Railways Blog

The West Coast Mainline is to be closed between Milton Keynes and Hemel Hempstead for every weekend until Christmas. This is so they can replace one set of crossovers between the fast lines and slow lines.

It says something about the ill-considered rationalisation of tracks over the past 30 years that they’re making no attempt to divert any services over alternative routes; all potential alternate routes (Manchester-St Pancras via the Hope Valley line and the Midland Main Line, or Birmingham-Banbury-High Wycombe-Marylebone) have had to be ruled out because those lines are already at capacity with existing services. Instead passengers must endure the misery of being bussed round the blockade, and continue their journeys to London in commuter trains.

This is a problem that predates privatisation. Penny-pinching economies in the 80s and 90s removed extra tracks and loops, to give a network that could cope with the current timetabled traffic, and no more. So when traffic increases, or worse still, another line is blocked, the lines can’t take the strain.

I can’t believe the fragmentation involved with privatisation has helped, though. I suspect there’s a bit of HSE-related sillyness that’s made it necessary to close all four tracks in the first place.

Patrick Crozier has been reading my blog! Here, he mentions my name in connection with his suggestions to privatise the road network.

It’s a pity John Major’s regime didn’t consider the consequences before ‘pressing the button’ on rail privatisation. They could have tried privatising a few self-contained routes like the LT&S running from Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness, known in BR days as the ‘Misery Line’ due to it’s dismal performance. Or started with freight, one of the success stories of privatisation. But they didn’t; they chose to take a great leap into the unknown and hastily privatise the whole lot before an election they knew they were going to lose.

Patrick wonders why I read his blog if I disagree with his politics. Is it like a car crash that I can’t look away from? Well, not exactly. I find a lot of his ideas thought-provoking; sometimes we accept the status quo without considering if there’s a better way. Blue-sky thinking is always useful; even if many ideas turn out to be impractial, there will still be some that are worth considering.

Politically, I’m a non-ideologue. For example, I don’t really care who runs the railways as long as the train runs on time to the destination I want to get to at a price I can afford. If continued state subsidy is needed to avoid closing large parts of the network leaving entire regions with no services, then I’m willing to pay the taxes needed, after all, plenty of my taxes go on things that are no use to me. If there’s a good way of running those services with a much smaller subsidy, I’m all for it.

As for my “I am not a Libertarian” quote, this is a bit of a reaction towards the large number of annoying libertarian trolls and winguts I’ve run into on Usenet and places like Pyramid Online, often teenage sociopaths quoting Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, and saying things like “Democracy is like two wolves and a sheep deciding who to have for lunch” at every possible opportunity. See David Edelstein‘s Wingnuts and Trolls page for some gruesome examples.

Reading this month’s edition of Modern Railways, I was struck an article called ‘Boiling Frogs’ about the way costs for any infrastructure projects are spiralling out of control. Regardless of whether these inflated costs are paid by higher fares or increased government subsidy, people like me (both a taxpayer and a rail user) will still end up footing the bill.

The article (sorry, they don’t have an on-line issue; it’s strictly dead-tree only) identifies several factors. One major factor is all sorts of silly rules insisted by the HSE (Health and Safety Executive). Even non-libertarians like me recognise that the HSE is a completely out-of-control bureaucracy, seemingly accountable to no-one but themselves. Patrick Crozier takes them to task over the Potter’s Bar accident.

An aside here; why does it now take two to three weeks to reopen a like after a train crash, when before privatisation it used to take a few days? I’m old enough to remember the West Ealing derailment in 1973, when wreckage blocked all four lines. It was only two or three days before traffic was running on the slow lines, while they were still working on clearing wreckage (let alone repairing track) on the fast lines. Can you imagine that happening nowadays? Along with British Transport Police’s declaring of crime scenes, the HSE is the major villain here.

To return to these inflated costs, the other major villain is the wheel/rail split. The fragmentation of British Rail into hundreds of separate companies operating trains, owning the trains, owning the track, and maintaining the track was supposed to give us a more efficient railway, according to the architects of privatisation. What rot! I’m now convinced the fragmentation was nothing but a massive job-creation scheme for accountants and lawyers, US-style pork-barrel politics at it’s very worst. It hasn’t given us a more efficient railway, precisely the opposite. Any would-be efficiency gains have just been swallowed up by this new army of suits.

What is to be done? The effective renationalisation of the unloved Railtrack (the company that owns the track) may or may not be a step in the right direction. I would rather see the wheel/rail split ended altogether, either by renationalising the whole bloody lot (which realistically I have to accept isn’t going to happen), or by handing control of the rails to the train operating companies. I realise this is still going to cause problems of track access where multiple TOCs use the same tracks, such as the eight different operators (including two freight companies) using Manchester Piccadilly, but it can’t be worse than the present system.

Is this the finest view in England? Horse Cove, between Dawlish and Teignmouth in Devon, with the seaside resort of Dawlish visible in the background. For those interested in such things, the train is a Stagecoach South West Trains express from London Waterloo to Paignton, formed of two class 159 units.

Click here for a larger (800×600) image

I’ve added a comments feature to this blog – now you can comment on my entries without having to email me.

Since so many people love taking the piss out of us rail enthusiasts (not trainspotters!), sometimes it’s fun to have a laugh at the expense of those who don’t share my hobby – take a look at this post on Dreamlyrics.

Just got back from a week in the glorious Devon sun.

I spent the days photographing trains along the sea wall, getting through ten rolls of film, and the evenings propping up the bar of the Marine Tavern, which just happens to be the local of well-known railway photographer Colin Marsden. I’ll put up some of the photos I took once I’ve had them developed.

The main attraction, of course, is the finale of Virgin Trains’ loco-hauled workings. Unlike the end of the “Westerns”, “Deltics” or class 50s, there’s a feel not unlike the end of steam about this. Once these trains are gone, there will be nothing more than HSTs, multiple units, and the occasional freight.

Naturally the photographers turned out in droves; two or three on just about every bridge. I heard from a reliable source that there were no less than forty at Cockwood harbour on the Saturday evening. Over the week I met quite a few of the SWRG crowd on the way, as well as the webmaster of the Pet Unit site.

To celebrate all this, Virgin trains have painted six of the surviving class 47s in special liveries to mark their final months in service, five of the six in liveries the class have carried over their long lives.

• 47826 is painted up like a police car to promote the British Transport Police. I’m not convinced by this one myself. Who remembers the class 37 they did in an inter-city advert years ago?
• 47829 “Springburn” is in the Inter-City “Swallow” livery the locomotives carried immediately before privatisation.
• 47840 “North Star” carries the standard BR blue carried from the mid-60s onwards, the longest-lived colour scheme BR ever had.
• 47847 is painted in the large-logo blue scheme that started to appear in the mid-1980s
• 47851 carries 1960s two-tone green. They’ve done this with the full yellow ends as carried in the late 60s, and it really takes me back to my pre-teen trainspotting years.
• 47853 is painted in the 1964 “XP64″ experimental blue – this was a forerunner of the BR blue, but a slightly lighter shade. Unlike the others, it’s not a livery I ever remember seeing in the flesh back in the 60s.

I managed to see five out of the six; the only one missing was “Springburn”, which was unwell, restricted to empty stock workings in and out of Paddington, and travelled to and from Devon behind two of them; I had Police 47826 on the Glasgow-Penzance on the way down, and XP64 47853 on the Penzance-Manchester on the way back up.

Of course, not all the photos were of Virgin Trains 47s; First Great Western have a couple of loco-hauled workings as well. There were some class 67-hauled mail trains, now apparently doomed, and a few evening freights. I even took quite a few photos of South West Trains’ class 159s; for some reason I find the livery quite photogenic, and a six-car set looks like a proper train! And First Great Western’s (old) livery HSTs are quite photogenic against the backdrop of sea and red cliffs.

I’m taking a break for a few days, down to (hopefully) sunny Dawlish in south Devon. Being a rail enthusiast I’m going to pay my last respects to Virgin Trains elderly class 47 locomotives making their final stand in the south-west of England against the incoming tide of Virgin Voyagers.

Realistically, I have to recognise that the class 47s, now nearly 40 years old, are life-expired and in need of replacement. They’d been getting increasingly unreliable and expensive to maintain in their old age, and a gentle retirement in preservation puttering up and down a short tourist line is what they deserve. But for the next few weeks at least, they’re still in front-line service, working intensive diagrams taking them from one end of the country to the other.

I have my doubts about their replacements, officially named “Voyagers” and unofficially called “Cola Cans”. I find the interiors cramped, there’s a severe lack of luggage space caused by the fact the overhead luggage racks won’t take anything larger than a briefcase. Someone forgot that these are not commuter units, they’re long-distance trains used largely by the holiday and visiting-friends-and-relatives market, most of whom come equipped with large volumes of luggage. Then you’ve got the vibrations from the underfloor engines to remind you you’re really travelling in a glorified sprinter with a pointy nose at the front. A significant number of the seats don’t line up with the windows so you can’t actually see out. And the less said about the unreliable high-tech toilets the better. Altogether they’re less comfortable than the 25-year old Mk2 stock they’re replacing. Perhaps Virgin should have refurbished their existing coaches and simply bought some new locomotives to haul them.

No doubt the some problems will be solved in time; the teething troubles with the toilets will be fixed eventually, and sooner or later they’ll take some seats out to make room for more luggage racks. But I’m sure the idea of 4-car trains replacing the existing 7-car sets is a bad idea, even if the plan is to increase the service frequency. The trains travelling at popular times, such as morning long-haul departures are going to get badly overcrowded. Are we heading towards airline-style travel, where it’s necessary to book several days in advance if you want to travel at the time of your choice?

I’m going to be travelling down on the Glasgow-Penzance between Manchester and Exeter; this will be 47-hauled all the way, a five-hour trip behind loco-haulage. In less than a month, this will be history.

All you ever wanted to know about Cornish wagonload freight trains. Some train formations from 1986 to 1991, mostly taken from my photographic archive and notes, and some purely from memory. (While some people can remember obscure third division football scores, I can remember train formations) It’s not fully complete, because I haven’t been able to dig up all the notes, but it will be updated eventually. Did you know Yeoman-liveried PGAs were used on calcified seaweed traffic in 1990?

The banner ad is meant to be ironic. And it is a really good album…

Looks like I was mis-informed on the locomotive name. 57301 is actually named after Scott Tracy, not Lady Penelope. Still, it’s to be part of a fleet, so the other names will follow in time.

One question remains – how did the photographer avoid setting off the automatic camera detector? Inquiring minds want to know.

What did this poor locomotive do to get painted in such a horrendous livery? (Photo from www.gbrail.org.uk/) Worse than that, it’s named “Lady Penelope” – it’s job is to rescue other Virgin Trains that have broken down. Why is it not painted pink and fitted with a machine gun in the nose? And just watch out for No 50031, “Hood”.