What was built over a century ago has shaped today’s country, by promoting places to live or industries to work in. But don’t assume that the current network will be ideal, or indeed sometimes even relevant, to the future needs of the nation. At the very least, it will require development and adaptation.
It is essential to plan now for the decades to come, to transition progressively and effectively to the railway of 2050 and beyond.
Only a few per cent of the existing infrastructure is renewed each year - and new lines take decades to develop, authorise and construct.
At the same time, railway equipment and infrastructure is being renewed every week and will largely still be in service in 2050. New tunnels or structures, by-pass lines or whole new routes will be in service a century after that. So what is being done now is already shaping the future.
Even with good current infrastructure management, the network is not capable of meeting the needs of 2050 and beyond. It will require a programme of sustained and high-quality investment to transform it and realise its potential.
Added difficulty comes in the short term from the lack of skills development, through (by world standards) an indifferent education system compounded by the practice of contracting out (which has diminished corporate core knowledge capability).
Some global trends are predictable, even if their exact timing and extent are not. These ‘mega-trends’ will affect all developed nations and so are an essential starting point.
Their implications for rail as a viable transport mode are threefold. First, and most important, is their impact on the economic and social activity of any society, and therefore its transport needs. Second is their impact on the competitiveness and complimentarity of rail as a specific mode. And third is their impact on the sustainable provision of rail technical systems and infrastructure, and its effective operation. These are some of the most significant.
THE RISE OF ASIA
The remainder of the 21st century is likely to be dominated economically by the rise of Asian countries as manufacturing and then (increasingly) knowledge industry leaders. This is as true of India and South East Asia as it is already of Korea and China.
The established leading economic blocs of Europe and America will need to compete through investment in research and development, advanced manufacturing and other future technologies, and particularly in knowledge creation.
No country, let alone a single city region, can prosper alone - connectivity, both physical and virtual, between knowledge and industrial centres within the country and across its national borders will assume ever greater importance.
There are also implications for railway systems and equipment supply chains, both through competition for standard products from Asian companies as well as their acquisition of European companies and intellectual property. In turn, the continuing consolidation of the latter into larger organisations, to respond to the market challenge from the East, is inevitable.
The building blocks of railways - whether trains, smart systems or infrastructure - will become increasingly standardised and available globally. Any policy of devising national special standards and products is doomed to render that railway unaffordable.
Instead, skills will need to focus on integrating (and also adapting and life-extending) new standard systems and products into existing (non-standard) infrastructure cost-effectively.
URBANISATION
Irrespective of short-lived pauses (for such as the current health pandemic), the millennia-long drift towards cities which has been accelerating since the industrial revolution will continue.
The economic efficiency from centralisation of manufacturing continues, and has been joined by the recognition of similar efficiencies for ‘creative production’ which happens through teams working closely together more than from individual lone effort.
In any country, the centres of excellence will become increasingly concentrated, and (without appropriate mobility) mainly in capital cities. As a matter of public policy, it will be desirable to ensure excellence centres are spread more widely.
Apart from a very few mega-cities, no single city will have the scale to focus on more than one or two areas of wealth-creating skills and to develop them sufficiently to compete in a trans-national or global market. Even in London, Europe’s only mega-city, only financial and legal services industries are of sufficient scale and depth to be world-leading wealth-creating industries.
The consequence will be the rise of the ‘centre of excellence city’, which to prosper will need effective connectivity to cities with complementary skills. Examples can already be seen in the multiple medium-sized cities of the Rhine-Ruhr region of northern Germany or the Rondstatt of the Netherlands.
The ‘Northern Powerhouse’ region of England will become such a collective. And the cities west and south of London, from Bristol round to Portsmouth, will need to organise similarly if they are to avoid being the decaying fringe of the London region.
Only together will they have the scale of skills to compete globally. And so their mutual connectivity, and with the national corporate specialists in London, will be vital.
The social attraction of urbanisation is founded on the concentration of organised leisure activity, from participatory and spectator sport to cultural events and centres. Added to that, secondary and tertiary healthcare is rapidly concentrating similarly on centres of excellence, both from an affordability factor of infrastructure provision and the human skills practicality of specialist training and service delivery.
All these factors drive the need for sufficiently good mobility both into and around the city areas and between cities, without which urban decay will be inevitable irrespective of any short-term financial subsidies.
