The future of rail

It is a pleasure to open this conference on the future of rail sponsored jointly by Rail Magazine and The Railway Forum. If I may say so, it is particularly fitting that Professor Rod Smith should be in the chair. Rod is one of Britain’s most impressive railway policy analysts. His writing on the Japanese experience of the Shinkansen has been a major influence on my own thinking as to the potential for high-speed rail within the UK, and I was privileged to spend an afternoon recently at his Railway Future Research Centre at Imperial College.   

I am also delighted to be following Nigel Harris. Rail Magazine is a brilliant window on the rail industry and essential reading every fortnight. On my recent national rail tour Nigel joined me for the journey between Peterborough and Birmingham New Street; indeed he bought me coffee and a croissant on Peterborough station at 7.30 am as, bleary eyed, I got off the 05.52 from Norwich. There is of course no such thing as a free croissant with even the friendliest of journalists. By the time we reached Birmingham I’d agreed to write an article for Rail Magazine reflecting on the 2,200 miles I clocked up in the week after Easter on a £375 all line Rail Rover. The article appears in Nigel’s next issue, but since this is his conference, I thought he wouldn’t mind my giving you a preview of my article in my speech today. I do so for another reason: in all my experience as a policy maker, by far the best thinking about the future comes from intensive experience and analysis of the present. And by the present, I mean not only what is happening presently in the UK, but also abroad – abroad being a large place from which we in Britain don’t seek enough inspiration when it comes to transport policy. In my concluding remarks about high-speed rail, I want to refer to the travelling I have been doing abroad recently to study high-speed rail systems on the Continent and in Japan. So here goes, starting with my travels in what Bill Bryson may call this small island, but which seemed pretty large to me after five days criss-crossing it on 45 trains.

Apart from finding the experience hugely enjoyable and energising, I came away from my national tour with two main impressions.  

First, in respect of today’s train services, most offer better quality for the great majority of passengers in terms of frequency, punctuality and comfort than at any time in railway history. Of course, usage has soared over the past 15 years, with passenger journeys up more than 50 per cent putting huge pressure on parts of the system; but the volume and quality of rail services has risen significantly over that period too.

My tour included a trip on the Swanage Railway and it concluded with an afternoon at the National Railway Museum in York, just as the Tornado was arriving.  Both are wonderful examples of Britain’s world leadership in railway preservation. But our very success in preservation as a country, combined, until recently, with our acute failures in running a modern railway, have brought with them a tendency to “golden-age-ism” – the ingrained belief that at some point in the past, whether under Brunel or Bob Reid, or before Beeching, it was all so much better than now. Well, apart from some lines which probably shouldn’t have been closed by Beeching, I don’t have much desire to wind the clock back to the 1950s in terms of railway technology and service, let alone to the 1850s.

While at York, I spent a fascinating hour in the museum archives, and looked up a selection of 19th and 20th century railway timetables. Apart from some suburban lines into London in the post-electrification period, most of the services I spotted are now generally faster than in the days of old, and virtually all are more frequent.  Where services are slower, it is generally because stopping patterns have changed to include more cities and towns where there are now large rail markets which demand frequent services. Therein lies one of the challenges for the future: how to combine high speed and high frequency within constrained capacity. For example when I stopped off at Norwich to meet business and council leaders on my tour, their cry was for a one and a half hour standard journey time to London, and indeed the Anglia line wasn’t far short of that when after electrification, when the standard Norwich-Liverpool Street journey time was 1 hour 40 minutes with trains stopping only three times en route. Now there is a half hourly Norwich to London service throughout the day, which is twice the frequency of the early Nineties. However, the standard journey time has slowed to 1 hour 54 minutes because there are now six or seven intermediate stops.  But who is to say to Diss, Stowmarket, Ipswich, Manningtree, Colchester and Chelmsford – all of them big and expanding population centres and rail markets – that they can’t have a fast half hourly service to London on a par with Norwich? The ultimate solution can only be greater network capacity, as on the expensively upgraded West Coast Main Line where there is now both a faster and a more frequent service than ever before.  But on other lines in the shorter term there will continue to be difficult trade-offs between speed and frequency.         

On my tour I travelled a lot on provincial and cross-country services. You will recall that at this conference three years ago Alistair Darling said that we cannot be in the business of carting fresh air around the country. I’m glad to say I didn’t see much evidence of that. Apart from the early stages of services departing between 5 and 6 am – the 05.52 from Norwich wasn’t the earliest train, there was also the 04.57 from Inverness to Aberdeen which will forever be ingrained in my mind – every train I travelled on, including branch lines such as Newquay to Par, was fairly or very full. Despite the current economic downturn, everywhere the story was of long-term passenger growth, and how to expand capacity and develop new services on what were historically secondary or marginal routes.  This will clearly be another theme for the future of the railways.

Indeed I would make a wider point. A real spirit of optimism is abroad on the railways. Everywhere I travelled, railway staff – both junior and senior – had a real pride in their job. They no longer see themselves working for a declining industry and I was constantly on the receiving end of practical suggestions for expanding and improving the rail system to meet real demand.  

The quality of trains was also generally good or very good. Yes, I travelled on a few Pacers – and I would not disagree with the Wikipedia entry on the Class 142 and 143: “Although the Pacer is economical, there are limitations to using bus parts for railway uses” – but for the rest, the trains were fine, provided you could get a seat. Only the servicing and cleaning of toilets left a lot to be desired.     

This positive view wasn’t just mine. In Middlesbrough, a Passenger Focus director handed me a report of theirs on the new Class 185 Pennine fleet. It declares: “The message is clear - passengers like the new trains.” More than 90 per cent of passengers surveyed by Passenger Focus for the report said they were satisfied on key measures - getting a seat, the ease of getting on and off the train, and cleanliness of the train interior. “Passengers value the modern on-board facilities and the opportunity to travel in a more stylish and relaxed environment.” The report concludes, and I concur: “This should encourage the Government to invest more widely in modern, reliable trains suited to the expectations of the 21st century traveller.”

Overcrowding is the significant caveat to this positive picture – not only on commuter routes at peak hours but also on busy inter-city and cross-country routes, including the trans-Pennine and Norwich to Liverpool services on which I travelled, where in both cases a better quality of service in recent years has brought passengers flocking to trains which have insufficient seats to cope – even sometimes off-peak. On this point I simply have to say: those 1,300 extra carriages can’t come soon enough, and that won’t of course be the end of the story.

There is also an issue about the slowness of some regional routes, even given stopping patterns. They may be no slower than in the past, but it would be good if some could be speeded up to promote greater modal shift. For example, when I met Highland rail experts in Inverness, they accepted that the region’s lightly used lines could not be speeded up much without (probably) uneconomic investment. But surely, they asked, it is possible to do better than three and a quarter hours (often longer) from Inverness to Glasgow, a rail journey that is far slower than by car?  

So far, therefore, as train services are concerned, my own impressions accord with the statistics showing significant change for the better in terms of punctuality, reliability, service levels, safety and rolling stock. The task ahead is to sustain and if possible to accelerate the industry’s rate of improvement in recent years.  In all these respects, it appears to me that existing policy is focused on the right priorities, and there is significant investment in place to make a difference. In the Control Period 4 just started (2009-14) there is £10bn of funding to increase capacity by up to 183 million passenger journeys a year, with Thameslink, Crossrail and the Super-Express programme stretching beyond 2014, and possibly a rolling programme of electrification too, depending on decisions to be taken later this year. It is essential that government and industry – Network Rail, the Train Operating Companies and the rolling stock companies – work together to plan this investment effectively and get best value for money, with ORR continuing to exert appropriate regulatory incentives and pressure. 

On fares, I was struck by how many people I met on my travels were on good value tickets. None was as good value as mine. I see that ATOC think I was getting too much of a good thing and on my return announced a 15% increase in the price of the all-lines rover, lest the ticket actually become popular; but it is clearly the case that advance sales and marketing, which have exploded with the Internet in recent years, have brought great deals for passengers. There is, however, an issue about complexity and passenger knowledge in respect of fares; particularly, in my view, getting out the message that there are good value regulated walk-on fares in the off-peak period, and that it is not the case that to travel economically you must book in advance. Passsenger Focus had some worthwhile recommendations about this in its recent report on fares, including the proposal that booking offices should display prominently the standard off-peak return fare to principal destinations, and I hope that these will be taken seriously by the train operators and Network Rail. The government has also made clear that if the application of the RPI+1 formula this July would suggest a reduction in the price of regulated fares next year, then we will carry this reduction through.

So much for train services. On my rail tour I saw almost as much of stations as I did of the trains that run through them. I got on or off at 51 stations, ranging from the cathedrals of St Pancras, Paddington and Manchester Piccadilly, the subterranean delights of Birmingham New Street, the faded grandeur of Middlesbrough and Crewe, functional suburban commuter stops like Upminster and Shenfield, right down to one platform Newquay with its seven single carriage diesel unit departures a day, closed on Sundays.  From this exercise in total station immersion I gained a second overall impression of today’s railways: that the quality of stations is now far more variable than the quality of the trains that serve them, and that at some of our major stations the service level is downright poor.

The low point was my inability to buy so much as a cup of tea at Southampton Central at 8pm on a cold Tuesday evening while stopping there for an hour before embarking on the two hour coastal service to Brighton (where the station's M&S was still open at 11.20pm, showing how major station retailing can be franchised better). If motorway service stations are required to be providing drinks and hot food until late evening, why not major stations?                                          

I could add a litany of toilets closed or uncleaned, tales of the shortage or inconvenience of cycle parking, ditto car parking (where there is often available station land to expand parking which is now fully occupied by 9am), great variability in the quality of bus interchanges, the unavailability of local transport information – even of basic local street maps and bus route diagrams, which are of course standard features in London Underground stations. 

The issue here is not only the physical state of station buildings - which in many cases will of course cost a small fortune to transform – but more immediately the services provided by stations, which need not be expensive to provide, and in many cases could be cash generative.

I think we need to consider further how station service standards are set, and whether more exacting minimum service levels, and station by station improvements, should be specified. As well as getting these basics right, there is also room for fresh thinking about the role of stations as transport interchanges and community institutions in an age of rapidly growing rail travel. Our best modernised stations – like St Pancras, Liverpool Street, Manchester Piccadilly and Sheffield - are not simply Victorian shells with modern retailing: they are fundamentally reinvented transport interchanges designed for the present day.

I am therefore glad to announce today that Sir Peter Hall and Chris Green have accepted my invitation to conduct a review of station standards over the next six months, looking both at the immediate practical issue of setting service standards appropriate to stations within different categories of usage, and also at the bigger picture of the future of stations as transport interchanges and community institutions. Chris Green’s sterling qualifications for this role need no stating to this audience. His current role as a non-executive director of Network Rail is particularly valuable; this work is being taken forward with the full support of Network Rail and ATOC. Peter Hall is President of the Town and Country Planning Association; in times past he was a special adviser to Michael Heseltine and a key influence on the decision to deploy transport infrastructure, including what is now called High Speed One, to help regenerate the Thames Gateway. We need a similar breadth of vision in planning stations of the future. When I called Peter on his mobile last week to offer him this role he was on a Swedish train leading a Town and Country Planning Association study tour there, and proceeded to tell me what we could learn from the Scandinavians, which bodes well.

This neatly takes me from home to abroad for the last part of my remarks. In recent months I have been to study the rail modernisation programmes of Japan, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. There is a good deal I could say about the enhancements they are making to their major city metro systems.  But since this serves broadly to support what the government and Transport for London are doing in upgrading the tube and the Docklands Light Railway, and in the construction of Crossrail, the conclusion I draw is simply to press ahead resolutely with current investment. 

In terms of new policy, it is the development of high-speed rail in Japan, France, Germany, Spain and Italy which is of most significance to us here in Britain. All five of these countries are investing in national networks of high-speed lines, having in most cases started with a single high-speed line built for capacity reasons between two major conurbations – Tokyo and Osaka in Japan, Paris and Lyon in France.  The rate of construction is now remarkable – and it is accelerating.  France, which already has 1,900km of high-speed line, is now for the first time engaged in four simultaneous construction projects, totalling about 650km, which is about the distance from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh.  Italy is completing its Milan to Naples line and planning now a north-west to north-east line linking Turin, Milan, Verona, Venice and Trieste, extending west from Turin into the French high-speed network at Lyon via a tunnel under the Alps. Spain, having just completed Madrid to Barcelona, now has 1,600km of high speed line in operation, with another 2,000 under construction including a line north from Barcelona through – or rather under – the Pyrenees to link into the French high-speed network on a line south which the French are currently constructing from Avignon to Perpignan.  Germany is completing its high-speed Hamburg to Munich and Berlin to Munich high-speed corridors, with 378km of line now under construction in addition to the 1,300km in service. As for Japan, which of course started the high-speed revolution 45 years ago with the bullet trains from Tokyo to Osaka – a distance shorter than London to Glasgow or Edinburgh – it continues not only to build new lines to complete the national Shinkansen masterplan, but is now also preparing for a second Tokyo to Osaka line as the first one reaches saturation point.    

What is my observation on all this?  I can’t beat President Obama’s phrasemaking, and as he put it a fortnight ago: “high speed rail is happening, it just isn’t happening here.” Or rather, in Britain’s case, it isn’t happening here beyond the 68 miles of High Speed One. Just as President Obama has put high-speed rail firmly on the Washington policy map with his stimulus package, which follows the successful Californian ballot last November for a $10bn bond to start work on a San Francisco to Los Angeles line, so we in Britain are preparing the way for a possible north-south high speed line by setting up in January the High Speed Two company, and asking it to report to the government by the end of this  year with a firm route plan for a line from London to the West Midlands, with corridor options for extending it beyond to the north-west, West Yorkshire, the north-east and the central Scottish conurbations.  We intend to consider the report immediately after its receipt, and to consult the other political parties upon it, with a view to indicating a definite way forward in the early part of 2010.  The decision we take – on whether, and how, to proceed – will be the most important transport decision we take over the next year.

So the challenge ahead is to boost capacity, slash journey times, and attract significant numbers of new passengers to the railways. We need to encourage modal shift by getting people out of cars and planes, and so help to reduce transport’s overall carbon footprint. Proceeding with high-speed rail will be enormously challenging – not only on a political level, in terms of decisions about investment and phasing, and generating the cross-party consensus which I believe is vital to such a major long-term infrastructure project, but also in terms of planning and engineering. Simply getting new lines into London, Birmingham and Manchester will be a huge undertaking, as was clearly apparent to me on my tour as I spent time examining the bottleneck approaches to Birmingham New Street and Manchester Piccadilly.  In the case of Birmingham, there will be precious little spare station capacity even after the £600m refit of New Street. Considerable imagination and ingenuity will be needed – on a par with the imagination and ingenuity which built Britain’s first railways.

However, this much is clear to me: a north-south high-speed rail line in Britain is now largely a matter of dates. It will come; the only question is whether it comes in the next 15 years or the next 50. A huge amount is at stake for our economy and our society in deciding between the two, which is why High Speed Two is grappling intensively with the difficult economic, routing and funding issues which will need to be resolved before we are able to take a decision.

We have, however seen the future – not just on High Speed One, but further north. When I was at York, I learned that the Japanese bullet train has already travelled once on the East Coast Main Line. I have a picture to prove it. Alas, it wasn’t travelling on its own steam at 300km an hour – but [display picture] being hauled at a snail’s pace by a Class 66, at the dead of night, being taken to the National Railway Museum as an exhibit. I understand that Rod Smith was instrumental in ensuring that we at least have a high-speed train in a museum on the way to Scotland. So far so good.  But our vision for the future is to reverse the process and get high-speed trains out of the museum and onto the tracks, speeding north at 300 km an hour. Thank you.  

(This speech represented existing departmental policy but the words may not have been the same as those used by the Minister.)