the Bombardier Turbostar to run out of puff? Well, the whole business was an expensive false alarm, as I discovered on a visit to Litchurch Lane in October.
Because the Class 172 is the first Turbostar to use the inside frame FlexxEco bogie it required a bifurcated exhaust pipe. Design calculation by the exhaust system supplier had predicted the back pressure at 100 millibars (mb). But test measurements taken on the production system put the figure at 160-170 mb which would adversely affect emissions. So production was halted while an alternative solution was developed.
Prudently Bombardier also decided to take the same measurements using a complete engine and exhaust system on a test bed. And the testing revealed irregularities in the pressure readings. Moving the location of the measurement point resulted in the constant readings you would have expected.
These gave a back pressure just under the predicted 100mb. Moving the pressure sensor to the new position on a production Class 172 produced the same result.
Standing down the Class 172 supply chain put back deliveries of the units for London Midland by six months. By mid October six weeks of the delay had been delivered.
Class 378
I also found out the cause of the poor reliability of the London Overground Class 378 EMUs. These have a complex Driver Only Operation Closed Circuit TV and while the supplier has the equipment operating on bus fleets, this is the first rail application. And, of coursed, being safety critical equipment, if the DOO CCTV stops working the train can’t run.
Compounding the Class 378 problem was that re-booting the DOO CCTV system after a failure was initially taking 20-30min. Bombardier’s immediate solution was to flood the fleet with riding technicians who could carry out a health check of the CCTV system during layovers at terminal stations and, if necessary re-boot while the train was out of service.
By the time of my visit to Derby, the frequency of failures had been cut by 85% and the train riding team was down to nine, Was this another example of train builders chasing the cheapest system and coming unstuck? Bombardier tells me that it’s a quality product and they were trying to widen the supply base rather than cut costs.
Roger’s Blog
Since last month’s blog, I’ve had a session with the McNulty Review team (see above) and whizzed down the road to Borehamwood for an update from Signalling Solutions Ltd (
This coming week should be fun. Tuesday is the being touted as the day of the ‘big bang’ announcement, when, against all odds, IEP is expected to get the go-ahead, or a go-ahead. And on the same day the Rail Safety & Standards Board is holding a ‘drop in’ event for face-to-face discussions as part of its consultation on the next Rail Technical Strategy.
Given that when the first Rail Technical Strategy was launched in 2007, Nigel Harris and I got involved in a lively verbal punch up with its progenitors, I am looking forward to this opportunity to get my retaliation in first. Could be a case of torrid Tuesday.
Then on Friday it is the Golden Spanners awards for train reliability. When I walked into our excellent local motor factors, Bennetts, I was hailed with ‘It must be trophy time again’ from the man behind the counter. Obviously my lips are sealed on the result, but I will say that English Electric traction equipment has done well.
On 2 December the Railway Division of the IMechE is holding a seminar on accessibility – once a regular feature in Informed Sources, but now no longer an issue – thanks to European Regulations and an outburst of common sense at DfT. So a good time for an update.
And the week after that comes the traditional start of Christmas, the Rail Freight Group lunch, where I need my water-cooled propelling pencil as the notebook gets a good thrashing.
Meanwhile, will the shoe finally fall on Tuesday (or Thursday) this week? Whenever it happens I will try to get out an e-Preview special on the salient points.
Roger