With Network Rail ditching the latest version of the December 2024 East Coast Main Line timetable, Gareth Dennis argues the case for more trains stopping at more stations, to ease the capacity crunch.
On January 14 2020, amid speculation on the future of High Speed 2, Network Rail Chief Executive Andrew Haines sent a letter to the Department for Transport.
In it, he highlighted that each of the East Coast, West Coast and Midland Main Lines were essentially full, and that upgrades would provide rapidly diminishing returns in capacity, would be increasingly disruptive over multiple decades, and would not get close to the capacity release realised by the new north-south high speed line.
In unintentionally prophetic terms, Haines pointed out that there would be “significant” disruption if funds for HS2 were “re-allocated” to other projects.
Three years later, in the Prime Minister’s speech at his party conference, HS2 was curtailed to a London to Birmingham shuttle and replaced by a short list of uncosted aspirations with little holding them together - bolstered by one or two larger programmes that were already under way.
Network North, as it was misleadingly named, has been pilloried elsewhere and I need not repeat this criticism.
But the cancellation of HS2’s most transformative element is crucial to the story we are about to tell.
In April this year, the latest update to the East Coast Main Line timetable was postponed. This latest abandonment means that the timetable has been all but frozen since May 2021 - major updates usually issued every six months have been delayed over and over again, such that the next opportunity for a new timetable will now be May 2025, a full four years later, with no meaningful advantage for passengers (or freight customers) having been made of the capital investments made along the route over this period.
Network Rail Director of Network Performance Chris Curtis said: “Following lessons learned from introducing major new timetables, the industry steering group that oversees timetable introduction has concluded that there are too many outstanding issues to have confidence that the new East Coast Main Line timetable can be delivered robustly in December.
“We are all committed to working urgently together to find a way to deliver the benefits to passengers and freight users as soon as we can.”
The ECML, Britain’s fastest north-south inter-city route, was one of the first parts of the network to exceed pre-COVID passenger levels, with growth pushing overcrowding to extremes (as was the case before the pandemic).
There is a vital need for a new timetable to maximise the extent to which the railway can accommodate this growth.
So, why has it become impossible for the railway to create a new timetable that works for the ECML?
The answer, at its core, is all about complexity and capacity - and the conflict when you have too much of one and not nearly enough of the other.
Ultimately, we are seeing the consequences of the cancellation of HS2 playing out, just as predicted by Haines and essentially every other railway expert worth their salt.
Firstly, we need to understand the current state of play.
Despite the geographic simplicity of the route when compared with the West Coast, it has a complex mixture of passenger operators.
By a long way, most daily trains are London suburban services run by Govia Thameslink Railway under the directly awarded TSGN contract.
Flagship nationalised long-distance operator LNER runs most inter-city trains, but Hull Trains, Grand Central and most recently Lumo all run their own private, open access operations.
Regional and inter-city services are also operated by franchised East Midlands Railway and CrossCountry.
Nationalised TransPennine Express and (north of the border) ScotRail, run further inter-city and regional services.
This plethora of services operating on the line is bested only by the even more messy tangle of stopping patterns that these services employ, either to maximise journey times or to guarantee open access paths from the Office of Rail and Road.
Trying to serve flanking platforms on a two-track railway means leaving big chunks of space in the timetable, to ensure the following non-stop train doesn’t catch it up.
This not only reduces the number of trains you can run over a given period, it also results in station calling patterns that are irregular and unfriendly for passengers.
And this doesn’t just apply to small stations. In York, there can be three or more services departing in a very short space of time, as the non-stop service is followed in quick succession by stopping services trying to stay ahead of the next fast train.
Journey times are important. There is a proven link between minimising journey times and maximising modal shift from road and (particularly along the London to Scotland route) air. Rail dominates aviation when journey times are less than four hours.
However, this is only part of the picture. In the rest of Europe, air travel accounts for between 2%-6% of long-distance travel, whereas in the UK that figure is 14%. Speed is not the only reason for this - high fares and overcrowding limit demand, and both of these are as a result of limited capacity.
The pressure being felt within Network Rail’s timetable planning team to negotiate these challenges and provide an improved
timetable is significant - as evidenced by the number of people who have approached me under condition of anonymity over the past few months, describing highly stressful working conditions and the impending breakdown of the process.
Within these testimonies, a single common complaint stands out: constant political meddling.
Rather than setting the objectives and stepping aside to let the timetable be constructed (an enormously difficult task requiring the uninterrupted focus of dedicated and skilled staff, incorporating the needs of countless operators and stakeholders), Department for Transport mandarins held frequent meetings and would propose adjustments that required additional work to either incorporate or dismiss.
More than one of my sources described these meetings and the suggestions they would throw up as ‘unhelpful’ - in less than polite terms.
The second commonality between testimonies was the immense complexity that open access operations added to the process.
Because of their rigid stopping patterns, necessitated by their operating agreement with the Office of Rail and Road, they act as a sort of solid line around which it is difficult to fit
the incumbent services while still achieving the desired journey times.
On the West Coast Main Line, where there remain no open access services despite a succession of applications, services and their stopping patterns can be swapped and reshuffled to attempt to optimise the whole picture without a significant impact. Not so over on the ECML.
This is a claim that is fiercely disputed by Martijn Gilbert, FirstGroup’s MD for open access operations, leading Hull Trains and Lumo.
In a commendably robust conversation, he lays out his view of the problems: “Having had a seat at the table on the East Coast Timetable Steering Group, it is not open access that has stopped that timetable coming into operation. Far from it. The real cause of it is unsatisfactory performance modelling, and a risk from how the structure of that timetable has been developed.
This is a piece of work that started prior to the pandemic, and was then paused, then re-started again, paused again, and re-started.
“I can categorically assure you that open access is not the reason why that timetable has not come into operation. I can say that hand on heart.”
Gilbert continues: “Lumo doesn’t have a standard pattern timetable. It ducks and dives around gaps in the timetable and demonstrates huge flexibility. We run the very first train of the day from King’s Cross to Edinburgh at 0530, and we run the last train in the evening back from Edinburgh at 1958, that gets into London in the early hours. And we make those trains work commercially.
“In Hull Trains, it would have impacted the broadly standard pattern of the timetable, with a few negative impacts on journey times. But we sat down with the team in Milton Keynes for three days, and in the end we reached agreement.”
However, it is also crucial to contextualise Gilbert’s words. The current government is trying to front-and-centre open access operators as part of its new model for Britain’s railways, repeating the common refrain that open access operators provide increased competition and better value for customers.
This is only true if they increase capacity and enable an overall reduction in fares, which I would suggest is (at best) difficult to argue.
Another argument is that the open access operators serve markets such as Hull or Sunderland that otherwise would not have regular inter-city services.
On the continent, open access on lightly used inter-city networks has arguably increased the quality and competitiveness of rail - for example, in Italy, where Italo competes with the incumbent Trenitalia high-speed services.
On a railway line running at maximum capacity such that no meaningful competition can exist, the services run by open access are either extractive or ought to be run by the incumbent operator anyway.
Putting these arguments to one side, both ministers and representatives of open access operations have been meeting regularly and more frequently over the past few months.
More importantly, given the likely result at the next General Election, open access operators are facing ambivalence from the Labour party, whose recent Getting Britain Moving paper suggested that open access operations didn’t have a guaranteed future.
It is no wonder that any suggestions they are getting in the way of timetable planning are robustly batted away.
In discussing the challenges with the timetable, I spoke to several representatives in freight operations, including within Network Rail, who suggested that a major problem with the development of the now-scrapped timetable was that it had inadequately planned freight services, and in some cases omitted required paths entirely.
Gilbert validates this: “I don’t think the foundations of that timetable, its construction
and evolution, have delivered a particularly robust base.
“The real challenge has been freight paths, because those paths had not been included in any of the performance modelling.
“I can absolutely say that about lack of confidence in how that timetable has been structured, because it has been layered onto many things, affecting performance modelling and the robustness of freight paths.”
Despite there being a significant gap between the testimonies of some of those timetable planners and what Martijn Gilbert had to say, it is also interesting to note where there is commonality between them.
Gilbert continues: “There is huge pressure to get that timetable in. The minister has clearly said that after all that money has been spent on the ECML, we need to have something to show for it. It’s unfortunate that things reached a point where the minister announced it in the Autumn Statement, before people warned that it was looking quite fragile.
“We cannot have a repeat of the debacle seen in 2018, and I’m afraid that is where that process was going. A lot of tweaks were being made, and I fear it needs a wholesale refresh from the start.”
Framed alongside the local service reductions at intermediate stations that the consulted iterations of the ECML timetable were proposing, Gilbert paints an image of a railway industry being harnessed to create press releases, not to move more people and goods sustainably.
He is not wrong when he says open access operations aren’t the reason for the latest postponement of the timetable - they are more of a contributor to the challenges on the ECML than he admits, but not the single cause.
Incorporating the services run under open access into the incumbent inter-city operator would provide a major benefit for timetable planning, and for passenger simplicity, as well as removing revenue extraction. However, this alone would not solve the deepest challenge the ECML faces - extremely limited capacity.
Likewise, the lack of robustness in modelled performance, problems for freight, the difficult working conditions, and even the constant political meddling aren’t causes either. They are merely symptoms of the problem - a consequence of fighting over the scraps of unclaimed capacity remaining on an otherwise completely saturated major railway corridor.
Further major engineering works could provide some relief, such as the relocation of GB Railfreight’s facility north of Peterborough station onto the Peterborough to Lincoln line west of Glinton Junction, thus avoiding the slow crawl of trains entering and exiting the existing facility via Spittal Junction (no, the £200 million Werrington dive-under just up the line didn’t solve this problem).
Remodelling of station approaches such as those north of York or at Darlington (both ongoing projects), and bi-directional signalling to unlock more parallel moves, may drag out additional limited capacity over the next decade and enable more timetable resilience. But as Andrew Haines said back in 2020, this is a case of rapidly diminishing returns.
The current government fallback to manage demand is the same that has been employed since the days of British Rail - and it looks increasingly ridiculous as global heating necessitates a critical need to drive modal shift from air and road to rail.
That fallback is increasing fares to limit those who can use the railways. This is simply unacceptable, and within the framework of the Climate Change Act 2008 may increasingly be seen as illegal as government drifts further away from the emissions targets set down by the act.
No. The only solution is to increase capacity. And with the reinstatement of the high-speed line between the West Midlands and the northern ECML looking increasingly distant, only one viable option remains to provide a significant boost to the number of hourly seats on the ECML in the medium term.
That option? Prioritising hourly train numbers over journey times, densifying the long-distance timetable by removing non-stop services, and exploiting the greatly improved acceleration of the latest generation of electric inter-city trains to make up some of the difference.
With all trains stopping at most stations, utilising alternating calling patterns, the number of hourly trains could be boosted. This would enable more seats, more modal shift, and no abandonment of smaller intermediate stations that has otherwise been the general thrust of timetabling over the past decade or so.
But even this is limited by platform capacity at King’s Cross and the dreaded Welwyn bottleneck.
For the UK government to meet its own emissions targets, the railway needs to double (yes, double) its share of people and goods moved by 2040 at the latest.
This means an enormous leap in capacity that only radical change to rail services and significant, disruptive upgrades can achieve.
Further to this, if we are serious about giving the public choice about how they travel, then we absolutely must boost railway capacity to meet the significant demand on the ECML.
To break the timetable deadlock, and without High Speed 2 providing desperately needed relief any time soon, the East Coast Main Line needs to deliver capacity first, and fast trains second.
