That’s not to say Britain should not try. But viewed from 2022, there’s a real risk that instead of a steady flow, Network Rail is about to see Midland and trans-Pennine wiring being delivered at the same time as Scotland’s projects and at the same time as High Speed 2 needs to bring in OLE teams.
What’s absent is the railway’s plan for a rolling programme - one that stacks different schemes against each other in terms of the benefits they release and their costs. Such a plan should take account of wider factors such as rolling stock. This might mean that a weaker line’s case becomes stronger if its stock is approaching the end of its life and needs replacing.
The Railway Industry Association has been working on this for northern England, and expects to publish its findings around the time that printers produce this issue of RailReview. That’s surely a good start, but it needs Great British Railways to take this forward across the rest of England.
The second refrain is the perpetual call for more time. It’s entirely logical that work is more efficient if there’s no need to keep stopping and starting, so longer blockades are better than night or weekend closures.
Unless you’re a passenger wishing to travel. As Alan Ross told the PWI: “The railway is here to move people and goods. The railway is not here to dig the railway up and create new projects.”
So, there will always be tension between running a service to earn money and closing a route to spend money more efficiently.
In some cases, NR will need to invest in alternative routes to deliver reliable links between towns and cities. It’s recently done that on the Calder Valley line that joins Lancashire and Yorkshire via Todmorden. This gives train operators, particularly TransPennine Express, an alternative to its usual route via Huddersfield.
Taken to its extreme, HS2 has the best chance of delivering efficient electrification. It will be working on greenfield sites with no trains to worry about.
At the other end of the spectrum is East West Rail, which was planned to be electrified, but then descoped to be a diesel railway. When even miserly ministers realise they can no longer resist electrification (for all those well-known decarbonisation reasons), it will cost them more than had they done it while the line was being restored.
The third refrain can best be described as ‘measure twice, cut once’. In other words, plan the work thoroughly before starting construction.
This is perhaps the biggest lesson to learn from Great Western’s electrification, where pressure to deliver on time led to work starting before plans were properly developed.
This showed itself most clearly in the problems the project had with piles. The National Audit Office (NAO) summarised the problem in a report: “Network Rail did not carry out sufficiently detailed surveys of the route before the ‘detailed design’ took place. This is critical, since if ground conditions at one site are not as expected, designs for a number of nearby locations could need to be changed. This delays piling and installation of masts. In November 2015, Network Rail estimated that 78% of designs completed so far had needed to be revised.”
Scotland is now using test probes at each pile site to check whether the ground is suitable. This might appear to be extra work, but it costs less than the disruption to a schedule that comes with piles refusing to drive.
Being sure in advance that every site selected for a pile is suitable helps drive the production mentality that Alan Ross espouses. It was this mentality with which NR started its Great Western programme.
It procured a special train, called HOPS (high-output piling system) to do just that. It could drive up to 30 piles per night. Behind it, NR could send another train to lift masts into place and then fit booms. These booms hooked into place, making them quick to fit. The crane didn’t need to hold the boom in place as teams fitted bolts - it could move straight to the next mast.
But this production line fell foul of piles refusing to drive into the ground. It meant that project managers had to revise plans to cope, shedding their production line in favour of bespoke work to particular piles and masts. With this, any hope of keeping to their schedule disappeared.
So, NR had the right idea, but delivered it badly. It should revisit HOPS for future projects, but only if it does the proper groundwork first. (Some of the HOPS kit remains dumped in Swindon.)
Despite having a clear view that the Great Western modernisation was introducing electric trains, the DfT did not do enough to link both sides of the railway system. The NAO was very critical in its 2016 report: “ When the Department entered into a contract to buy the Intercity Express trains in July 2012, creating fixed deadlines for electrification, Network Rail had only just identified that it would need to develop a new type of electrification equipment. It is unlikely that either Network Rail or the Department had a good enough understanding of the work involved in developing and installing this new design, to be confident in the time it would take when the Department let the contract for the new trains.”
The NAO explained that the DfT was at one point facing bills of £400,000 per day for Hitachi’s new trains, that couldn’t run until NR completed its wiring work. DfT also had to negotiate a variation order to its deal with Agility Trains to convert the 21 electric trains it had ordered into bi-modes, to run on diesel or electricity.
Proper management from the outset of the project as a combination of wiring and trains would avoid these extra costs.
There’s another aspect of proper management that NR must consider. That’s deciding what it wants from electrification.
The flip side of this is being clear about what isn’t electrification. Renewing signalling isn’t electrification, yet its costs can too easily be lumped into the bigger bill, which harms electrification’s overall case. Likewise, raising bridges to give increased freight gauge. It’s worth doing and worth spending money on, but it’s not electrification.
Across recent schemes, it’s generally reckoned that foundations, masts and wires consume about one-third of project costs. Another third goes to civil engineering work to stations, bridges, track lowering and tunnels. The final third goes to signalling immunisation, traction power connections and compensation to operators.
Bridge clearances remain a contentious problem for electrification schemes. With care and engineering judgement, it’s possible to cut the costs of electrification by cutting the number of bridges that need rebuilding. This care and judgement must come from the client. Leave the decision to the contractors and they will likely recommend more work to earn more money.
So, compare the 270mm static clearance mandated on the Great Western project with the 85mm clearances that exist now (and have for many years) on the Great Eastern Main Line out of London Liverpool Street.
