UK - Summer of rail chaos

[John Ashworth]

Holidaymakers face summer of chaos on Britain's failing railways

August promises to be a month of travelling misery as engineering works take hold

* David Smith and Caroline Davies
* The Observer,
* Sunday July 20, 2008

It's the summer holidays. But for families wheeling suitcases down to the local railway station, it's going to be a long, hot summer - for all the wrong reasons.

Engineering works: two words that immediately conjure up images of slow trains, replacement bus services, frustration and missed connections - are set to make August the most disruptive month on our railways. The West Coast main line, one of the two main north-south routes running from London to Manchester and Scotland, and the Trent Valley area will be the worst hit.

With fewer commuters travelling, August is seen as the best month to tackle some of the track and signalling upgrading that is vital to reduce the problem. Such disruption will not be confined to this summer. Weekend closures, already a regular feature of the rail system, will continue for years, predict experts.

Britain has the oldest railway network in the world. When Robert Stephenson, son of George, employed 20,000 men to build the London-to-Birmingham main line in 1838, the feat of engineering was compared with the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. But what should have been a head start has turned into a liability. Decades of neglect, underinvestment and a bungled privatisation have turned the pride of Victorian industry into a continental laughing stock. 'At a certain point in time,' Guillaume Pepy, head of the French operator SNCF, once said, 'you forgot your own railway.'

Earlier this year Spain unveiled a service which connects Barcelona to Madrid, a journey of more than 300 miles, in two and a half hours -top speed nearly 220mph. Arriva Trains Wales, meanwhile, has just advertised for 'high-speed' rolling stock which has a somewhat different definition. It will be expected to reach 53mph between Holyhead and Cardiff.

Rail travel in Britain is also more expensive than anywhere else in Europe, according to a study by the travel agent Thomas Cook. In February it published figures showing that in Britain £10 will buy just 27 miles of travel by train, compared to 38 miles in Ireland and 50 in France. Recently the news that fares will soar yet again by as much as 10 per cent because of inflation generated another round of negative headlines.

In the media, the railways are synonymous with shambles, if any politician's public image was so negative they would have been voted out of office long ago. The classic complaints involve poor punctuality, delays caused by engineering works and exorbitant fares. But for the rail watchdog Passenger Focus, one problem has taken over as priority. 'The big issue now is overcrowding,' said Ashwin Kumar, passenger director at the group. 'If you are going between Manchester and Warrington, for instance, at 5pm it's difficult to get on the train.'

Tim Rogers is among the lucky ones. As a fitness specialist and long-distance runner, he is physically well equipped to stand in discomfort for two and a half hours with little elbow room. Some of his fellow passengers in 'cattle class' from Chester to London are increasingly feeling the pain.

'Seven or eight years ago I had no problem getting a seat - sometimes I had a carriage to myself,' said Rogers, 44, an internet entrepreneur who makes the commute once or twice a week. 'Now there is such demand that occasionally I have to stand for the whole journey. There are times when people can't even find space in the vestibules. It shows that we want to travel by train more but the infrastructure can't keep up.'

For him and millions of other commuters, Britain's railways are going to get worse before they get any better. Figures from the Department for Transport have shown that passengers are being packed into carriages offering less space than the legal minimum for transporting farm animals. Some of the most crowded trains are carrying 50 per cent more passengers than they were designed for, with the overspill having to stand in vestibules and even lavatories.

Kumar added: 'We are at a time of improving punctuality and investment in the infrastructure, so overcrowding is basically the consequence of success.'

This is the paradox of the railways. It is the deeply unpopular service that has never been more thoroughly popular. Spurred by economic growth and low unemployment, the number of passengers has gone up by 45 per cent in the past 10 years, while freight traffic has gone up by 60 per cent. More than 20,000 trains carry more than 3 million passengers a day, two-thirds of them at peak commuting times. The number of miles travelled on the network reached a peacetime high of 30.1 billion during 2007. In addition, Network Rail, which runs the infrastructure, boasts that punctuality has reached record levels, with more than 90 per cent of trains running on time. In other circumstances this would be regarded as a booming industry, a new golden age of rail.

Now rising petrol prices threaten to force more people than ever off the roads and into trains. Car traffic decreased last year, and recent polls by the AA suggest a steeper decline this year. The number of people taking driving tests has also dipped. Tim Rogers said that, despite the overcrowding, his commute is much easier by rail. 'It used to take me five or six hours by car from Chester to London; the other day by train it was two hours 10 minutes. I could barely get to Birmingham by car in that time. The train costs £20-30 if I book in advance whereas, with the price of petrol now, it would be £80-90. Journey times have improved and Virgin has done a fantastic job with the rolling stock. People look at the journey and think the train is the only option.'

But it has been estimated that, if just five per cent of people travelling by car turn to rail, it would require a 50 per cent increase in rail capacity, piling unbearable pressure on a system which has no room for manoeuvre. On many lines into London from the South East there is no prospect of adding carriages until the platforms at Waterloo and other stations are lengthened. Tracks also require remodelling before trains can run more frequently. In the North and other parts of the country there is a shortage of train rolling stock.

The fundamental contradiction is simple. Passenger numbers are at their highest level during peace time, and set to get higher with forecasts of an extra 80,000 peak passengers in London and other English urban areas before 2014. But the network is a third smaller than in its 1950s heyday. In the following decade Dr Richard Beeching oversaw the closure of thousands of miles of track and local stations. Now, surging demand is compelling Network Rail to turn back the clock. The Airdrie-Bathgate passenger rail link in Scotland, shut down in 1956, is now under reconstruction as part of a £300m project. Once again Britain has the fastest-growing railway in Europe - but it might not be fast enough.

'We're catching up on decades of underinvestment and dealing with record growth,' said Kevin Groves, head of media at Network Rail, which took over Britain's railway infrastructure after the collapse of Railtrack in 2002. 'The railway has been a victim of its success. Trains are a convenient way to travel; roads are more congested and the cost of fuel is rising; airports have security to get through. We have got to invest to cure the bottlenecks and crowding that people suffer every day. We have an ambition to create a seven-day railway, open late at night, running more regular services over weekends and bank holidays, including Christmas and Boxing Day.'

In the longer term, Network Rail's chief executive, Iain Coucher, has announced 'the most thorough and wide-ranging strategic review of the potential need for new rail lines this country has ever seen,' describing it as 'a mammoth piece of work that will take 12 months to complete and will involve many experts'. It has set a budget target of £29bn for the next five years, with a new emphasis on extending platforms, upgrading signals, building junctions, adding carriages to trains and increasing their frequency. But the industry regulator, the Office of Rail Regulation, has trimmed that figure by £2.5bn, which Network Rail has warned, could lead to more overcrowding and congestion. Negotiations continue and a final decision will be made in October.

Tom Harris, the rail minister, insisted that £10bn has been set aside to increase capacity. 'There will be 1,300 extra carriages so that longer trains run on the busiest routes,' he said. 'Passengers will also see 24 trains an hour running through central London on the Thameslink network, improvements at Birmingham New Street and the removal of pinch points around Reading station. Longer term, we are providing £5bn for Crossrail to enable an extra 200 million journeys and are in the process of developing a new fleet of inter-city trains that will be capable of carrying significantly more passengers.'

The promise of extra carriages will not make much difference, say sceptics. David Fowler, the editor of Transport Times magazine, said: 'There is a big school of thought that the 1,300 are only just going to keep up with growth and demand and, while they are welcome, will not dramatically improve the situation.'

Philip Haigh, business editor of Rail Magazine, said: 'Longer platforms will help. New carriages will help. But remodelling track and upgrading signalling takes longer and is more disruptive, meaning weekend closures. Passengers should expect a continuation of what they are seeing at the moment for the next few years. There is no easy way. You have to put up with the disruption to get the prize at the end of it.'