INFORMED SOURCES e-Preview June 2013
This month’s column includes a couple of challenges to received wisdom, one salutary (I hope) and one downright provocative.
Flatlining growth threatens CP5
New franchise procurement process unveiled
Do heavier trains matter?
Radical Train highlights innovation contradictions
When we were very young
East Coast – DfT goes retro
Modular Signalling reveals detection challenge
A regular claim, is that the privatised railway has broken the historic link between passenger ridership and the ups and downs of the economic cycle. Thus, while 2009 economic crisis slowed ridership growth, it soon returned with passenger miles in 2010-11 increasing by nearly 6%.
It seemed that rail travel was now so popular as to be recession proof. However the latest figures show that for last year, 2012-13, while revenue grew by 5% Passenger journeys went up year and year by only 1.8%.
If you take the percentage year-on-year growth for each Railway Reporting Period and calculate the Moving Annual Average (
With the
New franchising process.
Really, this item is just for the record. We all need to be up to speed of DfT’s reformed franchise procurement process, if only to understand what’s happening if it goes pear shaped. So this month’s column has a quick run through the new approach. If you are really keen, and have good eyesight, you can find the process map here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/franchise-competition-high-level-process-map on the DfT web site.
Briefly the process map covers the life cycle of a franchise in five stages. Stages 1-4 cover procurement and take 24 months from the initiation of a competition to the new franchisee taking over. Within this 24 months, 12 months are allowed for the bidding process. Stage 5 is management of the franchise after it has been let.
For each of the five stages the process map shows not only the activities of bidders and DfT, but also the ‘governance’, the formal checks on documentation and major decisions found wanting in the Intercity West Coast debacle. For example, in future, before the ‘OJEU/Pre-Qualification Questionnaire pack’ can be issued it will have to be approved by the Secretary of State and the Treasury.
It will be interesting to see how this plan survives its first encounter with reality.
Cold numbers on heavier trains
A recurring plaint, not just among the innovation brigade, is that that passenger trains are too heavy. Well, average vehicle weights have certainly increased: by around 25% if you compare a 1970s Class 313 with a modern Class 395.
But, this is as nothing compared with the car world. The latest Ford Focus, is 61% heavier than its 1962 equivalent, the Cortina.
Of course, like trains, modern cars offer more in the way of facilities which don’t come weight free. Yet, despite lugging progressively bigger and heavier cars around, Ford has improved fuel consumption by over a third compared with the Cortina.
But trains too have improved. Diesel engines are around 15% more fuel efficient, while the advent of power electronics and regenerative braking has saved anything up to 40%.
Composites
Now those who claim that trains are ‘too heavy’ assume that new lightweight materials are the answer – generally composites . Of course, rolling stock engineers have been using structural composites for years, for example the IC125 power car cab end.
And in the 1980s, the Germans, with much fanfare, trialled a glass reinforced polyester bogie. If any reader knows what came of it, please let me know (roger@alycidon.com)
Airbus uses carbon fibre panels rather than the Boeing approach of complete fuselage barrel sections. So you could build up a monocoque coach bodyshell rather than making it in one piece.
But would it save much weight? I’ve got a counter-intuitive comparison of the original Boeing 747 and the Airbus A380 which I hope readers can explain.
Finance
Since manufacturers are competing for orders, they are not going to make trains any heavier than they need to be since material has a cost per tonne. Take the seats proposed for Eversholt Rail’s Mk 4 coach upgrade which use an aluminium honeycomb sandwich. These are claimed to save half a tonne per vehicle.
What would that be worth to the IC225 fleet? I make it around £215,000 a year on variable track access charges and £65,000 a year on electric current. But would this offset the costs of new seats?
So weight has a value and trains need to be no heavier than necessary. But when people say ‘trains are too heavy’, the reply has to be ‘compared with what’.
And, anyway, trains are now a commodity and no manufacturer is going to build an ultra-lightweight train for the dysfunctional
Radical Train challenge
Which brings us to the Radical Train challenger, launched in March and worth £2milloion to the winners, who will have to match the funding. The competition is seeking proposals for ‘the new ideas which can make a huge difference’ and to show how ‘a significant step change in the performance of trains on
Oh dear! And before launching the competition a workshop was held and all the old favourites came up. Like improving primary safety systems to allow crashworthiness requirements to be ‘relaxed’, saving weight. ‘Why do we design trains to crash into each other’ the workshop asked? Great Heck perhaps?.
For me the best bit was the thought that the financial model for rolling stock may need to be changed to bring to fruition a radical vehicle design, together with ‘a “radical operating concept” and/or “radical infrastructure” in order to optimise the “radical train” proposition’.
So what these rolling stock engineers really want is a ‘radical new railway’ for their new vehicles. And I’m not making this up.
In the question and answer session at the launch I asked the organisers how they defined radical? Had IC125 been radical, for example? The only suggestion was the BR Research/Leyland National Railbus. This combined a bus body with a two axle 140mile/h capable freight underframe. It sounded radical at the time.
English Electric at the cutting edge
Obviously, if you are going to criticise attempts to encourage ‘innovation’, you need to give some positive examples. So I have gone back to the dawn of the power electronics era, when ‘radical’ and ‘step-change’ had real meaning.
I won’t say when or what or where. But it’s to do with the West Coast Main Line, there’s a photo of my first boss and some truly revolutionary hardware.
Minister snipes at EC performance
Transport Minister Simon Burns has been busy defending the Government’s decision to prioritise the return of the Intercity East Coast franchise to the private sector. There was an article on this subject under his name in the Daily Telegraph on the day he appeared before the Commons Transport Select Committee.
Mr Burns’ was critical of EC’s quality of service. While conceding that it ‘has done a reasonable job of running the service in difficult circumstances’, he pointed out that passenger growth has been ‘lower than on other routes’. He contrasted a ‘one third increase in ridership’ on EC ‘over the last 10 years’ with the doubling of demand on the West Coast. The (then) latest monthly figures for reliability and punctuality also ranked EC last .
Naturally, ‘these contrasting figures show how private sector operators can outperform those from the public sector, providing sustained benefits to both passengers and taxpayers’. You won’t need me to rubbish these comparisons, although I do in the column.
But where Mr Burns really shone was on finance. When the Select Committee pointed out that ORR’s latest data showed that EC was effectively subsidy free, Mr Burns was unabashed. ‘I do not accept the premise’ of the ORR’s study, he declared.
Indeed he told the Committee, and later repeated in Parliament, that the premium EC pays to the Treasury is less than that paid by Virgin West Coast. The RMT union jumped on this, accusing the Minister of ‘lying through his back teeth’ quoting official figures in support.
Mr Burns stood by his numbers claiming ‘During the last three years the Treasury has received £411million and £450million from the East Coast and West Coast rail franchises’. But this came with the caveat ‘this is separate from money the DfT paid to Virgin as part of their franchise agreement’.
What a weasel! In 2011-12 Virgin certainly paid a higher premium than EC, but under Cap & Collar got back £44 million in revenu4e support, reversing the situation.
However, my concern is less with Mr Burns than with the DfT Permanent Secretary and his team who, for all the claims to transparency, apparently condone this sort of official obfuscation
Mod-Sig grapples with crossings
It’s a couple of years since I visited Invensys and Signalling Solutions Ltd (
Central to Mod-Sig is the treatment of level crossings. Both schemes use a new variant on the Manually Controlled Barrier (MCB) crossing, with Obstacle Detection (OD) replacing a visual check by the signalman using CCTV.
All eight crossings on the Norwich-Ely scheme have Level Crossing Orders signed off by the Office of Rail Regulation. Network Rail has yet to have the five crossings with MCB-OD on Crewe-Shrewsbury authorised although it had ‘anticipated’ that ORR would sign off level crossing orders for this line before commissioning was postponed at the end of last year.
While ORR is content with Network Rail's use of MCB-OD and the crossings’ safety, service experience is showing up problems. While these are lightly used lines, some crossings have quite heavy traffic into town centres, leading to queues when the crossing is open.
This could see a barrier coming down on a stationary car. So Network Rail is ‘looking to install’ additional Barrier Protection Management (BPM) sensors, similar to those used in car Parks. Induction loops in the road service detect the presence of a vehicle and prevent the barriers lowering.
At
We have to remember that these are pilot schemes, so teething problems should be expected. Meanwhile, Network Rail says that ‘detailed work is now underway on several schemes for commissioning in the next 2-5 years’.
Roger’s Blog
Last month’s blog saw me looking forward to the Railtex Exhibition, which was bigger and better than 2011. All the major players were there and
Sadly, there was so much to talk about, with the Modern Railways stand team phoning to vector me to companies who wanted a meeting, that I didn’t have time for my usual 100% up and down the aisles coverage. If I missed your stand, apologies.
May has been relatively quiet, but June is looking promising. In the first week there is the Rail Freight Group annual meeting, followed by the Interfleet summer reception. Then on June 18 I’m taking part in a
Then there’s the IMechE Railway Division conference on 25 May which seeks the answer to the question ‘Does carbon matter to rail?’. I think we suffer from modal cringe and the railway needs to stick up for its energy efficiency achievements so I may raise the odd inconvenient question.
Two papers in particular look especially interesting. Network Rail is presenting its work on resilience in the face of weather and climate change and London Underground on reconciling capacity growth and energy efficiency.
My colleague Ian Walmsley has the after-lunch graveyard slot with the intriguing title ‘Greenwashing Railways’. Knowing Ian, this should keep everyone awake.
At the end of that week it’s the Fourth Friday Club which incorporates the 2013 Innovation Awards. And the week after that my focus shifts to
Roger