I dont think thats necessarily accurate; network rail has been in charge for over 5 years now and it should be pulling the situation round. its undoubtably true that its spending a lot more money than Railtrack on infrastructure but it appears to me that in £ per mile of track or signalling its actually way less efficent than the private company. i reckon that in work on the ground if you exclude the major projects theres less renewal going on now than during railtrack days. I think that this is begining to show and its only a matter of time before a major mishap will result in another rethink.
Well it’s all way less efficient than BR. Just ten years or so ago, a platform extension cost a few 1000s, these days it’s a lot more. Here are a few examples from the BR documents of the early 1990s, so prices adjusted for inflation shouldn’t be that much more:
Grantshouse/Innerwick TOWS £12,000 (that’s a lineside track warning system)
Removal of Cockenzie Headshunt £7,000
Haymarket Platform Extension £2,512
Earthing work in Relay rooms £2,000
http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/BRB_ECMLCompletion1992.pdf
As a comparison recently some TOCs have spent millions and refurbishing booking halls with very little visible improvement…
Railtrack was known for not spending anything very much. The London area was of course paid for by BAA. Indeed, the track got so bad on the GWML that studies revealed that it was surprising that there wasn’t a derailment as some of the track alignment was very bad. What the situation is like now, I don’t know.
While true that the situation should be pulling itself round, the underlying problems are restrictive track layouts, 1960s signalling technology and track which is going to take serious work and investment to put right.
Interestingly I do wonder if modern signalling is cost effective. In 1883 Saxby and Farmer were paid £2,112 13s 7d to signal Lincoln area. Some of this equipment is still in use.
Using this site
http://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/
We can convert that to today’s money, which turns out to be between £146,000 and £2 million depending how it’s calculated. Let’s say £1 million.
NR has a Lincoln resignalling scheme (which admittedly includes track), which is going to cost £55 million to do away with the same area, so 55 times as much. Obviously you are going to save staff, let’s say 5 per year over 30 years, which represents a £4 million wage saving. And the new schemes will only last 30 years, compared to over 100 years (with some new post war semaphores) for the old scheme.
The wonders of modern technology eh?
Of course the real blame lays with the Tory government and the Labour Government for the privatised structure which is incredibly risk adverse, myopic and management heavy.
The DfT seems to be making a mess of most of what they touch. I was reading this morning, with the new cross country trains now not going through Birmingham in the same way, especially up the WCML, there has been a huge move to domestic flights since the timetable change.
In the late 1960s the Boeing 747 reduced costs for plane tickets, because it was a much larger craft meaning less staff were needed per passenger and was more fuel efficient. Meanwhile the railways have been moving the opposite direction with small 4 coach trains, with huge engines and weight to boot, spending millions on infrastructure to run more, when they could be adding extra coaches and filling the seats with yield management. And people wonder why costs are going up….
