NIP 14 also set out the Government’s longer-term approach to infrastructure, with a 2018 completion date for Phase 1 of Crossrail, backing for HS3, and recognition of the need for greater co-ordination between HS2 and NR’s network improvements. Various short electrification schemes for CP6 (2019-24) were listed as being under consideration, such as Leeds-Harrogate-York and Sheffield-Doncaster.
Some projected milestones of the early reports now look optimistic. In 2011, it was confidently expected that electric services would operate to Bristol, Oxford and Newbury in 2016 and to Cardiff in 2017. The dates for the predominantly civil engineering Reading upgrade and King’s Cross station improvements were met, but schemes involving masts and wires look very different.
By the 2014 NIP, no date was given in future delivery milestones for any of the current electrification schemes apart from the start of Crossrail services in 2018.
The skills requirements for the DfT’s Damascene conversion to electrification in 2008-09 were grossly underestimated - and lack of human resources are now being blamed for slipping schedules. This seems surprising, given that the dearth of suitable skills should have been obvious - almost no electrification schemes had been carried out since 1986 and warnings had been made after completion of the East Coast Main Line wiring about the potential loss of skills in the industry unless the Government devised a rolling programme of electrification. They were ignored by the Thatcher government of the day.
The opening in autumn 2015 of the National Training Academy for Rail in Northampton will help to address the shortfall, but clearly the numbers of trainees on NR’s engineering apprenticeship programme, which began in 2005, have not been enough. Looking further ahead, the National College for High Speed Rail, divided between Doncaster and Birmingham, should also improve training numbers. Just as well given that the average age of engineers is currently 55 and 55,000 retirements are in prospect.
Len Porter, former chief executive of the Rail Safety and Standards Board, believes that civil engineering imperatives caused by ageing structures and a continued inadequate understanding of their physical condition will continue to distract NR from NIP upgrades.
Coupled with more extreme weather, landslips such as those at Tebay, New Cumnock, Tulloch and Harbury will become more common and require costly interventions to maintain resilience. The sea wall at Dawlish is naturally an extreme example, but based on previous climate-change models it had not been expected to become a serious problem until mid-century!
The National Policy Statement for National Networks (NPS), published in December 2014, recognised that work to tackle congestion will have to be augmented by measures to adapt to climate change and extreme weather events.
Building information modelling
Porter believes it is vital for NR to follow HS2’s lead in adopting Building Information Modelling requirements so as to gain a clear view of maintenance requirements, citing examples of problems through poor knowledge even of drainage channels. Equally, there is a perception that money is wasted in replacing assets that could have been improved or should have been kept in good order by effective low-cost maintenance.
Better asset knowledge and management reduces costs.
CP5 did set out requirements for modern asset management systems, which will be in place in CP6. Says Porter: “You can’t take cost out and improve performance if you don’t have the asset data and information management systems to populate the risk model.”
However, the Council for Science and Technology (CST) report on A National Infrastructure for the 21st Century observes “market-driven and efficiency-led approaches may not place sufficient value on resilience”.
Back in 2010, in the first paragraph of the first National Infrastructure Plan, it was recognised that the different infrastructure strands should not be treated in isolation. “Ensuring these networks are integrated and resilient is vital,” it advocated.
Yet since the Prescott era at the DfT, the word ‘integration’ has seldom been heard (although it makes a welcome reappearance in the NPS).
For decades, the Swiss have demonstrated with admirable intelligence and thoroughness that the only way to reduce car use is by dovetailing all the elements of non-car journeys - on foot, bicycle, bus, tram and train. Significant improvements have been made in Britain to ease the transition between modes, but we are still a long way from it being axiomatic that the railway station should be the destination of good cycle paths and served by most bus routes - naturally made much more difficult to achieve by bus deregulation.
Where NIPs do cite examples of “systemic linkages”, they are usually in terms of such obvious and uncontroversial synergies as using the Channel Tunnel to lay an electrical interconnector to the Continent.
