Where Worlds Collide

BBC NEWS | UK | Rising costs ‘threaten rail plans’
At last, somebody seems to have noticed! Modern Railways magazine has printed several articles about so-called ‘boiling frog syndrome’, comparing escalating costs of railway infrastructure work to the fate of a frog in a saucepan of water slowly being brought to the boil. In this case, I don’t know whether the frog itself has noticed the escalating temperature, or somebody else has noticed the frog is going to die unless they turn the heat down.

BBC NEWS | England | Rail firm considers 200mph trains
First Great Western is considering building a brand-new TGV-style line to the West of England.

However, if new lines are needed, they could cost £50m a mile, which could go up to £60m a mile if tunnelling is involved.

As yet there is no information saying how it would be paid for, when it could be achieved, or how far west the new line would extend.

There’s the rub. The present line is pretty fast up to Exeter, but then takes a winding switchback route through Devon and Cornwall, with a maximum speed of 60mph over most of it. The nature of the terrain west of Exeter means there are going to be a lot of tunnels unless it does what the present line does, which is to follow the contour line.

I suspect the environmental lobby will have problems with line crossing Dartmoor. As for how far west it would go, I doubt an LGV Penzance would be economically feasible. And unless Plymouth-Penzance is electrified, a Plymouth LGV would mean curtains for through services west of Plymouth.

A Cornish MP clearly sees this:

Truro and St Austell MP Matthew Taylor said: “It ain’t going to happen.

“I don’t mind people looking at this, and if they can come up with a way of making it work, then fine.

“But let’s actually get the reality working – the trains replaced. That’s what First Great Western should have been announcing.”

Seriously, if we’re going to follow the French and the Japanese with new high-speed rail links, the obvious first one would be parallel to the West Coast Main Line, where the present route is at capacity already.

Just in case anyone at Virgin Trains thinks the only people that dislike Virgin Voyagers are railway enthusiasts nostalgic for class 47/8s and pressure-ventilated Mk1s, this post from Alice Bachini says exactly the same things that I’ve been reading on trainspotter lists like SWRG. Are you listening, Richard Branson and Chris Green?

Patrick Crozier has been to Japan. He writes about the apparent standardisation of Japanese rolling stock:

If you standardise on one design that means you can constantly improve upon it over the years. You can introduce a model, find out how it works in service, how easy it is to maintain and incorporate the lessons in the next release.

Strangely enough in Britain we also have trains that are extremely reliable. They are known as Mark 1s. They were also the product of many years of experienced-based improvement.

A lot of Mk3-based trains use the same traction equipment as the surviving Mk1s, but with a stronger bodyshell. South West Trains’ 442s used the traction motors from the scrapped 4-REPs. Similarly, some 455s (they’re the plug-ugly sliding door trains used by SWT on inner-suburban services) used motors recovered from scrapped 1940s-built 4-SUBs!

They are due to be scrapped by the end of 2004.

This is supposedly because of their lack of crashworthyness. But I bet they won’t be scrapped by then, because no-one is going to scrap perfectly good trains unless their replacements are not only in traffic but performing with sufficient availability. Which I bet they won’t be!

And their replacements? Not such a happy tale I am afraid. The replacements are to be a mish-mash of different designs from different manufacturers. They are being introduced in a rush.

There’s more standardisation than you think. Look at how ubiquitous the 170s are becoming. So far, Chiltern, Midland Main Line, Scotrail, Central Trains, Anglia and South-west trains are all running them. They’re rapidly becoming the standard for medium-speed inter-urban and cross-country diesel trains. This is probably as much because it’s cheaper to buy an off-the shelf design that something to their own unique spec, which is what the BR sectors used to do. Only company to go for something different is First North Western with their 175s, which turned out to be crap. (Hence a lack of repeat orders by anyone else). Why else are the ancient 1950s-built 101 units still running?

170s aren’t ugly either.

We could have done with more standardisation in the BR days. Can anyone explain why the a.c. commuter trains used in Birmingham and Manchester (the 323s) had to be completely different from those designs used in London and Glasgow (the 317/318/321 family, all basically the same train)?

Already, there are signs that they are way off the reliability of their predecessors. No great surprise really as there simply hasn’t been the time to get it right.

170s had teething troubles at first – the bodyshells *leaked* when it rained, but now seem pretty reliable. On the other hand, I’ve documented the troubles with Virgin’s 220/221 ‘Voyagers’, which are becoming the standard for diesel-powered inter-city trains (Midland Main Line and Hull trains have also place orders for these). Most of my complaints have concerned the ill-designed interiors, but their allergy to seawater is a new development.

The non-standardisation today is nothing on the 1955 modernisation plan, when British Rail ordered locomotives from many different companies for comparative trials. Many of the designs delivered were totally useless; a complete waste of taxpayer’s money. Some of the notoriously bad designs spent most of their time out of service awaiting repair, and were consigned to the scrapheap after less than ten year’s service. Top of the hall of shame are the products of North British, producers of such turkeys as the D600 diesel-hydraulics, which didn’t even manage to outlast steam, the 21/29 diesel electrics, expensively re-engined but *still* scrapped by 1971, and the worst of the west coast electrics, the AL4s. Other notorious failures were English Electric’s class 23 “Baby Deltics”, Metropolitan-Vickers’ class 28 Co-Bos, and the Clayton’s class 17s. British Rail managed to order 117 of the latter before someone discovered how terrible they were.