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INFORMED SOURCES October 2001

Catching up on the order hiatus

A lost decade of traction and rolling stock orders casts a long shadow

When you have got some privatisation die-hards on the ropes, the last justification of the scoundrel is likely to be ‘At least British Rail wouldn't have ordered all these new trains'. At which point, you sneer ‘You mean all the new trains littering storage sidings'.

And when former Transport Minister Sir Roger Freeman invited a group of battle hardened veterans to contribute to his history of rail privatisation, John Prideaux's chapter on the Rolling Stock Companies took the ‘BR certainly wouldn't have done that' line.

To show that privatisation really had freed the industry from the Treasury's purse strings, John included a little table comparing the ‘last BR orders' with post privatisation contracts. The difference was certainly impressive. If you threw in the new EWS locomotives, the total for the new railway was 2360 vehicles and locos compared with 1043 for BR.

Warning bells

Two things rang warning bells in the cynical Ford brain. First, that grand total (2080 if you ignored the locos) depended hugely on the two Virgin fleets - totalling 825 vehicles. At the workhorse EMU/DMU level the difference was less marked - 1043 BR played 1255 New Railway.

Can we discount the Virgin Fleet? Well, West Coast certainly. BR was all set to order InterCity 250 in 1992 when the recession led the Treasury to cancel the project for 30/45 1+10 car formations.

So Pendolino is business deferred. However the complete renewal of the Cross Country fleet is a legitimate triumph of privatisation. BR would have kept on cascading rolling stock, although the projected Class 48 InterCity diesel was aimed at Cross Country.

Second, the numbers in the ‘last BR orders' column, headed 'delivered 1993-97 inclusive', didn't look right. For example, the Class 465/2 fleet showed only 198 vehicles when 200 were ordered. So when I had a quiet moment I went back to the orders behind the deliveries.

Elastic

And as you can see, in the context of this comparison, 'last BR orders' was an elastic term. For example, the two orders for Networkers in 1992 were political bribes aimed at keeping York Works open while privatisation was launched. BR's procurement programme was aborted when the recession really bit in 1991.

Indeed, revisiting Informed Sources for 1991 makes grim reading, as project after project being deferred or cancelled. In January, for example, came the news that the delivery of the first 200 Class 471 EMUs proposed for Kent Coast had been deferred from August 1993 to May 1995.

Defining the start of privatisation is equally elastic. I tend to think of 1996 as year zero, since that was when the first franchises took over, Railtrack was floated, the ROSCOs were sold and Chiltern broke the 1064 day train order hiatus.

So for a chronologically exact match you could look at BR orders placed 1986-1991 against New Railway 1996-2001. In this case the BR totals gains 60 electric locomotives, 92 Class 142 vehicles and 52 Mk 3 Driving Van Trailers ordered in 1986.

But that is nit picking. The real point is that claims that seek to extol the present by diminishing the past are self-delusory. Worse, they obscure the emerging crisis in traction and rolling stock provision.

Until the SWT order with Siemens earlier this year for Mk 1 stock replacement, bad old BR had ordered more EMU vehicles in the five years of Bob Reid's business led railway in its pomp than the ROSCOs had achieved their first five years of Treasury free investment. Through no fault of their own, I hasten to add.

What these tables show is that recession followed by privatisation all but wiped out nearly a decade of EMU and DMU renewal, let alone the growth builds that Network South East was planning under Chris Green's ‘400 Networker vehicles a year for ever policy'. The bar chart of traction and rolling stock investment, based on date of delivery rather than authorisation says it all.

1991 revisited

And no prizes for spotting the similarity between 1991 and 2001 on the traction and rolling stock front. Then as now the train operators know what they want to buy. Unlike then, the city stands ready to fund trains in undreamt of quantities. But then as now political interference, make that incompetence, means that orders are few and far between.

Already my chums in the manufacturers, ROSCOs and the City are worried that another train order hiatus is in the making. There is growing confidence, misplaced in my view, that as the scale of the south of the Thames EMU crisis in particular becomes apparent, there will be a derogation on the Mk 1 withdrawal date, perhaps even the requirement to fit cup and cone.

Quite simply, given the actual and forecast growth in passenger traffic, plus the wake of the 1064 day hiatus, plus the continuing need to replace life expired equipment, orders since privatisation are probably 50% of what is needed. So using BR as a yardstick gives a false sense of security – even if the comparison is fair.

Continues.........