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In 1943, an American laboratory working on a substitute for natural rubber came up with a strange putty. Moulded with the fingers could be shaped like modelling clay, but if dropped on the floor, bounced. Attempts to sell this unique combination of properties for industrial applications failed and so, in 1950 a new toy was born – silly putty.
Today in this country we have the railway equivalent of silly putty, particularly when it comes to capacity. Politicians of all parties agree that the railways have a role to play in a greener future by getting travellers out of planes and cars. Yet with overcrowding already endemic on the busiest services, there is no concomitant commitment to providing additional capacity other than lip service to a putative North South High Speed Line.
So, in the short term, the railway bounces, rather than stretches, pricing passengers off the busiest trains. We hasten to add that where fares are not regulated it is to be expected that the laws of supply and demand should apply to rail passenger services as much as low cost airlines.
It is often forgotten that the railways pioneered the yield management techniques for which the Easyjets and Ryannairs are nowadays known. But there are limits to the extent to which pricing can spread the load. And if, in future, rail is demanding a premium at the time you need to travel, then modal shift is not attractive.
Which is where we come to the other attribute of the silly putty railway, the slowness of real change. One of the successes of Government policy has been the transfer of responsibility for the Rail Utilisation Strategies from the former Strategic Rail Authority to Network Rail.
With its demise approaching we detected signs of a scorched earth policy in the RUS that emerged from the SRA . Network Rail, with its feet firmly on the ballast, is actually applying cause and effect in the RUS published to date. If freight growth of x is predicated and the Mayor of London was to increase passenger service frequency by y on the North London Line then the answer is this list of projects.
But translating aspiration to commitment, let alone investment, is desperately slow, in large part because funding of the railway is agreed in a series of discrete parallel processes. Franchises are let for seven to 10 year terms on the basis of detailed service specifications. Network Rail's funding is determined in detail every five years under Periodic Reviews. Every so often the Government comes up with a white paper on railway policy or transport strategy.
So once a franchisee has committed to a subsidy/premium/profile, or Network Rail has been funded for another five years, change is almost impossible to accommodate. The putty has been moulded to a new shape and if required to be changed in anything less than five years bounces around frantically.
One organisation to acknowledge this inability to respond to changing demand is the Office of Rail Regulation. Its latest consultation document on ‘ Enhancing incentives for continuous improvements in performance' hides some challenging proposals behind its anodyne title.
In particular, instead of simply ‘delivering the HLOS' in the next Control Period, ORR thinks that Network Rail should be encouraged to modify its capacity targets if emerging demand varies from the assumptions in the Government's High Level Output Specification.
Compared with the alternative of making adjustments at the start of each five year Periodic Review, this is pretty radical stuff and likely to be anathema to the neo-Stalinist Ministry of Railways. But there is more to come
ORR wants to move decisions on capacity ‘closer to the customer' and make Network Rail more responsive to its customers' needs. For example, the infrastructure owner's income could be linked ‘explicitly' to the passenger and freight operators' revenues with Network Rail sharing directly in ‘some measure' of operators' revenue growth. As a fall-back ORR suggests the linkage could be to capacity related measures such as ridership and freight tonne miles.
But there is more to capacity than infrastructure. There is no point in providing extra paths or longer platforms if the seat miles remain the same. While the freight operators have a free hand when it comes to increasing capacity, a TOC frantically running in the hamster wheel which is the modern franchise can barely draw breath to ask the Ministry of Railways if it can modify the premium/subsidy profile next year to cover the initial losses while ridership builds up to the point where new revenue covers the leasing and operating costs of extra trains.
With the Eddington Report on transport running late, to be followed by the HLOS and yet another railway white paper in just under a year's time, nothing seems likely to change this side of the 2008 Periodic Review which will come into effect on 1 April 2009. So, in the meantime the best we can offer is an apocryphal anecdote.
On holiday in Spain Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander meets his Spanish opposite number Magdalena Alvarez. Over dinner, talk moves from railways to the linguistic differences between the two countries. ‘Tell me Douglas , does your Railways Directorate use any terms similar to the Spanish word “manana”, she asks? ‘Yes', he replies, but nothing with the same sense of urgency'.