The maintenance, renewal and upgrade of the underlying railway infrastructure is a significant area of expenditure, and the way this is carried out clearly has a large influence on what users pay.
The earlier part of Philip’s article describes how intensively the UK’s rail service is operated, and how this has the consequence of severely limiting the available time to carry out infrastructure work efficiently. We are always told that booked services must run and that passengers and freight users will go elsewhere if there is any significant decline in the rail service, but is this true?
In most areas of life, there are times when you cannot use assets continuously. Take an example from everyday life, such as decorating your lounge. You could do this by creeping in every night and doing a little bit of preparation or repainting - you could even say that there should be no noise made, no dust left and no smell of paint. Alternatively you can decamp to the kitchen, cover your furniture with dust sheets and get the work done. If you were paying people to do the work you would never dream of choosing the first option - and I don’t suppose many DIYers would either.
Similarly, motorways are upgraded by reducing speeds, narrowing lanes and creating safer environments for work to be carried out in the closed-off space - the M1 between Junctions 15 & 19 seems to have been in this state for most of my lifetime! Generally the roadworks are lifted for major holiday periods - the opposite of the railways, where Bank Holidays are one of the few times we get decent access.
It is interesting to see the references to Simon Blanchflower’s Thameslink project, which has largely been progressed efficiently via larger blockades and closures of sections of the route. I live near the Thameslink line, and as a regular user I can vouch for how well the closures have been communicated to passengers, and how the need for this has largely been accepted. The exception seems to be at London Bridge, where Southeastern users were not (initially), so well-informed. Another aspect of Thameslink’s success was the communication of the end benefits resulting from the scheme. South West Trains is also taking this approach with planned works at Waterloo, scheduled for August.
Also affecting how efficiently we can carry out our work is the lack of knowledge about (and underlying poor condition of) the railway infrastructure, coupled with a reluctance to adopt innovation. These issues are improving, but tend to be amplified by the lack of access - if you are using more old-fashioned technology in short-access windows, finding underlying faults in the historic infrastructure can be more disruptive than in a greenfield environment.
So for those of us working on the infrastructure it’s the lack of reasonable access that prevents us being more efficient. We have a highly trained workforce, trained to work safely and effectively, and unsurprisingly these people expect to make a career of working on the railway and earn regular pay. Major upgrades will require improved access if we are to deliver them efficiently. The Thameslink programme demonstrated how to achieve this without upsetting the customer.
