INFORMED SOURCES e-Preview September 2013
While the announcement came a day too late for the August Modern Railways, e-Preview meant that subscribers had the salient details of the Department for Transport’s decision to impose IEP as the replacement for the Intercity East Coast IC225 fleet. Not surprisingly most of this month’s column is taken up by analysis of the deal. But there is also a feature inspired by the series of transport accidents in July culminating in the Santiago de Compostela derailment.
All-IEP fleet for East Coast
IEP cost analysis challenge
Desperate defence of political deal
Lessons for rail from tragic month
A forgotten driver?
DfT is exceedingly twitchy about my financial analyses of the various IEP deals and provided me with unprecedented amounts of data and background to make sure I had the correct numbers. Given the misinformation through which this column has battled since the start of he IEP, I am equally twitchy about passing on duff-gen to readers and so my 11 tables (!) include all the raw data. Actually there are 12 table if you include a bit of East Coast journey time nostalgia.
It seems pretty clear that this was a nakedly political decision in the face of sustained pressure from industry for the decision on IC225 replacement to be left to the new East Coast franchisee. Alstom was not asked for an indicative price for its Pendolino proposal. Eversholt did submit a detailed proposal for its IC225 upgrades (Informed Sources January 2013), ranging from ‘do minimum’ to major re-engineering including re-tractioning with Bombardier Traxx
Market
In frequent meetings with DfT, Alstom, and Eversholt had been calling for the market to decide and both were sufficiently miffed with the decision to go public. Eversholt was disappointed that DfT had decided to ‘prescribe’ the rolling stock to be used on the new Intercity East Coast franchise. For Alstom, UK President Terence Watson said that he hoped that DfT ‘will truly encourage innovative offers that allow prospective franchise bidders to choose the rolling stock for the East Coast Main Line services thus ensuring full value to taxpayer and passenger alike’.
Certainly the imposition of IEP changes the risk in the replacement franchise significantly. The new operator will be responsible for managing and bearing the risks associated with delivery and commissioning of a train procured by a third party.
So bidders will have to assess the commercial impact of delivery and reliability risk and their powers in managing the acquired Train Availability & Reliability Agreement (TARA). This will be important when delay to a train is worth £360 per minute to the operator.
These factors suggest that bidding for the replacement franchise will not be straightforward and could be protracted. Nor can a non-compliant bid based on alternative rolling stock be ruled out.
Financial analysis
Despite the unquantified impact of changing foreign exchange rates and rolled up interest clouding the issue, I am fairly certain that DfT has driven a much harder bargain in return for the additional vehicles which are clearly vital to keeping Hitachi’s new plant in the North East occupied pending further contracts.
A point to note here is that separate subsidiaries of the Hitachi-led Agility Trains consortium are providing the Great Western and East Coast IEP Train Service Provision (
In its commentary on the Table of costs I publish in the column, DfT explains that because financial close has yet to be reached on the East Coast Phase 1 contract - the core IC125 replacement – the deal has benefitted from prevailing foreign exchange, financing costs and tax assumptions. This has had the effect of reducing the NPV of the core order from £4.9bn in July 2012 to £4.6bn in July 2013.
Also to be taken into account when considering DfT’s annual cost is that with the addition of the IC225 replacement fleet the ‘first year of full operations’ has moved back from 2019-20 when the deal was signed last July to 2020-21 to allow for the longer delivery time.
Cutting through these variables, using DfT’s figures I calculate that the Cost per diagrammed vehicle per month for the GW and EC IC125 replacement fleets has fallen from the previous £74,500 at 2012 prices to £70,500 today.
However at £114 million for the additional 243 diagrammed vehicles to replace IC225, the Phase 2 cost per diagrammed vehicle per month is only £40,600. This reduces the cost of the overall deal to £61,000 per diagrammed vehicle per month - still an awfully expensive way of buying trains.
That’s my conclusion. DfT officials insist that accounting for all of the factors, on a true like-for-like per-seat basis, IEP trains are significantly cheaper than comparable intercity stock. This sets the scene for some weasel finding rudery in the next section – but with serious intent
As you like-for-like it
By this point we are up to Table 8 in the column. This is also official and compares the number of seats in various types of train.
Consider this statement. ‘A 9-car train will have wider aisles and 131 more seats than the equivalent Intercity 125 High Speed Train (HST) and 188 more seats than a comparable off-the-shelf new 9-car train, with no compromise on leg-room’.
Clearly the ‘off-the-shelf train is a Class 390 Pendolino and DfT is pretending that if you buy a Pendolino, Alstom will insist it can have only the highly space inefficient seating configuration that Virgin adopted when it was thinking of three classes back in 1997.
I also have some fun with ‘leg room’. The key phrase here is ‘no compromise on leg room’. A helpful fact sheet gives the IEP leg room as 750mm. In the interest of research I jumped onto an IC225 while passing through kings Crosse and measured the ‘leg room’ in a Mk 4 standard coach.
The results suggested that this was a pointless parameter, since you are measuring from the squishy cushion at the bottom of the back-rest to the back of the seat in front. I got a spread of measurements from around 720mm to 740mm before I gave up and switched to seat pitch. This gave a consistent 840mm between the same points on seat backs.
In Eversholt’s Mk 4 mock-up the Standard class seating provided 753mm ‘leg room’. This was with the same 820mm seat pitch as IEP. The thinner seat backs saved 15mm which could be used for more legroom or combined to provide an extra luggage stack.
Last time
Confused? I am. So time for further research with the tape measure the next time I’m passing through King’s Cross.
But what really puzzles me is why DfT has dragged itself into wrangling about leg-room and seat capacity when the original IEP Invitation to Tender used the unambiguous parameter – ‘furnishable space’. This is the floor area between vestibules. How many seats you fit into this space is then up to the operator.
Reliability wrestling
DfT seems to like pig wrestling (you get dirty and the pig enjoys it), offering the challenge of a graphic comparing the 55,000 miles per Technical Incident Number (MTIN) which Hitachi is required to deliver with various existing trains plus the earth’s circumference.
And guess what? One of the comparators was the Hitachi Class 395 where DfT has understated the fleet’s reliability by around 10,000 MTIN. Ever helpful I have corrected the error and added some of the current top performing EMUs – plus the distance from Earth to Moon which is more relevant to Spanner winning reliability.
Time
DfT quotes various East Coast journey time reductions with IEP. And, of course, Alstom has been pushing the idea of Pendolino running at 140 mile/h to
Chums are suggesting to me that raw speed ought to become saleable again and that the East Coast needs to get in touch with its inner Fiennes and start chipping away a journey times as we used to in the 1960s and 70s.
My heart is with the need for speed but my head is not so sure. In particular, would it be worth the trouble with HS2 on the way knocking half an hour or so of current times to
Air and rail crashworthiness compared.
A particularly annoying cliché, which regularly emerges when discussing the weight of rail vehicles, is that ‘aircraft are not designed to crash into things’. On 6 July a Boeing 777 came in too low and slow at
Flying at 125 mile/h the 777 hit the sea wall at the start of the runway, ripping off the complete rear fuselage and tail plane aft of the cabin pressure bulkhead . Becoming airborne again it spun round and came to rest, some 1,500 feet from the first impact.
Remarkably 123 of the 307 people on board are reported to have escaped from the wreckage unaided. Around 180 passengers were injured and of the two fatalities, one is reported to have been hit by an emergency services vehicle.
Six days later a rake of loco-hauled Corail stock was approaching Brétigny-sur-Orge station south of
Then on 24 July a Class 730 Talgo approaching Santiago de Compostela failed to brake for a tight radius curve and derailed at 95 mile/h. And as we know 79 people died.
Comparisons
I use these three accidents as the basis for an examination of the approaches to air and rail crashworthiness. For example aircraft seats are now stressed to withstand static force equivalent to nine times the force of gravity (9g) plus dynamic tests which simulate the loads in an ‘impact-survivable’ accident. A 16g dynamic load is applied, using crash test dummies.
Flight 214 showed that 16g seats do the job. But after that accident a former head of the US National Transportation Safety Board was reported as calling for aviation seat standards to be up-rated further to take even higher deceleration forces.
Trains
Obviously, rail vehicle seats are a very different matter. Apart from the lack of belts, seats can be forward or rearward facing depending on direction of travel. And you can have facing pairs.
As with aircraft, train seats have to take static proof loads plus dynamic testing which evaluates the injury potential for a passenger hitting the back of the seat in front or back into their own seat. These dynamic tests use pulses of acceleration of 5g and 7.5g.
Of course, everyone thinks of rail crashworthiness in terms of energy absorption in the event of head-on collisions. But this is only of value in low speed collisions – which is still important. But to put it in context the Class 390 Pendolino met the contemporary requirement for 3 MegaJoules (MJ) in the front end and its total energy absorption along the set is over 19MJ. The kinetic energy of a nine car Class 390 at 125mile/h is around 700MJ.
In a train – or a plane in a high energy accident, it is the structural integrity and interior crashworthiness which matter. And as I have said before, if I ever am in a high energy accident a Mk 3 coach would be my preference.
A forgotten driver?
Many years ago, in a paper to the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers, President Tony Howker posed the question ‘have we forgotten the driver’? His point was that while signalmen had been increasingly protected from making mistakes by interlocking developments, safety, in many cases, still depended on the driver doing the right thing every time.
And as has become clear subsequently, the driver of the Talgo was a classic example of Tony’s argument. The Spanish authorities are now extending the signalling system to include balise on the approach to severe speed restrictions, including the curve at
In a blog, my chum Professor Roger Kemp suggested that in addition to the distraction of a radio call, loss of situational awareness could be a factor in the
The last tunnel before
In theory, ETCS should make old fashioned route knowledge less important, if not redundant. Train drivers being able to go on any route without local knowledge, like lorry drivers using SatNav, is regularly raised as an aim. I’m not so sure.
Roger’s blog
Having got the September column off to bed, after a massive session of IEP analysis, I went up to
On my way to meeting David, I diverted to
Last Wednesday I thought I had organised my time really efficiently with three meetings in
And now it’s holiday time, including a trip to see family in
Meanwhile September is filling up, including my deferred meeting with East Coast, a session with Eversholt and then a trip down the road to Hatfield for the IMechE Railway Division Young Members seminar on ‘Integrating delivery across the rail industry.
See you in September
Roger