Rolling stock procurement question

[JonD]

Hi All,
I've been reading Roger Ford's Informed Sources column with interest regarding the various new rolling stock schemes that the previous government was putting in place, but it suddenly occurred to me that I must be missing something.

This may be a total newbie question, but how do the mechanics of this work? The TOCs don't own the stock, neither does the government, the ROSCOs do. So how does the government go about procuring new rolling stock, such as IEP or Thameslink?

Does it "suggest" to various ROSCOs that it might be nice if they got, say 1300 extra vehicles? Does DFT-Rail fund the purchase of those vehicles, and if so, how do they end up being owned by the ROSCOs? If they don't fund it, how does it ever get bought?!

There's obviously some link in the procurement chain that I'm missing, but I can't for the life of me work out how the Government could influence procurement by privately owned companies...

Cheers
Jon

 

[Peter Mugridge]

As I understand it, the TOC has to make the business case for it within the franchise agreement and when ( or indeed if! ) the DfT approve that then the TOC has to tender for the supply. The ROSCOs then have to make their offers based on their own business case and the order gets placed via the winning tender.

It's a bit more complicated than that in practice, though.

 

[starrymarkb]

And for IEP/Thameslink the DfT were trying to bypass the Roscos with the idea that the builder finances the stock for the TOCs

 

[Greenback]

As I understand it, the TOC has to make the business case for it within the franchise agreement and when ( or indeed if! ) the DfT approve that then the TOC has to tender for the supply. The ROSCOs then have to make their offers based on their own business case and the order gets placed via the winning tender.

It's a bit more complicated than that in practice, though.

Everything seems to be unduly complicated in the Uk railway industry. Is it any wonder that so much more subsidy goes into it now compared with BR?

 

[JonD]

And for IEP/Thameslink the DfT were trying to bypass the Roscos with the idea that the builder finances the stock for the TOCs

Really? So does the stock end up being owned outright by TOC instead of leased from a ROSCO? If so, is the government financing it? And, does the TOC in question get any say about they specification, or is it entirely a DFT party?

Thanks for the useful info!

Best regards
Jon

 

[swt_passenger]

I think 'bypassing the Roscos' would be better described as 'bypassing the existing Roscos'.

The DMU project that was abandoned included the idea of a 'DfT owned Rosco' to buy the trains and lease them to the TOCs, but this was only a short term fudge until the DfT's Rosco was to be sold.

The IEP project (in abeyance obviously) resulted in the trains being owned by a Hitachi led consortium, and leased to the TOCs. Part of the idea was that DfT would control the order rather than ECML, GWML, WCML XC etc etc all tendering separately for similar solutions.

I think the Thameslink units were basically specified by DfT (with FCC input) because the delivery timescales are beyond the various current Franchise end dates, and there has to be a remapping of FCC(T/L), FCC(GN), SN and SE to share out the routes. So none of the incumbent TOCs is really in a position to run the tender process. However there is no indication AFAICR that the units will be owned directly by DfT or a TOC, so there will have to be be something like a Rosco to finance it. Roger Ford refers to slicing the order to make it more acceptable to any financial backers...

(Despite the other thread suggesting the 'Thameslink Programme' info has been binned, everything about the T/L EMU ITT is still on the DfT website - I just can't be bothered to go through it all again looking for info on the financial proposals though.)

Going back a couple of years, TfL were proudly announcing that they would buy the 378s outright, avoiding a Rosco type deal, but once their financial people got stuck into the proposal - suddenly they decided that leasing was the way to go - although not from an existing Rosco - but it's a similar arrangement - just that TfL lease the units rather than having a TOC to it...

 

[WatcherZero]

Really? So does the stock end up being owned outright by TOC instead of leased from a ROSCO? If so, is the government financing it? And, does the TOC in question get any say about they specification, or is it entirely a DFT party?

Thanks for the useful info!

Best regards
Jon

No the idea was that the builder raised the finance (and so shutting out the banking dominated ROSCO's) they would then lease them to the TOC's along with service and maintenance contracts. At the end of the fixed contracts that would probably be in the order of 20-30 years the builders would probably dispose of them to a normal ROSCO if they could.