INFORMED SOURCES e-PREVIEW October 2013
Last month’s analysis of the East Coast IEP orders ended with me pondering whether raising line speeds and cutting journey times was back on the agenda. This set a train of thought going which became the lead item in the October column. There’s also more on IEP seating and an analysis of who is really cutting the cost of the railway.
Time to revisit the need for speed
Social media sinks King’s Cross ticket barriers
ATOC claim highlights funding confusion
Total support for railway rising
Why you can’t compare IEP costs – the official view
IEP seating update
This renewed interest in line speeds sent me back to first principles and the 1950s when the long distance rail passenger business in the
I’ve recreated his chart that led to an order for 22 Deltic locomotives and then re-calibrated it for the 21st Century. This suggests that that the current Vitesse Commercial is the 90 mile/h average speeds, give or take, we have today – Great Western long distance services excepted.
But do passengers think this is fast enough? The latest Passenger Satisfaction Survey suggests that they do.
Of course, on today’s busy railway even pathing the ‘Flying Adonis’ Edinburgh-London early morning service is a considerable achievement. The even 4hr timing averages 98.25 mile/h. That said even the current best ‘regular’ journey times on the ECML at 4hr 21 min still average a shade over 90 mile/h end to end.
DfT Claims that the superior acceleration and braking of the Hitachi Super Express Train will cut 18 min off today’s London-Edinburgh times giving an average of 96 mile/h. Perhaps.
But what about running faster? British Rail reckoned that 140 mile/h running between
As a rough sense check, the difference between running at a constant 125mile/h and 140mile/h between
Faster infrastructure
So while it may seem defeatist, the best way to cut journey times on the long distance routes is probably a revival of the classic line speed improvement programmes exemplified by the just completed Midland Main Line. East Coast civil engineers were masters of winning minutes here and there which collectively made a worthwhile difference.
Time for some schemes to be pulled out of the plans chest and scanned into the CAD systems? Saving time by not slowing down may be smarter than going faster. Another possibility is to reduce the speed differential between trains on a route.
Building on the programme with London Midland which raised the maximum speed of the Class 350/1 Desiro fleet on the WCML from 100mile/h to 110 mile/h, Siemens is offering a 115mile/h ‘Express’ version of its new-generation Desiro platform. Shorthand for the new ‘Desiro Express’ is ‘a ScotRail Class 380 with extra oomph’.
Why 115 mile/h? Well new rolling stock in the
Siemens reckons that this means that trains complying with the conventional TSI will be able to run at up to 118mile/h without restrictions on leading vehicle occupancy, subject to meeting the crashworthiness specification. If this is the case it is good news for capacity – both on the track and in the train.
Clearly, you need a round number on the speedometer, hence 115mile/h for Desiro Express. An obvious application for the new concept is the Great Western commuter services after electrification. Siemens claim that on the outer-suburban services, modelling shows that a 115 mile/h Desiro Express would be able to run ‘comfortably’ within the proposed Intercity Express Programme timetable.
Twittering away
In what I think is an industry first, an exchange on Twitter became an instant, and controversial, item for this month’s Informed Sources.
Back in August recently-appointed Northern Rail Managing Director Alex Hynes (@AlexHynes) asked ‘Why is it that the automatic ticket gates at Kings Cross are so rarely in operation’?
East Coast Chairman Michael Holden (@holdmch) replied ‘We have found thru experience insufficient income at risk to justify full time operation’. In a follow-up tweet he explained ‘These things aren't always clear cut. We have improved on-train rev protection since then & other TOCs aren't keen on gates’.
This represents a major change in policy for East Coast, which had previously told my chum
It will be interesting to see what DfT has to say about gating in the Invitations to Tender for the new-style East Coast and Great Western franchises.
DfT data shows up ORR
There was a lulu of a headline in the Daily Telegraph’s usually rigorous business section in August. It read ‘Railways 'in black' for first time in two decades’ with the sub-head ‘Operators pay the state more than they receive in subsidies, say Atoc figures’.
This was based on ATOC’s interpretation of a table from the now-annual report by the Office of Rail Regulation on ‘Government support for the rail industry’. With what can only be regarded as sloppiness, this Table showed the ‘Subsidy for each Train Operating company and the subsidy per passenger mile.
And, indeed, this did show that the TOCs collectively paid more to Government in Premia and revenue sharing than they received in subsidy. So what am I whingeing about?
Well, ‘subsidy per passenger mile’ represent only part of the cost of the railway because it ignores the nearly £4billion a year DfT pays to Network Rail in the form of the direct grant. Fortunately, and this is not something I thought I would write, DfT’s cost data is as rigorous as ORR’s is sloppy on this subject.
Published at the same time as the ORR report was DfT’s vastly superior equivalent and the Table reproduced in the column gives the full story. It details each
Not only that, the DfT spreadsheet also has a separate worksheet with the data for each of the previous years from 2009-10 onwards. And when you put the full series together you see that while the allocated cost per mile for the Network Rail grant has been pretty constant at 10 pence, the TOCs have collectively gone from break even to a premium of 3 pence per mile.
So instead of bamboozling the Torygraph, ATOC could have claimed that its members have knocked 37% off the cost of the passenger railway over the past four years. Now that is an achievement.
Crossrail grants inflate railway support
Also in the ORR financial data for 2012-13 were a table and chart of total support for the railway going back to 1985-86. And these showed that, despite all the cost saving, support is apparently rising again, topping £5 billion in 2012-13. This seemed counter-intuitive but the answer was, for once, immediately obvious.
Support for the railways can be grouped in three main categories: payments by Central Governments and the Local Authorities to the TOCS; the Direct Grant to Network Rail; plus what the ORR Table terms ‘Other elements of government support’
From 2001, these ‘other elements’ bumbled along between £100-200 million a year, lost in the financial noise. But since 2010-11 it has taken off, rising to £1,536 million in 2012-13, in turn an increase of £828 million on the previous year.
ORR explains that capital spending on Crossrail represents the bulk of this additional support, accounting for £1.2 billion of the ‘other elements’ in 2012-13. Should capital grants for major projects be lumped in with support for the working railway? I’ve got a chart in the column showing how it affects the total.
ORR explains that DfT has only just caught up with the Crossrail capital grants in the ‘other elements of Government support’. This, says ORR, follows a review by DfT of the spending included in this category. ORR also reports small revisions for DfT’s payments to TOCs, - that’s small as in low tens of millions.
With this sort of thing going on, you can see why this column aims to be approximately correct, rather than precisely wrong when it comes to railway costs.
DfT on comparing rolling stock costs
Last month’s analysis of the deal to implement the option in the Intercity Express Programme to replace the East Coast Intercity IC225 fleet drew heavily on additional information provided by the Department for Transport. DfT was particularly concerned about any attempts to compare the costs of the new trains with the alternative proposals – IC225 re-engineering or Class 390s. Readers will recall that this column calculated that IEP will be twice as expensive to lease and operate per vehicle as a Class 390.
To pre-empt any further such claims, officials enumerated the many factors affecting such comparisons. While I mentioned some of these in my analysis, I thought it would be useful to have the Department’s views on record. So in the column your will find the authorised version verbatim, with no sniping commentary. Have fun.
IEP seating official
Last month I had a job working out where the 627 seats came from in the nine car version of the Hitachi Super Express Train (SET). This was because, to save time, I used the layouts from my last briefing meeting with
So this month’s column rectifies that omission. And in addition Alstom have provided details of their proposed seating configurations for new Pendolinos, plus the original nine car for reference.
Readers will recall that DfT claimed 188 extra seats for IEP over an ‘off-the-shelf-train’ (OTST), code for Pendolino. But that assumed that a new OTST had to have the same space-inefficient seating layout as the existing Virgin fleet. The actual difference is 50 seats at most. And that is after DfT has dispensed with a buffet.
Useful
I expect many readers have the National Rail Live Departure app on their tablet or smart phone. But for those who would like more detail can I recommend taking a look at www.realtimetrains.co.uk. This is a new website developed by Tom Cairns, still a student, using open source data.
You enter a station and get a list of all trains, with those stopping in bold type plus the platform and the Working Timetable passing times of other trains, including freight services shown in italic. I tried it the other day when power supply problems at
Roger’s blog
Well, as I write this, the holidays are over, the nights are drawing in and the diary is filling up nicely. Last week I popped down the road to the Uni in Hatfield where the IMechE Railway Division Young Members were holding their annual conference. The first two speakers pitched presentations perfectly for an audience of engineering graduates at the beginning of their railway careers. Graham Smith of the RDG gave a summary of how his organisation is bringing a fragmented industry back together. Patrick Hallgate, Network Rail’s Great Western Route Managing Director, enthusiastically conveyed the excitement of the Route Modernisation.
Some time back I tried to do a Gantt chart showing all the activities involved in the GW Route Modernisation but conceded defeat when I saw Network Rail’s official version. It’s even better in Power Point, because Patrick starts with a route diagram and relentlessly overlays the multiple elements, such as electrification and signalling. Then, when you think there can’t be any more, he throws in Crossrail, maintenance and aspirational schemes on his patch. A real tour de force.
This week I’m off to Derby where Bombardier are going to show me how they really do design and build trains rather than just assembly the bits. Then, October starts with an invitation from Virgin to see work on Voyagers at Central Rivers. ]
So that’s a rolling stock factory tour and a depot visit, two of my favourite activities, and then I switch to CompIRSE mode because Hitachi have invited me to see the prototype of their Train Management System for the new Network Rail Route Operating Centres. After that I’m in with SWT for an up-date on their CP5 HLOS proposals, detailed in Informed Sources some months back but now formally endorsed by DfT. That evening there’s the Guardian’s Bradshaw lecture.
Finally on Tuesday 29 September I’m giving a talk on rolling stock to a joint Railway Study Association/CILT meeting at
Meanwhile, if the editor has found room, fellow enthusiasts for the two-wheeled products of a former factory in Bracebridge Street in
And on that tantalising note, it’s time to get on with some more analysis.
Roger