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Informed Sources were playing a fun game last month. It was called ‘Ledburn costs what??'
Like the best games the rules were simple. Someone phones up and says ‘Have you heard the latest cost for Ledburn' and quotes a ludicrous number. The phonee then has to return the call, ask the same question and quote an even more ludicrous sum – assuming that you can have degrees of ludicrousness.
On one day in June, the cost went from £60million, to £118million to £132, where it seems to have stuck. Yet I seem to be the only person getting het-up about this monstrous cost.
Consider. Ledburn is a set of high speed crossovers just south of Leighton Buzzard, due to be replaced this summer. There are eight single lead crossings. They will be resignalled with Solid State Interlockings (SSI).
Anyway, back in 1991, a single lead crossover, including signalling, cost around £500,000 - say £700,000 at current prices. That gives a pre-privatisation cost for Ledburn of £6million .
Railtrack's bureaucracy, group standards compliance, Health ‘n' Safety etc, roughly double actual costs. So, say £13million.
You will have seen where some of this extra money goes if you have travelled past the Ledburn site recently. Facilities for this temporary workside included a tarmacked car park with permanent lighting, canteen, ramps for wheelchairs.
As a sanity check, Railtrack today reckons about £200,000 each to replace a set of points and a single SSI module with trackside kit costs £5-6million. So, eight crossovers plus signalling, doubled again and we get £13-15million.
A realistic 2002 cost for this relatively simple scheme, then, is around £15million. When I say realistic, I mean by today's perception of reality.
Railtrack's project team themselves reckon £132million is over the top. They hint that it's nearer £50million for the installation and the same again for compensation for the 18 possessions during the summer. So, only £100million then?
According to informed sources in Godzone, a current project to signal 20km of bi-directional, suburban high density railway in Sydney , including SSI, control panels, SCADA systems and comms, is costing under £10million.
Now consider the Cherwell Valley – the 20 miles (32km) between Banbury and Leamington Spa. Through it, run Adrian Shooters 100mile/h Turbostars and Chris Green's 125mile/h Voyagers. They run at 75mile/h, under semaphore signals, with no AWS and 7min headways.
Thanks to Messrs Green & Shooter – Old Railway purveyors of travel to the masses – plus EWS and Freightliner, Cherwell Valley is now a busy section of line again. Resignalling is long overdue.
So the train operators asked Railtrack what resignalling would cost. And the answer was £100million. No, that is not a misprint – one hundred million pounds. Absolutely bonkers.
Yet talking to Messrs G&S about it, they didn't seem to share my outrage. Resignation seemed more the emotion of the day.
This is deeply worrying, because if those who know what things ought to cost don't make a stand, the railway will price enhancements off the Treasury's shopping list. I put their reaction down to Boiling Frog Syndrome (BFS), known in the safety world as ‘creeping normalcy'.
Drop a frog into hot water and it will try to escape. Put a frog in a saucepan of cold water and turn up the gas and the frog doesn't notice the gradual rise in temperature and dies. (Please don't try to verify this at home).
To see what Cherwell Valley would have cost once upon a time, I analysed the cost per route kilometre of 10 BR signalling schemes between 1984 and 1991 – effectively, Tonbridge-Hastings to Birmingham Cross City .
Ignoring the Waterloo resignalling, the average cost before 1990 was £75,000 per route kilometre, within a range £60,000 to £83,000
In 1990/91 we had Newcastle under the ECML electrification (179 route km at £240,000/km), Kent Coast (170km at £170,000/km and Birmingham Cross City (25km at £158,000/km)
Now this is a typical Informed Sources quick and dirty analysis. Cost per route kilometre is a blunt figure; but the numbers are coherent.
Remember that after the Clapham Accident in 1989, BR's Signalling & Telecomms organisation was in turmoil. New practices increased costs by an estimated 20% and the associated admin, probably put 50% on that. Hence the jump in cost per kilometre in 1990/91
At these rates, a relatively simple scheme like Cherwell Valley ought to have cost around £5million. Adding in the RTBF we get £10million.
Even applying the Ford Factor (now officially pi) to the old BR cost you get ‘only' £15million. You don't get £100million.
Of course, if you are going to signal more trains down the route at 4min headways, you might want improve the fringe areas. This work could include freight loops at Banbury and modifications to the layout at Leamington . So let's say £20million to be generous. That's £625,000/route km, which is ten times Tonbridge-Hastings in 1984.Lets try another approach. It would take two SSIs to resignal the Cherwell Valley . Ergo £10-12million. To handle the enhancements at the fringe locations, plus bi-directional signalling which eats up SSI processor capacity, would take another one or two modules.
So perhaps £20million is what a gold plated Cherwell Valley resignalling would cost – before the RBTF.
And it's not just signalling, take electrification. Wouldn't it be handy, for diversionary purposes, if you could run electric trains between Crewe and Kidsgrove – the 8.5mile gap left by the budget-trimming in the 1966 West Coast electrification.
How much do you think Railtrack reckon this will cost – bearing in mind all the high-productivity overhead line kit already deployed on the West Coast Route Modernisation? Answer - £30million or £3.53 million a mile.
As a reality check, the East Coast Main Line electrification cost £1.8million a mile in modern money, and that included resignalling and new trains. Electrification on its own cost £335million or £865,000/mile, including clearance work.
But Crewe-Kidsgrove had its clearances increased in 1966. It doesn't need additional power supplies since the feed can be taken from each end and about a third of it is single track. Since it won't be heavily used you could string up a simple trolley wire.
So £5million tops. Add in the RTBF – such as individual ground surveys before you dig holes for the concrete bases for the masts, calculation of wind loads etc and £10maximum. Railtrack think they might make a commercial case at £15million.
Dream on. Before long we will back in the 1970s with the DfT arguing the detail on every scheme. Remember when BR wanted seven HST's for the East Coast Main Line and the old DoT, under that prince of foxes John Palmer, would only agree to two? Those times could return – if they haven't already.
Meanwhile, the civil servants in the DfT – pronounced daft one assumes – are sending their new boss on suicide missions. Announcing the Network Rail deal to take over Railtrack in the House of Commons Transport Secretary Alistair Darling said, ‘It is because of the need for long-term sustained investment that the Government will, through the 10 Year Plan, increase the average annual investment in the railways - on top of continued support for running costs - to £4.6 billion. That's over three times the annual average in the 10 years prior to 1997'.
Presumably, no one thought to tell him that if projects cost three times as much, three times the money means that in real terms nothing has changed – except that everything takes longer.