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SRA has bitten the bullet to get the WCRM completed by the next election – but to what specification?
Where to start after a month which saw the West Coast Route Modernisation reach a new low?
Well, SRA Chairman Richard Bowker bit the bullet, recognised that the 21 st Century railway simply can't handle renewals, let alone enhancements, the way we did things before and took the decision to stop the job at key points on the WCRM for months on end so that the men in Cat boots and hard hats can work uninterrupted.
His decision (see below) caused great wailing and gnashing of teeth from the ‘old railway' community who were worried about the impact on customers and revenue streams. But get real chaps, BR is dead and gone. Bob Reid 1 won't sack you for a bit of ‘Operational convenience and Tony Blair will thank you when he wins a third term in May 2005.
Quite simply, the WCRM has run out of control on time and money, and since time is money, drastic measures were unavoidable. And, mea culpa, until I looked back to Modern Railways WCRM mega-feature in the August 2001 issue I had not appreciated the total collapse of the project in the 14 months since I interviewed the leading players on the project. Who's a boiling frog now?
Capt Deltic's WCRM Jargon buster
CIP – the core investment programme, costed at £1.35billion in 1996 money to renew the WCML infrastructure to modern standards PUG1 – Passenger Up Grade 1 which adds 125mile/h operation of tilting trains to the CIP at a cost of £150million Track access charges supporting the CIP/PUG1 package were agreed by the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising and Railtrack in October 1996. Completion date June 2002 PUG2 - The £600million further upgrade to 140mile/h operation agreed between Virgin and Railtrack and finally signed in January 1999. Completion date May 2005
Phase structure.Because PUG2 would require additional work to infrastructure upgraded for PUG2, Railtrack rescheduled the project in to Phases. Phase 1 – Infrastructure work needed for 125mile/h tilt train operation on London-Liverpool/Manchester services. Completion date June 2002 Phase 2 - Upgrades to allow 140mile/h tilt operation south of Crewe , 125mile/h operation north to Glasgow . Completion May 2005 Black Diamond review - A total review of the cost of the project completed in December 1999. This revised the cost to £5.8billion of which £1.8billion would cover Phase 1. Within the £5.8billion, around £4billion represents CIP renewals and about £1billion of this was incurred in Phase 1. Bechtel Review – consultants Bechtel were called in earlier this year for a complete review of the project. Informed Sources quote a figure of £13billion for the current cost of the WCRM |
What kicked off the brouhaha was a story in the Financial Times that Railtrack was considering abandoning provision for tilting trains between Crewe and Glasgow to save money. This was the big railway story on August 27 and to be blunt, it did not compute.
Making the route between Crewe and Glasgow suitable for 125mile/h tilt is not a huge task. In Scotland much of the work has been done.
Signal re-sighting for the higher speed is the main task. According to Railtrack, rebuilding of bridges and viaducts between Carlisle and Carstairs was completed last year. Where there are severe gauge constraints TASS can inhibit tilt. The track has to be tamped and aligned for the marginally higher sped.
And against a reported cost of £13bn following Bechtel's review, tilt provision north of Crewe was not a big item. But all the media got excited by this latest bad news. And there is always a strong whiff of schadenfreude when Virgin are on the receiving end.
So the SRA immediately put the media straight, making it clear that it retained ‘ultimate control' over the scope of the project and tilt was part of the deal. More interestingly the SRA added that £ 13bn cost in the Bechtel review ‘appears to be exaggerated'.
Apparently, due to ‘cost controls and efficiency measures' the cost is now likely to be ‘south of £10bn'. So that's alright then? Ribbit, ribbit.
But the FT story must have rattled Government, because on 28 August the Informed Sources SIGINT Canberra PR9s were picking up suggestions of a big push on the WCRM front. Transport Secretary Alistair Darling, who had been due to make a statement on roads the next day was now going to say something about the WCRM. Selected transport correspondents got advanced copies of press releases by e-mail. This column stood too at dawn.
And on Radio 4's Today programme Mr Darling did indeed start off with roads before turning to the WCRM issue. He announced that there would be a series of four month blockades which would ‘enable us to do the work more cheaply because it's very expensive to have a series of very short stoppages'. This would also mean that the upgrading of the line, ‘allowing trains to run at 125mile/h can be brought forward from 2006 to 2004'.
Shortly afterward, the office fax started chattering away and out came the a press release headlined ‘ New Rail Industry Masterplan Accelerates West Coast Works ‘.
According to the release, ‘the Rail Industry has unveiled new plans for the West Coast Main Line to accelerate current delivery of the multi billion pound programme by up to two years'. Well, naturally, the Informed Sources spin filter cut in, because two years early delivery of the basic renewal and 125mile/h PUG1 would have been June 2000 or May 2003 for Virgin's 140mile/h PUG2.
Alternatively, the tacit assumption for some time has been that 125mile/h Pendolino operation would not start until September 2004, having in the last 14 months slipped in stages through the winter and summer timetables of 2002/2003 and 2003/04. But two years would have brought it forward to the Winter 2002 timetable, or this year as we call it.
Of course, I jest bitterly. What the SRA was telling us, in an obviously rushed announcement, was that the Bechtel Review of the WCRM had shown that WCRM had experienced a Krakatoa-scale explosion of cost and time.
Obviously, if you are Bechtel called in to evaluate the project from hell, with the prospect of being invited to lead the rescue, you produce the darkest worst case scenario. In part, this ensures that you maintain the legend by coming in on time and under budget.
But projects are like car restoration: when you get to work with the angle grinder you always find the rust is worse than you feared. Bechtel have tangled with enough problem projects to know this and allow for a woodshed probably full of nasty things.
So it looks as though the WCRM had run away to the extent that at the current rate of progress it would cost £13billion in total and take until 2006 to deliver what is known as ‘Phase 2' namely the 140mile/h railway south of Weaver Junction with some extra capacity and the radio based Train Control System.
Yet, only 14 months ago, according to Railtrack, Phase 1 railway was ‘on-track' for Summer 2002 and Phase 2 for May 2005. The case for a Parliamentary inquiry is undeniable
Just consider the numbers. In December 1999, Phase 1 represented £1.8million of the new total spend of £5.8billion . And within the £5.8billion, roughly £4billion represented the cost of the CIP which renews the infrastructure to modern standards.
Note the on-going symmetry Back in 1996/97, the CIP represented 64% of the total cost including the two PUGs. In 1999 the figure was 68%.
Now the SRA says that the cost has now been cut from £13billion to ‘south of £10billion. Scaling up, If the CIP was £4billion in 1999 it has probably doubled to £8billion now. Add in a nominal £1billion for some upgrade work and there you are – just south of £10billion. Hope's Law writ large.
And the symmetry is maintained. At £9billion, the cost of the basic 125mile/h railway south of Crewe represents 70% of the £13billion full house. This says to me that PUG2 is dead and buried and with it the West Coast franchise
But consistent symmetry does not necessarily equate to reality. You can scale up a cabbage white butterfly to the size of one of those giant moths of the Amazonian jungle, but not to the size of an eagle.
Of the 1999 £4billion, £1billion was supposed to have been spent by now. Ignoring PUG1 This means that to deliver the 125mile/h Phase 1 railway by the winter timetable 2004, Network Rail and its contractors will have to spend £7-8billion on infrastructure renewal over the next 24 months.
I make that £10million a day. Ooops, that sounds like a 747 sized cabbage white suffocating under its own weight. And if you say a third of the CIP is for north of Weaver Jct, it doesn't seem any more feasible.
These numbers also kick the compensation excuse into touch. If compensation is half the cost, then TOCs will be getting a couple of billion a year. The total revenue of Virgin West Coast and Virgin Cross Country is only around half a billion a year
Of course, the elimination of PUG2, combined with the results of the SRA's current route capacity study, bring in secondary savings. Getting PUG2 past the Regulator had meant additional commitments to provide the famous 42 extra paths. This required a further six miles of quadrupling in the Trent Valley plus work at Northampton and Nuneaton which would take until 2007. Now, the SRA will allocate paths between operators
So we wait to see what the SRA's major breakthrough will provide by September 2004. We are told they will include greater frequency and capacity, with improved journey times and extra train paths available. A half-hourly London-Stoke service is instanced.
I reckon it will be WCML Lite, with 125mile/h north of Weaver Jct put back to 2006 and several of the resignalling and remodelling schemes on hold. Note that in the SRA list there is no mention of a blockade for Rugby remodelling, for example, or sundry other works mentioned in the August 2001 feature.
Older readers may care to draw a parallel with the original 1966 electrification.