“And while we have plans (or at least ideas) to implement that sort of technology, they are pretty long-term. And as you’ll be aware, just taking ETCS, the current plan takes us through to 2062 before we have ETCS everywhere.
“If you look at it in the cold light of day, it’s probably a questionable plan (to say the least) for having technology that takes that long to roll out. Because as sure as eggs is eggs, it’s going to be overtaken long before completion by something else. So I think the first question was probably around why that takes so long, and why can’t we do it quicker.
“The other major driver for this really is around capacity. The growth story of the railway is fantastic. It’s doubled over the past 20 years or so in terms of passenger journeys. We’re now at record levels of 1.5 or 1.6 billion passengers a year, which is about where it was back in the 1920s. We’re at or around the point where there are as many people travelling on the railway as there ever have been - but on a much smaller railway. There are significant pressures, particularly around the more urban parts of the railway - not just in and out of London, but in and out of the other big cities as well.
“While HS2 or possibly other high-speed links and other more strategic links are definitely needed to provide some of that more inter-urban capacity, there is also a need for a lot more capacity in and out of the cities in a more commuter type of arrangement than any high-speed link is going to give us. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that building new railway lines in and out of cities is a pretty tough thing to do.”
Just how much extra capacity can be realised from ETCS varies, depending on the route. England reveals that initial work has shown that a 30%-40% increase might be possible on the South West routes from London Waterloo.
“We’ve had a look at a couple of other routes, and while I would say the 30%-40% is probably at the high end, it certainly feels doable that we could get into a lot of routes a 20%-30% increase in capacity, by smarter operation of the trains through a more digital approach to the signalling and control system.”
For the West Coast Main Line, the increase could be much lower. Its mixed traffic nature leads England to say that it might just be “single-digit percentage improvements in capacity”. And he stresses the need to continue with High Speed 2, as NR’s Digital Railway plan does not make HS2 redundant.
Changes in ticketing
The past few years have also seen major changes in ticketing. No longer must every passenger have a small piece of card. Some tickets already exist only on mobile phones; others are printed at home onto ordinary paper; yet more exist on smartcards, marketed under an array of different names even though they are essentially the same thing.
Says England: “In this day and age, other railways and certainly other modes of transport have gone into much more digital ticketing using smartphones and other devices. There’s no reason why we can’t do that, potentially getting rid of ticket barriers, and having much more intelligent detection systems that allow operators to know who’s there and who isn’t there and what tickets they have and don’t have. So we want to try and bring some of that in.”
There will be many who question why Network Rail needs to be involved in ticketing and England admits that it will be a project not just for Network Rail, but one for the whole industry to take forward.
Accurate and timely information is the other Holy Grail. England tells RailReview: “It’s not just to improve the information available to passengers on the railway about the railway, but to provide much more end-to-end journey information so that people can have on their smartphones or other devices a much more end-to-end journey plan. One that will take them from wherever they started (be it their home or their office, or anywhere else) to wherever they are going, and provide them with the right level of information - be it about cars and car parks, buses or trains, airports or whatever. And that’s all added together and in one place. The technology pretty much exists, so why not make it more fully available?
“Then, if there is disruption, it would allow everybody to provide a much better service in terms of providing alternative options for people, advising them of changes they may need to think about, or alternative routes, or providing taxi details or whatever.”
Certainly, there have been recent information improvements, but these have not come from the railway, but from third parties. For example, the realtimetrains.co.uk website, developed by Tom Cairns when he was an undergraduate, has vastly improved access to train running information.
And in London, the Citymapper app for mobile devices can display routes to and from any location in the capital by bus, Tube, taxi, cycle or foot. It calculates journey times based on how long it takes to walk to the nearest bus stop or Tube station, how often the buses or Tubes run, and how long it might take to walk at the other end. Both show what can be done with information.
England reckons: “One of the things I’m quite keen to do in my new team is to engage, perhaps only on a temporary basis, with some of those people, to understand what is the art of the possible and then think about how we might realise that. Is that something we either want to realise or that we can realise? And if so, how? If it’s just as simple as ‘here’s a bunch of information or data, just work with it and sort it out’, why wouldn’t we do that?”
Network Rail need not develop its own app and arguably the train operators need not (although they might choose to in order to help their customers), but if the provision of good quality information results from NR’s switch to ETCS, then all the railway’s customers will benefit.
England admits that even with all this extra information, NR and train operators would likely still struggle to say how long disruption might last, or how long a problem might take to fix. Of course, with less equipment on the trackside to go wrong (albeit with more on the train), it should be that faults that delay trains become fewer. For context, the Office of Rail Regulation’s latest report into NR notes that delay minutes caused by track circuit failures have increased by 23.1% over the last year. Operations delays from signalling have risen by 27.8%, it says.
Cutting delays from these causes will form a major part of the business case behind the Digital Railway. England admits that an initial review showed a case positive enough to justify further work, although he is not willing to reveal further details.
The more thorough case will conform with HM Treasury’s Green Book rules, now that NR is funded directly by government rather than through private money backed by government guarantees. The business case will need to balance the costs of ETCS development, design and installation (as well as the costs of replacing existing signalling before it’s life-expired) with the benefits of improved reliability, capacity and lower maintenance and running costs.
England explains: “Certainly, there’s a big part of the business case which is accelerating the renewal and replacement of existing signalling equipment that won’t be life-expired. We did a very high level piece of work in the summer which does show that there is a business case - and it looks like quite a good business case for doing that - if you offset the sunk costs of the infrastructure with the increase in capacity, availability and reliability on the network.
“There’s a lot more work to be done on that over the next 12 months or so, to get those numbers to something that I would be comfortable publishing. We need to be realistic about it as well.
“While there is going to be (on a net present value basis) a very good business case for doing this from an affordability point of view, it is likely to mean that if we want to do it at the scale and pace we’re planning to, there may well be a peak of expenditure in CPs 6 and 7 that effectively, against the current plan, will bring forward expenditure that was going to be in CPs 8, 9 and 10.
“So, overall we could be spending less money, but there is a question around the affordability of doing that. We’re going to have to work that into the equation as well.”
This spending also comes at a time when government is likely to be heavily committed to building HS2, which goes some way to explaining why Mark Carne has already been to No. 10 Downing Street and why NR people have been to the DfT. England tells RailReview that reaction has been generally supportive, but it’s clear that for best effect, the railway industry will need to be united in pushing the Digital Railway and that both the industry and the supply chain must be able to deliver their promises.
“We’ve been into the top of the industry, we’ve been to the Rail Delivery Group and more recently the Rail Supply Group, RIA and other supply chain forums. We’ve spent quite a lot time over the past few months with those stakeholders, helping them understand what we’re trying to do here and what we’re suggesting we do, trying to get their high-level buy-in, which everybody has given,” says England.
Now he needs to build his team. He’s appointed a development director, and expects to soon add a transformation director in place of the current temporary, on-loan, arrangement.
