I'm sure they've got a lot more than that, but the details have not been announced yet. In particular I find it totally unbelievable that the Rail Minister, Peter Hendy, does not have some very specific plans for GBR. I expect we will learn more soon after royal assent for the bill, though some of the plans may be contingent on the spending review early next year.
The Williams Rail review was set up in 2018 to examine the future of the railways.
The result was published in May 2021 as the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail.
It is now nearly 2025. Are you seriously trying to say that it's still necessary to keep the details under wraps? And it doesn't show much confidence in GBR if its remit and structure are dependent on one spending review.
I definitely agree that the govt isn’t electrifying the network as quickly as we all here would like to see. Yes, no denying how important a factor it is to the cost base, but that strikes me as something that can be solved purely from the infrastructure owner perspective, so I don’t see how it is relevant to the organisational reform that comes with GBR?
I did not mention anything at all about electrification, but only the general cost base.
But, taking the bone, why do you think that further electrification will reduce the railways'
total costs? Agreed that rolling stock maintenance costs may be reduced slightly (mainly concerning the power unit, most of the other kit is unaffected) and that nominally reliability should be higher than diesel traction but actual practice shows that there is little, if anything, in it. The costs of fuel for electric trains can be higher than diesel, look at the cost of Electricity for Traction (EC4T) supplied by Network Rail to the train and the costs of servicing the capital tied up in the overhead wires and power supply system before trains use them. There can be years between installation and use - and in the meantime the capital spent is simply adding to the costs. There are also costs incurred in maintenance of the power supply system - trying to avoid these costs is at least part of the reason that so many de-wiring incidents have occurred. Low voltage/high current third rail is notoriously inefficient — all those juicy I^2R losses — and the presence of the third rail adds considerably to track maintenance costs. The diesel carries all of its fuel with it in a steel tank permanently connected to the prime mover.
It’s to keep all potential options open at this stage! Why announce any detailed plan and pre-commit to one particular path when you’re not even sure of all the pieces that you get to play with yet?
My understanding of the Williams-Shapps Plan was that there should be a new "guiding mind" of the railway, that is GBR: it is effectively a merger of the DfT's franchising function, the Rail Delivery Group and Network Rail.
There has been little of substance published since then which suggests that this arrangement will not come to pass — although there has been much hearsay and speculation. The published aim was for GBR to manage both the network infrastructure and a new generation of Passenger Service Contracts ("PSCs") granted to train operators. Ostensibly the logic is one of simplification and reduction of inefficiency. We'll see.
Changes in the
details of the industry, however, are less obvious. The current and future industry diagrams in the Plan show differences which seem to me to be more aesthetic than substantive. It's not entirely clear which (if any) of the existing "maze of agreements" (and as a consequence some of the "battalions of lawyers") are expected to disappear.
The big difference for the train operators is that unlike the previous franchise agreements whereby the franchisees took the farebox risk, the new PSCs will basically be managed concessions under which operators will be paid a fixed premium over their costs in exchange for delivering a detailed service specification determined by GBR. It is conceivable that the PSCs may incorporate the (currently separate)
track access agreements — maybe that is the reason for all this secrecy?
That’s why it’s so important to get on the TOC nationalisation bill passed… imagine if that wrecking amendment had gone through. Assembling GBR starting with GA and absorbing all the good practices that comes with it would require quite a different strategy to starting with Avanti and being forced to come up with all sorts of stopgap solutions to its systematic performance issues.
I don't think your prediction of the way things will work maps to the Plan's aspirations.
