Fury over rail fare rises

I have little sympathy over the fury about rail fare rises. A major cost here is rolling stock. Had it not been for the mad panic over safety in the period after the Clapham rail accident, the mark 1 slam door stock would still be in service. This would have considerably reduced the costs of the whole operation. It was good for about 45 years from 1975 ie in the normal way of things the last of it would have been withdrawn in 2020. As it was, the last of the stock was taken out of service in 2005, which means that 15 years of service life was lost - nearly one-third of the total.

There were a variety of enhancements that could have been made to this stock at minimum cost to bring them up to modern standards, plus the option of re-bodying but retaining the most expensive and valuable components ie bogies and other running gear and the electrical equipment which was simple and robust and could have been made to last indefinitely. The new stock, being heavier, also consumes more electricity which has to be paid for.

One of the reasons why the less expensive option was not chosen was because the oligolopoly of train manufacturers was anxious to sell their very expensive new products and convinced the politicians who make these decisions that trains are like cars and have a fifteen year replacement cycle.

Things are going to get much worse. As has been pointed out before, the real cost of railway rolling stock went up by a factor of about 6 between 1955 and 1995 and has risen again with the advent of trains like the Pendolino, the Crossrail replacement and the Hitachi Inter City Express which has just been ordered. The latter costs about £2.9 million per vehicle compared with £6000 per vehicle in 1955. Allowing for a factor of 40 for inflation, that makes the new trains ten times as expensive in real terms. They are not ten times more comfortable, or ten times faster or ten times safer. Passengers travelling in 1950s trains normally remark how spacious and comfortable they are in comparison with the new ones.

How much does the IEP really cost?

According to RailStaff analysts at the DfT argue that the Hitachi IEP offers better value for money than an equivalent fleet of Pendolino trains. They claim that an electric IEP carriage costs £2,431,389, compared to an estimated £2.7 million for the Pendolino equivalent, and a bi-mode IEP costs £2,829,187.

This is disingenuous. A fleet of Pendolinos was not the only option. These trains will replace mark 3 stock known to have a residual life of 20 to 30 years, as well as mark 4 stock which is only 20 years old. Existing stock currently running in HST sets could be converted for haulage by new electric or diesel locomotives. New trailer cars with a similar specification to mark 3 stock, seating around 76 with a decent amount of luggage space and legroom, should cost not more than a million pounds apiece.
 
Standard locomotives such as the TRAXX are available for under £3 million, which could provide traction for newly electrified routes as well as replace the class 91 fleet if these cannot be economically overhauled and brought up to date.
 
26 metre length is also a bad choice. The Hitachi trains will be restricted to routes which have been cleared for this length, at considerable additional expense. The additional length means that the width will be less than a shorter vehicle, probably around 10 cm less, which is a real drawback at a time when more and more people are becoming obese.

140mph running - is it worth it?

I cannot find the reference just now but I seem to recall that proposals for upgrading the GW main line include provision for 140 mph running. This strikes me as strange. Although the GW main line was laid out for high speed, such has been the development of the London-Bristol corridor in the past 30 years that the character of the route has completely changed. There is little opportunity or need for high speed running because the trains have to keep stopping every 15 or 20 miles to pick up or set down passengers. The trains will hardly have had a chance to wind up to 140 mph before the brakes have to go on for the next stop. Slough, Reading, Didcot, Swindon, Chippenham and Bath are all busy and popular local transport hubs serving areas which have become suburbanised, to the point that then entire belt between London and Bristol is turning into an arm of the south-east conurbation.

Bearing in mind that costs are proportional to more than the square of the operating speed of a railway, somebody ought to be asking whether the normal top speed on the route should be more than 100 mph.

Front ends are getting uglier again

What has gone wrong with locomotive front-end design? The class 70 Darth Vader look and the Vossloh Eurolight diesel seem to be part of a trend. It is styling rather than design. Why? What is this about? The Vossloh is a development of the class 67, a simple angular shape with no pretensions - this one seems to have got into British Rail's mid-1960s livery and is none the worse for that. So why was there a desire to fuss around with a perfectly sound design?



In the early days of diesel locomotives, there were some hideous monstrosities. The first diesels in Britain were not the most elegant things on rails but eventually, a design panel was set up and some top class industrial designers were engaged, such as Mischa Black who was responsible for, amongst other designs, the Western class 52 diesel hydraulic.



In more recent times there have been some tidy designs such as the British version of the Pendolino,   by, I believe, Jones Garrard of Leicester.




But now design seems to be going bad again. What is happening?