Catch a train south from Oxford and you’ll see remains of Network Rail’s failed Great Western Electrification Programme (GWEP).
Alongside the tracks are steel piles, some of them driven fully into place, others still sticking from the ground (‘refused’, in engineers’ parlance). According to the plan first announced by the Department for Transport in 2010, these piles should be topped by electrification masts and then overhead lines.
But as the project ran over budget and over time, Oxford’s electric prospects were axed, leaving train operator Great Western Railway using its expensive inter-city bi-mode trains on services that would be better handled as outer-suburban services using its Class 378 Electrostars.
GWEP’s shadow looms large over railway projects. Its problems led to the DfT axing its 2012 plan to wire the Midland Main Line to Sheffield, the trans-Pennine route between York and Manchester, and the ‘Electric Spine’ freight scheme from Southampton to the Midlands. The first two are once again being talked about with last November’s Integrated Rail Plan, but it means that England has lost a decade.
Meanwhile, Scotland pushed on with its plans and now wants more. Between 2014 and 2019, the country wired 200 miles across its Central Belt, so that all five routes between Edinburgh and Glasgow now run with electric trains. This means that 76% of Scottish rail passenger journeys use electric trains, while 45% of freight in Scotland is electrically hauled.
Progress stalled when the final elements of those 200 miles were completed (Alloa, Dunblane, the Shotts route, and Grangemouth freight terminals in 2018 and 2019). Network Rail’s construction hub at Cadder fell silent and was then converted to a diesel depot for HSTs. But more recently, work has started to wire the line to East Kilbride and to Barrhead. More wiring must follow, and Scotland is pursuing a policy of discontinuous electrification using battery-electric trains.
This concentrates initially on Fife. Transport Scotland plans to have Network Rail erect wires from Thornton North Junction outwards on three arms - to reach west to Lochgelly, south to Kinghorn, and north to Ladybank. There will be a fourth arm when NR reopens the line to Levenmouth.
Two factors drive Transport Scotland. One is decarbonisation and the other is the country’s ageing diesel train fleet. Rail Director Bill Reeve told a Permanent Way Institution (PWI) seminar last April that around 70% of ScotRail’s fleet would become life-expired by 2035. Without more overhead wires, ScotRail would be forced to either keep its diesel fleets running or replace them with new diesel trains.
That includes the Class 156s by 2025, HSTs and Class 158s by 2030, and Class 170s by 2035. Reeve also listed electric Class 318s and Class 320s (dating from 1985 and 1990 respectively), and even the newer Class 334s, in the 2025 bracket.
Class 156s date from 1987 and work to places such as East Kilbride and the rural routes to Fort William, Mallaig, Oban, and Carlisle via Kilmarnock.
ScotRail’s ‘158s’ (1989) work widely over the network, including commuter trains into Fife and the Borders as well as the Far North Line beyond Inverness.
Class 170s, dating from 1999, are their more modern equivalent. They also work Fife and Borders services as well as inter-city routes, which they share with HSTs built in the 1970s.
Hence Reeve’s conclusion for electrification: “We cannot afford not to do this, and we cannot afford to wait to do this. We are struggling to get enough electrification done to be able to replace all of those fleets with pure electrics. We are working to achieve that, but it’s not straightforward, which is why this is urgent.”
Scotland’s Fife plan is modest. From Kinghorn to Ladybank is 16 miles, while running out to Lochgelly adds another seven miles. The section from Haymarket to Dalmeny adds around eight miles. As double track, this equates to around 100 single-track kilometres (stkm, the usual measure for electrification schemes).
NR Scotland Engineering and Asset Management Director Alan Ross also spoke at the PWI seminar. He reckoned that the next six years needed 90stkm of wires erecting, at a cost of up to £2 million per stkm.
He explained: “It’s about driving that cost down. It’s about seeking out those opportunities, reducing the footprint by which it takes us to deliver it, and at the same time working across the industry. Get that core cost down and get that key benefit out, and that will continue to attract, encourage and promote rail as that real critical transport network that can meet those ambitious targets of decarbonisation, but more importantly get that modal transfer from freight in particular to rail. That’s the key prize.”
His call for Scotland to move to a production mindset for electrification merits repetition in England and Wales. So does this argument from him: “The railway is a system of systems. So, the train management and train operation, the infrastructure management and infrastructure operation, and the capital delivery programmes all have to sit together in the same conversation. If they don’t, we’re going to hit bumps in the road. And some of those bumps can be fairly large.”
It was just such a bump that upset Northern’s plans to introduce electric trains in 2018. Problems with the scheme forced NR to delay its delivery. This affected Northern’s driver training plans and led to passengers seeing the benefits of electric trains even later than planned.
Worse still was the political impact of the timetable collapse that followed, which all but destroyed trust in rail companies.
Taken overall, the cost of an electrification programme comes not only in the cost of stringing wires, but also in procuring suitable stock (whether new or cascaded) and training crews. Only when you have wires, stock and crew can services start. That needs co-ordination that is best placed to come from a central mind, likely to be Great British Railways in the future.
But before we get to that, funders (that’s governments) must be convinced that electrification is worthwhile.
Scotland has an advantage here. Its decarbonisation plan for the railway comes from Transport Scotland to Network Rail. Transport Scotland is the Scottish Government’s transport department. In England, all that’s been seen is Network Rail’s advice to the Department for Transport in its 2020 Traction Decarbonisation Network Strategy.
Above all, electrification must become cheaper if it’s to have a chance of receiving government backing and funding.
Three top-level refrains answer the question of how best to make electrification cheaper. The first is a rolling programme. The second is more time, which translates into better access to the railway.
Both have elements of holy grail. Britain has never managed to plan a rolling programme of electrification. It wired its major main lines with decades between projects. The West Coast received wires in the 1960s and early 1970s, reaching Glasgow in 1974. The East Coast followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was then the 2010s before the Great Western followed suit.
Of course, there were other smaller schemes, such as Glasgow’s suburban lines and the London-Norwich route, which built on British Rail’s pioneering AC schemes around Colchester. But never has Britain managed to move sequentially from one project to another in a way that provides the sort of steady work that securely justifies sufficient investment in plant and people to truly drive efficient costs.
