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Testing is due to start on the Cambrian Coast in 2007. But unless the production ERTMS is significantly cheaper, where's the gain?
In May, the National European Rail Traffic Management System Project Team (NEP), published its latest progress report. ERTMS is, of course, a political construct, dreamed up by the European Commission which wants to see competing rail services racing across separately operated infrastructure unhampered by national frontiers. The generic term for this is ‘Interoperability'
Within ERTMS, the European Train Control System (ETCS) is the common signalling system intended to allow a train to run from anywhere to anywhere in Europe without having the bogies festooned with antennae needed to pick up transmissions from the alphabet soup of local signalling systems.
Up here in our little offshore island, where interoperability is not a practical issue, there is a tendency to assume that all the European railways are mad keen for ERTMS. They are not.
German Railways has taken the line that ERTMS brings no domestic benefit so that if European law decrees its fitment, Europe can pay. According to Informed Sources, the head of Belgian Railways described ERTMS as ‘developed by subalterns, with no leadership, no business case and no migration strategy'.
Caution is the ruling sentiment. The Swiss tested ETCS Level 2 on 35 km of the Olten-Lucerne Line last year but then took the system out and reverted to conventional signalling.
Olten-Lucerne was a pilot for the installation of production ERTMS on the 45 km Mattstetten-Rothrist line, due to open at the end of this year. However, the production hardware will be so different from the pilot scheme equipment that SBB will install conventional signalling as a back-up. There are reports that ERTMS has slipped a year
Conventional back up was also proposed for the Lotschberg Base Tunnel, due to open in May 2007 with ERTMS, but rejected as too expensive. But there will be signals at both portals, with the tunnel being run as a single block section if ERTMS is late.
Similarly, the French and German Railways have signed an accord for the installation of ERTMS on TGV Est. But his is effectively a high speed pilot and the line will have conventional signalling as well.
One thing still bedevils ERTMS in the UK , the recommendations concerning its fitment made in the Report on Train protection systems by Lord Cullen and Prof Uff which was endorsed by the Health and Safety Executive. Things have moved on since then and with TPWS fitted network wide – and still being enhanced, the safety benefit of ERTMS is negligible.
Yet even NEP can't get away from this historic baggage. The executive summary of the progress report explains, ‘ERTMS is a train control system that provides enhanced safety features compared to BR-ATP and TPWS. However implementation cannot be justified purely on safety benefit investment grounds'.
NEP then instances four ‘good business reasons for fitting ERTMS'. So, if safety benefits are slight, why aren't the business reasons listed first as the reason for doing something, with safety as a free issue benefit?
After all, if a business case cannot be made ERTMS will not happen, particularly when the railways in Britain face financial meltdown. The ‘ four good business reasons' are:
*Renewing signalling with ERTMS will reduce costs and improve reliability
*Replacing separate older protection systems - AWS, TPWS and BR-ATP - with ERTMS will increase reliability. Note even NEP adds the caveat ‘provided ERTMS is itself highly reliable and can interface reliably with current train borne systems'.
*Cab signalling should improve operating flexibility and performance.
*Removal of line side signals will increase flexibility in signalling design and when combined with new signalling principles ‘can improve service performance through better recovery from disruption'. There is also the ‘potential' to increase capacity and less trackside equipment will mean fewer track workers at risk.
Quite simply, as it stands ERTMS is unaffordable. NEP has collated fitting costs across Europe and has come up with an average cost for a multiple unit (two cabs) of £251,000 factory fitted to a new train and £285,000 retrofitted to an existing unit.
To this you have to add the trackside interlockings (as at present) plus the radio block centre which keeps track of each train's location and speed and sets new target speeds to maintain safe separation. And the GSM-R digital radio to link it all together. Overall, train equipment is estimated to represent around 60% of the total system cost
Various implementation scenarios are modelled in the Progress Report. As with the 1995 WCML Dev Co report mentioned above, the best case is ERTMS with cab signalling (Level 2 System D) since you eliminate the capital and maintenance cost of the lineside signals.
Offsetting the saving is the need to fit every train that runs on the line with ERTMS at £250,000 a time. Or else ban unfitted stock from ERTMS routes.
From the modelling the best benefit cost ratios comes from two scenarios. In both cases installation of Level 2 System D starts with the three UK main lines in the Trans European Network (TENS), with the rest of the network following as signalling comes up from renewal.
If the TENS routes are fitted by 2015 the present value cost is £4.28billion, falling to £4.26 billion if completion of TENS fitment is deferred to 2020. Benefit/cost ratios are similar at 1.7 and 1.8 respectively. If the Treasury's 30% allowance for ‘optimism bias' is included the benefit/cost ratios fall to 1.2 and 1.3
But present costs and values at discount rates at this stage of development are smoke and mirrors stuff. And for connoisseurs of this sort of thing can I commend the business case for the EDS. This has a positive Net Present Value of between £44million and £48million over six years on a reported cost of £60 million.
How can such a trial scheme on a bit or railway more than adequately signalled by Radio Electronic Token Block(RETB) have a business case? Well NEP has put a value on the reduction of risk to the ERTMS implementation programme. Perhaps I should see if the Open University offers a degree in financial sophistry so I can explain this sort of thing more convincingly.
Not Surprisingly SRA's Executive Director, Technical David Waboso, who heads the NEP, is clear that ‘the business case for ERTMS is about much lower costs'. By ‘much lower' he means half present figures.
This is a pretty heroic aspiration, given that ERTMS costs are uniformly high across Europe . NEP believes that one way of reducing costs could be to open the market to more suppliers.
Since the whole of the European signalling industry is involved in the ERTMS programme, and we have a British chapter in the form of RIASIG (Alcatel SEL, Alstom, Bombardier, Invensys Rail Ansaldo and Siemens), presumably NEP is hoping that the Azerbaijani Signalling Apparat will be able to knock up some reverse engineered safety critical kit at a third of the cost. Dream on.
So much for the wish list. Back in the real world considerable progress has been made in the last year on getting to grips with the realities of ERTMS. The focus has been on the EDS which will see ERTMS Level 2 fitted temporarily to 218km track on the Cambrian Line.
Why the Cambrian line? Well it is lightly used which means that traction and rolling stock fitting costs will be minimised; and if things go pear-shaped during testing disruption to passengers will be minimal.
Remember too that not only hardware will be tested. If ERTMS is to be affordable long term, we will have to be able to use Euro standard production kit off the shelf. This will mean adopting signalling principles used by mainland European railways who will provide the putative mass market generating the theoretical economies of scale.
Testing Level 2 system D will mean developing rules for driving without trackside signals and RSSB has a project team developing proposals for how all this is to be handled on the EDS, including revisions to the Rulebook and speeds in kilometres/hour.
Test running on the EDS is scheduled to start in March 2007. Trial running in passenger service should occupy most of 2008, after which the line will revert to RETB.
Pretty challenging. But I have suspicion that NEP is being too clever by three quarters in implementing the trial.
Apart from testing the system, which is hard enough, NEP intends to test the privatised railway approach to the long term implementation which assumes that sub-systems will be procured and fitted separately by the train operators and Network Rail.
Thus EDS will have contracts and agreements with the industry parties involved. Network Rail will be responsible for the trackside equipment plus the integration of trackside and train-mounted equipment with GSM-R. Arriva Trains and EWS will be responsible for retrofitting the on train equipment to 15 Class 158s and two Class 37s.
For a pilot scheme this looks like a complexity too far. In particularly, the choice of the franchisee to handle the passenger train kit seems perverse. Obviously it is not Arriva which will be responsible but the Wales & Borders traction and rolling stock engineers. But if we are serious about a national rollout starting with the 125mile/h lines, the Rolling Stock Companies are surely the obvious candidates to lead, since only they offer national coverage.
Mea CulpaApologies for the error in Table 6 in my energy piece last month. In the original the total consumption for the car was per occupant rather than per seat and assumed a driver plus one passenger. Tweaking my spreadsheet to make it per seat I doubled, rather than halved the figure. The correct figure is 8.7 litres/seat which translates to the correct primary consumption shown. |