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Recently appointed Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly set the tone for the White Paper ‘Delivering a sustainable railway' when she announced its publication to the House of Commons on 24 July. Referring to expenditure on ‘150 stations in the towns and cities outside London that form the backbone of the national network' she instanced them in a post-Betjemanesque riff; ‘better and safer stations from Wolverhampton to Dartmouth , Cleethorpes to Swansea , and Barking to Chester '.
And what fun the national media had when they realised that Dartmouth doesn't have a station and the one-time ticket office which served a station a ferry-ride away was now a café. But mocking a hapless minister is to miss a more serious, and deeply worrying, point.
Ministers don't write parliamentary statements. They are drafted by civil servants. The fact that the high ranking officials within Department of Transport Rail, the men and women who are taking an ever tighter control of our industry, could commit such a howler soon wiped the smile from our faces. And reading the White paper and its supporting Rail Technical Strategy only deepened our unease.
In fact we would recommend that readers start by turning to Page 140 of the White Paper where Appendix A contains the High Level Output Specification (HLOS) and the Statement of Funds Available (SoFA). This occupies just over seven pages: a further six page Schedule contains more detail on the ‘metrics' in the HLOS, such as new safety and performance targets and capacity to be provided.
There are no surprises here. DfT Rail had told us that the HLOS would be about improving safety, performance and, above all, providing more capacity. The safety and performance specifications will simply require continuing incremental improvements. That said, moving the Public Performance Measure (PPM) into the low 90% range required will be achieved only if Network Rail can match the improvement already achieved by the Train Operators since Hatfield.
Capacity improvements are specified in considerable detail, with additional passenger kilometres to be accommodated given to the nearest million for each of Network Rail's 23 strategic routes. For the major urban areas and the London termini the extra passengers to be accommodated in the peak by 2014 are specified together with maximum average load factors.
So far, so sensible. However, by accident or design DfT Rail have complicated analysis of the SoFA. But as you can read in Informed Sources, we estimate that the funds available fall in the lower third of the Office of Rail Regulation's range of income required by Network Rail.
Our expectation is that the HLOS and SoFA will match, just, given some cost-cutting and belt-tightening at Network Rail. The key issue will be squeezing the cost those capacity enhancements into the SoFA. It may get cosy.
Dominating investment in the HLOS is Thameslink, where the construction cost has risen yet again to £3.55 billion; the overall cost, when the scheme is completed in 2015, is put at an incredible £5.5 billion. Funding for the remodelling of Reading station, the only other major scheme in the HLOS, was made possibly by postponing the upgrade of the West Coast Main line power supply, made possible because of the energy savings from regenerative braking by the Pendolino fleet.
This paucity of major projects highlights the fact that the boiling frogs are with us still. If we look back 20 years, the railway was starting to benefit from the last period of economic growth. At today's prices, British Rail's income from fares and subsidy was £5 billion. In 2006-07 it was £10 billion. Poor little rich railway indeed.
Meanwhile, the Government is determined that the role of the taxpayer in funding the railways must be reduced. It is time for subsidy levels to start to ‘return to closer to the historic norm'.
This reflects a welcome, if belated, acceptance of this magazine's regular arguments that the railway is costing five times the subsidy required during the last upswing of the economic cycle. But, the historic norm was based on historic costs, and while new train prices have remained much the same, infrastructure project costs show no sign of coming down out of orbit.
Thus, in 1986/87 the farebox provided 67% of the passenger railway's income. Last year the figure was 48%. Unless costs can be brought down dramatically, returning to the historic norm will mean the passenger paying more toward a cost-ineffective network which, despite its bulging coffers, is strapped for cash when it comes to major projects.
Meanwhile, the other 139 pages of the White Paper are a triumph of pre-emptive procrastination. In essence it sees the railway as full of ‘unknown unknowns'.
Here's a typical quote. ‘Forecasts have been wrong before, and any strategy that tried to build a rigid investment programme based on fixed long-term forecasts would inevitably be wrong again'. Here's another. ‘It would not be prudent to invest today to address capacity issues that are unlikely to materialise until two decades hence and may not materialise at all'.
True, but it was ever thus. Appeasers have always sought to put off hard decisions. But the secret of good railway management has always been to be right most of the time and today the railway is living off the capital of the right decisions that railway managers were not afraid to make and Tory, yes, Tory, ministers were willing to back in the 1980s.
We have left the worst till last. The supporting Rail Technical Strategy (RTS) recalls the old joke that the abbreviation for the Strategic Rail Authority ( SRA ) should have been ‘R' because it had neither a Strategy nor Authority.
For the ‘R' to be technically illiterate while failing to provide what the OED describes as ‘a plan of action or policy deigned to achieve a major or overall aim' is no mean achievement. Railways, as an economist once noted, are heavy engineering in public. Not according to the DfT they aren't.
Throughout ‘R' we are in a world of ‘new age' feel-good techno-waffle, dominated by sustainability and carbon footp[rints, A world which pins its hopes on moving block signalling. A world in which ‘self propelled' trains built from thistledown drive on sight lightly over tracks of differentiated quality.
In truth, we did not expect much from the White Paper, because neither Governments nor railways have been much good when it comes to peering 30 years into the future. In contract, railways and their engineers have been very good at getting on with it and making the most of the best technology available to meet the needs this side of the event horizon.
And history tells us that today's properly engineered railway will be sustainable (however you define it), adaptable to changing needs and cost effective. Two decades is a short time in railways, five years, the period covered by each HLOS, is too long to wait and see.