“If I was going there, I certainly wouldn’t want to be starting from here” - Country Local responding to lost traveller.
If ever this applied to railways, it certainly does now, and the range of inter-related issues that Philip Haigh weaves together gives a flavour of the unattractive starting position we currently have.The interaction of train and infrastructure, European regulations (who needs them?), the UK loading gauge, future technologies, air quality legislation, and sustainable solutions all colliding in the face of political expedience, strategic ineptitude, delivery failures and unaligned commercial objectives. A toxic mix?
Yet the real weakness of our current position is not the direction we are taking, but the fact that someone appears to have changed the destination, thereby demonstrating both the strength and the weakness of Government decision-making. Only the Government can deliver a coherent transport strategy for the country, and only the Government can change it, which it will and does. A good strategy can be very powerful, signalling a clear direction for optimisation and for the deliverers to get on with. This generates confidence that brings investment in both plant and people, so that delivery and productivity improve, and even the Treasury can see the benefit. On the downside, every time the Government changes its mind, not only do the costs rise as optimisation falters, but confidence is eroded and productivity falls. This is, for me, the main message of the article.
So let me suggest an optimum destination that it is easy for us to agree on. How about developing our railway system as a mass transport mode that cheaply and sustainably does what it is good at? Large volumes, big loads, with high speed between nodes of economic activity in near absolute safety and with high levels of reliability. Volumes and concentrated traffic make railways indispensable for commuting and the life of cities; bulk loads define its contribution in freight; and reliable, safe speed lays down the marker for inter-city and inter-urban travel at UK distances.
My role for Government is for it to say what it wants, then ask some railwaymen to deliver it. We can do this successfully, with Crossrail the obvious recent example. Inside that project, train engineers looking at the whole-life cost of trains (including that of energy in a frequent stop scenario) specified an efficient high-volume people mover. Private industry has delivered a world-beating solution in the Aventra, so much better that its economics knock a poorly specified new train into the sidings. There is evidence that George Stephenson said something like the following to a young engineer he met: “Although I may be the father of steam locomotives, electricity is the way propulsion will go. You may be young enough to see it, I am not.” What a great man! How disappointed he would be at our rate of progress!
From Stephenson to now - from Sweden and Japan, railway engineers know the answer: an electric railway running on green electricity, everywhere that railways go. Simple, cheap, reliable, proven and well-developed technology… beat that!
Nearly a decade ago, under the auspices of ATOC, we measured the actual energy consumption of electric trains in the UK and compared it with similar trains by the same manufacturer in Sweden. Surprise, surprise - they were nearly identical. Yet when we worked out the sustainability of the train by applying the CO2 generated, the Swedish train was 2,000 times better than the c2c Class 357. (Yes, two thousand - this is not a typo!). Clean electricity is the reason, with Swedish generation dominated by low-carbon nuclear and hydro-electric plant. It is also self-evident that the air quality impact is negligible with near zero emissions at the point of use. The deliverability of these proven technologies is not in doubt, so why take our eyes off the ball?
Incidentally, these estimates of CO2 emissions (55gms CO2 per pass km) were based on average load factors of 30%, and electricity generated with the UK mix at the time (well over 30% coal). The success of rail growth post-privatisation means that this average load factor has improved (100% more folk, 40% more trains). Additionally, progress with the decarbonisation of our electricity supply over the past decade has been good.
So let us restate the destination. An all-electric railway.
Then how do we get there? Through a steady programme of electrification at a rate the industry can deliver reliably, effectively and productively. Evidence and common sense suggests that this may be lower than 100 route miles per year, but even this means that in four or five decades we will have caught up with the Swedish.
Bi-mode traction capability is, under this scenario, a relatively short-term and short-distance requirement, fulfilled by the application to rail of whatever technology our automotive colleagues settle on for lorries and big plant. This they can do with their vast market and research budgets.
I suspect that rail was first in the use of mobile high-pressure steam power because the low rolling resistance of wheel on rail was necessary for it to work at the time, and the early 19th century roads were inadequate for the loads required. This need has passed - there is absolutely no reason for rail to be first in technology selection and saddle itself with the costs of its own search for the right solution, be it mechanical energy recovery (which seems to work for Formula 1), compressed fluids, hydrogen cells or superconductors, all of which have been demonstrated in working locomotives at the IMechE’s Railway Challenge over the past five years.
The short-distance requirement is the key, so that energy recovery provides only the means to bridge short gaps in the wire that would be expensive to install. Long-distance unelectrified routes are given through trains by adding a single-mode locomotive at the end of the electrified section, which we know can be done safely and quickly within the normal time that the doors are open for passengers. (British Railways Southern Region 1960s).
If air quality is a big issue for the diesel locomotive, then electrify the route, missing out any tunnels and complex bits. For discontinuous electric overhead, pan dropping should always be automatic on simple reliability grounds, and is probably preferable to non-electrified wire sections for the same reason. In the fullness of time there comes a point at which the high-capital cost of electrification for low-density traffic is justified by the whole-system benefits of unified operation, the elimination of mobile prime movers with their costs, and the predictability of low electrification costs. Even before that time arrives, a sense of perspective tells us that once the core busy railway is electrified the outer ends of the routes are the lightly used and marginal tail .
Full bi-mode capability with equal performance in each mode is super-flexible, but still requires a non-diesel technology breakthrough, and there is absolutely no suggestion in Philip’s excellent review that it will be cheap, lightweight or energy -efficient. So let us learn the lesson of IEP costs and make our destination somewhere more sustainable, somewhere cheaper to run, and somewhere the passengers love.
Getting there from here then becomes relatively simple and achievable, so that the young among us may well live to see it. In this respect, my 50-year career tells me I will be like the great man in just one respect - understanding a railway destination I will not see!
