Great British Cuts

UK Railway Finance

It is instructive to see that the newly appointed chairman of Great British Railways, Sir John Kingman, is a former Treasury mandarin. This does not bode well for railway support. This is a clear signal that the government sees the railways as too expensive and ripe for cuts in financial support. Sir John is sharpening his axe as we speak.

Few of the passengers who ride the trains every day think about how much the government has to spend on keeping the railways going. All they think about is the cost of the fare. They think that fares are too expensive and that they'd be better off using the car. However, despite the cost of fares, every year the British government spends about £12 billion on keeping the UK Railway system going. This is more than half of the total railway income of £25.9 billion.

Right: A UK railway finance chart as provided by the British government showing the totals of expenditure for the period of 2024 to 2025, the latest figures available. Information from UK Office of Rail and Road (ORR).

 

Cuts

Of course, the railways haven't helped themselves. Network Rail, the UK railway infrastructure manager, didn't manage to spend all the money that they've been provided by the government in the last financial 'control' period. They under spent it by 12%. They are also veery big, very slow and very expensive. They are generally just like any other government department. 

I was once told that any time you ask anyone in Network Rail a question, the first answer is always 'No'. That needs to change. Management needs to be sharper, leaner and more responsive. Contractor management night be the first place to look, Sir John.

The Future

Whatever this government decides to do in the short term, what the railway really needs is a long-term cross party approach. Railway assets invariably last from 20 to 60 years so their management and renewal programmes needs to match this. The only way to do this is to have a long-term plan for renewals, replacements and upgrades. The plan needs to be agreed by all the government parties and it should be stitched into the UK's railway financing plans for at least a 40 year period. This would require a huge change in attitude but it really is essential to replace the existing feast and famine process that makes the railway so expensive.

How Intercity Railways Learned from Metros: Part 1

A Shift

Over the last 60 or more years there has been a system shift in the way railways operate, certainly in Europe at least. The shift has come in the way passenger trains operate - instead of locomotives hauling coaches, the coaches drive themselves. Instead of the traction power being contained in a single (or occasionally two) locomotives at the head of the train, the locomotive has gone and the traction system it carried in now distributed along the train, usually tucked underneath the passenger accommodation. There are a number of reasons for this and here we discuss the path from power on the front to power underneath and how it came about. We also look at some variations on the theme.

The Traditional Train 

We begin began with the traditional train. The traditional train comprises a collection of coaches (or freight wagons) with suitable motive power attached in the form of a locomotive. 

Figure 1: A steam locomotive hauling a train of passenger coaches. Photo: The Swanage Railway.

The train is made up of sufficient vehicles to carry the traffic offering and provided with enough power for the job. For passenger operations, one locomotive is usually sufficient. In heavy freight operations, this number might go up to four locomotives on the front and even some at other places along the train. 

A good deal of flexibility is possible with locomotive haulage. As long as the train weight remains within the capacity of the locomotive(s), any number of vehicles can be attached, although there will be limits imposed by platform or siding lengths. Locomotives themselves can also be flexible, many being designed to cover a range of duties. The advantages for locomotive hauled trains mean they are the best option for many railway operators around the world, particularly for freight carriers and for passenger trains where traffic is variable and train lengths need to be variable to suit.  However, this system has its limitations, particularly at terminals.

Terminal Operation

When a train arrives at the end of the line, it reaches a dead end. The locomotive stops at the buffer stops with its train behind it. It has nowhere else to go and, in fact, it is trapped by its train (Figure 2)

Figure 2: A diagram of a locomotive-hauled train in a terminal platform. The locomotive is trapped by the train, so another locomotive will be required to move the train and thus release the locomotive. 

To get out of this problem, another locomotive is needed to remove the train, usually by using it to form another service going back along the line. For long distance trains, it was the custom to remove the train to a siding where it was cleaned and prepared for another duty later in the day. Once the train had been removed, the locomotive could be released and it too would be taken somewhere nearby to be toped up with water and fuel and it you were lucky, it would get cleaned too.

A Single Loco Turnround

It is possible to use the same locomotive for the departure of the train rather than getting a second one for the job. It did require the provision of crossovers at each end of the terminal roads and it did mean that the adjacent track had to be kept clear of trains (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A diagram of a locomotive-hauled train in a terminal showing how the locomotive arriving with the train can be uncoupled from the train, moved forward over a crossover and then run along the adjacent track to the other end of the train. Here it uses another crossover to rejoin the train and made ready to take the train out on another trip.

The use of a single locomotive will not reduce the turnround time very much, if at all, but it does reduce the reliance on a second locomotive. However, during the steam era, arriving locomotives often needed refuelling so the single loco option wasn't often used except in the more remote terminals where frequency was low and resources were limited. Today, it is a popular method of operation for heritage railways.

In Part 2 of this series on how the railways learned from Metros , we will look at how terminal operation developed.

The Underground is Closed

The persistent closing of large parts of the London Underground (Tube) system at weekends must stop. The chaos, confusion and overcrowding it causes on the odd routes that are open has to be experienced to see how bad it is. 

I first wrote about this in 2011 and here we are, 15 years later and nothing has changed. In fact, it's got worse. The Piccadilly Line regularly gets shut down all weekend to do new train testing. One might wonder why they can't do it at night and one might ask why it takes so long. Are they so afraid of their engineering that they really don't trust it without years of closures to try it out?

London Underground 2024 Tube Stock being tested on the Piccadilly Line at Turnham Green one Sunday during the summer of 2026. Although the station is in use for the District Line, the platforms on the Piccadilly side have been taped off to prevent public access. Photo: Fortek67.

Actually, it's not their engineering, it's the suppliers' engineering. Since the trains were designed in Germany. Transport for London's engineers have little idea of what's been done and whether it meets their strict London-centric standards. Gone are the days when the Underground's engineers designed their own trains, using their long experience of operations in London, ensuring that it would work pretty much out of the box and getting it into service within a few weeks of delivery.

I feel sorry for the tourists who will go home saying, "Don't visit London, the Tube never works at weekends." I feel sorry for the staff who have to answer repeated questions on alternative routes. I feel sorry about the loss of income for shops and businesses.

Whatever happened to the "customer led railway" we hear so much about? We seem to have reverted to the old "operator led railway"

There must be a better way of managing the railway's renewal programme.