Trouble on the Line. Equinoxe. Channel 4. (1990)

when we're on maximum power we have something with the region of 3050 horsepower using the microprocessor giving full power until it gets to one to five mile per hour which is sat there on the clock we were served over 16,000 sandwiches would go on trains and we sold to our customers British Rail is a company under siege from outside we hear of high fares late overcrowded and slow trains but locked into a largely Victorian network is a system trying to break out in 36.2 message it's a system that straddles the nation a system operated by a blend of Technology and human effort it is run on a managerial technical and political knife edge that often leads to trouble on the line perhaps this is the perfect transport system it simply moves spare parts in and out of a store like a railway it is a guided network but unlike a railway it's silent robots are directed by wire and controlled by a central computer this system operates unaffected by fog staff shortages furious passengers or rush hours its owners Leyland DAF can operate it and develop it according to their business needs making their decisions unhindered by government departments or meddling politicians British Rail operates in a hostile world it's a system striving to meet government targets to make profits yet remain competitive in a ruthless transport market historian Corelli Barnett well this government in particular does not believe in state subsidies and state aid and state intervention in that it is really only going back to what was true in the 19th century in the original heyday of British Railways but even other governments which do believe in Satan intervention on the whole starved British Rail of money so what you had in Britain is that the state has never really had a national view of the rail system and was not being prepared to put in long term investment in backing she's complete contrast to Europe the editor of Railway Gazette Richard hope the our investment is rising now it is coming up but so much of that is simply a backlog correcting investment that wasn't made in the 1970s and the early part the 1980s be are still has a long way to go to catch up with the kind of railway they have in France or in Germany railways everywhere are in direct competition with to Transport Systems roads and aircraft yet in Britain where government is committed to not favoring any particular mode railways are at a disadvantage technical editor of modern railways Roger Ford I think that the government talk of not subsidizing against other modes is totally fatuous because who pays for the upkeep of a light used roads in rural areas roads I have to be relayed etc and there perhaps use by tool and roads and the tractor once a week on the other hand railways to maintain them is considered to be a heavy load on the public purse and there isn't a level playing field investment is biased because of the fact that it's got to be investment from in the railways own turnover nois yes that roads have to pay for the investment in the roads depreciation it's a very difficult situation and a totally artificial one which works against railways the present government authorizes investment it isn't in the form of a grant it's merely letting BR spend the money that it can earn so to spend more money be eyes to earn more money the need has to raise his prices cut its costs so therefore the person who eventually paid is the customer so what is a railway this is the permanent way the rails still known as roads are the very basis of the system their structure governs everything comfort speed and even the type of trends that can run intercity Performance Manager Bob Clark the track structure is made up of the rail the sleeper the ballast and the clips that hold the rail to the sleeper and modern railway track is essentially a carbon steel rail which weighs 130 and Z yard is a resilient pad which cushions the effects of the rail on the sleeper the sleepers modern sleeper is a pre-stressed concrete sleeper which weighs around a third of a ton that sits in granite ballast usually twelve to fifteen inches deep depending on the category of the railway the main purpose of having the ballast there is to provide support for the track it enables the geometry of the track to be maintained and it provides free drainage medium for getting water away from from the railway take for example a mainline route like these Coast Main Line we would expect the rail to be lasting something like 20 years before it starts to get tired we would expect the rail pads to be lasting between five and ten years we would expect the sleeper still has 50 years at least modern concrete sleepers that is the bast we would clean about every 15 years but at that point it's still serviceable for lower category lines and a policy we have now is to transfer the material at approximately those expiry dates down to like a tree line where they can still be serviceable for many more years with lower speed and lower Tonys traffic the trains that run on the rails are the point of contact between customer and system a system that doesn't always seem to run in the passengers favor because to British Rail the system belongs to one of four business sectors created to give management a focused commercial approach intercity network southeast rail freight and provincial now called regional rail wets sector ization means four separate networks or companies running on one system business editor of the London Evening Standard Mike Smith the difficulty with sector ization is that it once again places the emphasis on short-term profit whereas you are trying to provide a long-term public service the corporate plan renegotiating the terms of the corporate plan has placed the emphasis on short term even I've made that emphasis even greater on the whole it's been a very good thing for Br it's introduced financial discipline and it's introduced better management better power more power for the commercial side of the railway to get what they want from the engineers and the operators the problem arises when it's taken too far and the there is no overall corporate control at the boundaries between the sector's and I think the classic example here is timetabling and connections between intercity and provincial intercity is just going its own way and provincial is having serious problems in trying to adjust their timetables to make connections and very often when they do make connections if what if the provincial train is running late intercity won't wait for it that the the traveling public who don't understand these subtleties find this very difficult to cope with and very difficult to accept this is not part of British Rail but it does conform to most of the criteria now seen as essential for efficient railway operation it responded to a market need the need to provide a link between Docklands and London's tube network the Docklands Light Railway is a competitive solution and like the wire-guided spare part system it is completely automatic there are no drivers customer services manager mike ambrose the railway feeds off a 750 volt further out which is the great conductor Ralph you can see we have 11 trains and nine trains run during the victor also each station there is a brown box in the middle of the forefoot which is called a duck in data link once the trains pass over this stop index link it identifies a train at the station and also gives data regarding what's what's B the Train should go to the next station also there are our speed monitor loops along 7 half mile route of the railway that's the black wire which loops off at certain distances there's a timer on board the train so the train must meet one of those loops within a second it meets it over second basically transplanted slow it meets it under second the trains going to pass and that's how the railways run although only three years old the doctrine system has already outgrown itself to cope the lines and stations are being extended and a more sophisticated signalling system is to be introduced director Jim Gates the present system was fine for the initial railway which was to run nine trains around the system in the future we will be running about 30 trains around the system there'd be that much closer together we have a central Junction within our system where trains converge into the same route that is very difficult to manage in signalling in control terms and the system we're going to which would be the first of its type in the UK but it has been applied elsewhere will rather than having fixed fixed blocks keeping trains apart it has a moving block so in fact it keeps a predetermined distance between trains depending on what speed they go when they built this railway there was 77 million pounds and P they said what can we have they went out to tender and at one time they were thinking trams down the Whitechapel Road but what they got was this super little railway fully automatic very well used of the of the 77 million only about 10 or 12 actually went into the trains and the city motor went on the property but because it was a case of not buying a railway but buying 77 million quids worth of railway it was I think it was the first railway that exceeded its specified loads on the on the second day after opening and as a result everybody's had to work very hard to to expand it which is a pity because when the railway an automatic railway runs it runs extremely well but when you are trying to rebuild a railway when you're trying to increase its capacity three times threefold when you're trying to extend it to run into the city you are mucking about with the automated system reliability goes what is needed is a much more of an integrated plan so we know where we're going to be what we're actually providing transport for saying in 10 years time so when we're not working in the dark we're not continually having to upgrade different bits of the system at different times that we are going forward with an integrative approach so that so we've got across the board standard if you like of reliability and flexibility and quality of service to passengers at the end like British Rail Docklands has suffered from a lack of long-term planning vision the custom-built seven and a half mile tramway system is fine for a light self-contained railway but it's computer technology could never cope with British Rail a system of over twenty three and a half thousand miles running trains of every shape speed and length signalling governs the speed and the number of trends that can be run on any piece of track more sophisticated signals improve the efficiency of the entire system that you are there the cowl the lines between your box and mine well I've got the latex place on the line Victorian technology relied on interlocking beavers and men boy the cow on the line FIFA shop okay why today signalman scan BDUs in central control rooms commanding hundreds of miles of mainline out on the track this modern landline signal looks like a simple traffic light but it's not as the train passes it changes to red commanding any following trends to stop when showing one yellow light it means stop at the next signal which is red to yellows means the next signal has one yellow so be prepared to apply the brakes the driver sees the signal and gets an audible warning if he fails to press a cancel button after a warning of a red or yellow signal ahead the train will automatically break this system called AWS advanced warning system is activated by magnets on the track it has made the British railway carriage statistically one of the safest places on earth but the signals and AWS only advise the driver he remains in control its weaknesses that the driver can cancel the system and still pass a red signal to prevent this British Rail is now developing new signal technology ATP automatic trend protection project manager Bob Walters the attractions of the system that we are contemplating adopting and which we are piloting currently is that it works in parallel with the existing signalling and can therefore be installed without alteration to the existing signalling the reinvestment in which would represent billions of pounds this provides the additional safety without having to replace or repair any of the existing signalling and can therefore be introduced at the far quicker rate than would otherwise be the case with automatic train protection an on-board computer advises the driver if he is not matching the computers model events unlike AWS the computer takes control and applies the brakes instruments like this will be in the cab this tells the driver what's going on the white pointer is a speedometer the green light shows the maximum speed limit on the track 60 miles per hour and the red display shows the target speed for the track in this case zero in other words stop with ATP the driver cannot pass this red signal that power is removed from him part of the reason for the development of automatic train protection is that British Rail has been haunted by three accidents Clapham Pearlie and Belle Grove drivers experience has always enabled them to interpret the line in the case of Pearlie and Belle Grove driver misinterpretation is what led to the crashes automatic train protection would have prevented them but ironically it was the Clapham accident inquiry which recommended adopting a TP even though clapping was caused by faulty workmanship suddenly a TP became a priority and the politicians rushed to reassure the public I think that to have a TP is in itself called quite a desirable thing many of the other European railways are now moving towards a TP it is part of the the modern railway but those railways are maintained by government as essentially as public services and in that context it is quite feasible for the governments to insist on very high safety standards where it goes wrong is if you demand higher and higher safety standards where more abhorrent money is spent for less and less return will you demand that from a railway which is going to have two shared business is going to have to put traffic from the railway onto the road because it can't balance its books then the whole thing becomes not merely ridiculous but self-defeating the problem is is it to impose it as a political will when in fact the number of accidents it would prevent is minimal is quite irrational BR is going to have to find another billion pounds to pay for this and that could be a conservative estimate the numbers rise every time you talk and think about it but whereas that billion pounds going to come from I suspect it's going to have to spin the money out of its own guts as before in many instances whether the government will make that money available is I think very doubtful so basically the customer will end up paying for their own safety benefits and their very minor safety benefits at that this racing driver is attempting to shave one hundredths of a second off each lap by braking at the last possible moment and accelerating to maximum speed as quickly as possible without losing grip the secret is driving smooth high speed trends employ the same technique but save minutes rather than seconds this is British rails new 140 miles an hour locomotive class 91 it's not the driver but a microprocessor that maintains grip traction inspector Gordon Linford speed now 107 the racing car weighs less than a mini the Train 375 tons it has reached 125 miles per hour at full power in just under two and a half minutes you already feel the power started to decrease on the 91 this is getting gradually up to the 1 to 5 bar there we are the actual power light still remains lit but the mic processor has already eliminated any powder touching moment but there is a residual amount of power to the motor to keep it up that constant speed like the microprocessor has accelerated the 91 without wheel slip the faster trends accelerate to top speed and the quicker they stop the more you can get on the line the more on the line the more money British Rail makes so if signals can automatically stop the train and micro processors pilot it why not light Docklands remove the driver and let technology take over intercity 2 to 5 project engineer Andrew hickton in engineering terms is not difficult it's possible that's been shown but in terms of a high-speed railway like this I don't think I would like to ride on a train during 140 miles an hour with no driver just as I don't think about on an airplane I'd like to travel without a pilot although it's perfectly feasible to take off fly and land an airplane without a pilot public safety perceptions of changing so radically you only have to see the fuss about aircraft safety with these computer systems I would have thought that it was not on intercity have built class 91 at its train for a specific market London beads Umbra its development is an example of how the creation of business sectors has focused commercial effort but this process has caused casualties speed link is a sub sector of rail freight it's a system common in Europe wagons collected from private industrial sightings are marshaled into one long train like this for the rest of their journey but it loses money and might be closed any reduction in Freight on the railways will inevitably move that Freight onto the roads now one estimate is that cutting back this little bit of speed link will put an extra three million tons of freight a year back onto the roads environmentally that's crazy British Rail has a problem speed link will be essential when the Channel Tunnel opens because customers can pack their own wagons knowing they will reach their destination on time and safe but British Rail can't afford the small locomotives to move or trip the private wagons to the main yards where big lurgha motives take over it costs money trying to use big engines like this to pull short trains while tripping and it now seems likely that the speed link system will be abandoned a mere three years before the tunnel opens well the freight side BR is relying very heavily on private industry wagon hire companies and transport private transport companies to invest in terminals and in wagons and they've just dealt in the process of dealing a very damaging blow to the competence of those people by withdrawing the speed link wagon load service and rendering a lot of past investment by these same companies useless and worthless and I can't see how are they going to persuade people to invest to the extent forecast in Channel Tunnel traffic ironically Ralph rates Channel Tunnel sub-sector is already investing in wagons some from France Ralph rates Bert Blissett we are leasing some of these wagons to operate firstly a high-performance service within Britain and with day one of the tunnel to operate a service between the Continental mainland and Brittany having the same characteristics of speed and carrying capacity this wagon combines the two features of a low platform height and a very high speed capability in this instance 140 kilometres per hour which is roughly 90 miles per hour there is a souped up version of the wagon capable of 100 miles per hour and trains formed of these wagons run every night between having you on Paris having you on Lille and so on which makes them the fastest freight trains in the world the speed gives us two things firstly the ability to compete with road haulage in the marketplace over certain key routes where speed really is of the essence the ability for example to get from Paris and Frankfurt to London overnight and secondly it enables us to pass freight trains between passenger trains which themselves are running even faster a freight train of conventional speed say 60 miles an hour is much more difficult to path as we call it between passenger trains which are running at hundred and twenty-five so rail wears only work when everything is taken into account fast trains can't work safely without a signalling system to match Freight has special needs and yet must interlock with the fastest passenger tight ends when Britain is linked to the European system the efficiency of the entire system will depend on the quality of our rail infrastructure but European trends freight and passenger will emerge from the tunnel onto the most archaic lines in Britain Channel Tunnel it seems to me will only have the effects on British Rail that British Rail itself and the government and and British public opinion allow it to have the other words it's lots of ice that the tunnel it is the constraints on rail development in Britain which will determine what British Rail can do it's true that about a billion pounds is being spent on a passenger terminal at Waterloo on trains and on some limited improvements to the railway between London and the tunnel but they are very limited improvements they really don't amount to any more than bringing that line up to a standard which is lower than the standard of equivalent intercity lines north and west of London we're looking at channel tone development through the wrong end of the telescope or you could say the wrong end of the tunnel in my view we're looking at it purely on the short term commercial profit if you look at what's happening in France I think in the next four or five years they're going to spend four billion pounds on improving and already very very good high-speed rail network we are still haggling about 73 miles of high-speed network the specter that haunts British politics is of domination by the Europeans railways for years the British symbol of inefficiency and poor quality are now seen as environmentally economically and socially an essential part of a greater Europe political opinion in Britain has yet to catch up high-speed rail link is way in the future all the traffic demands indicate that extra capacity will be needed in the southeast we understand that but where it runs when it's open is a matter for debate or decision and announcement shortly but the pressure and feeling from Europe seems to be that we're being slow off the mark and it will be needed much earlier well we're running this rail network not the Europeans clothes every day I just can't guarantee when it's a temperamental ghost I'm not the headless Baron no I'm from Barker's I think I may be able to help yes I think you might you see with an unreliable ghost it may be better to offer weekend breaks rather than hourly visits and with a flexible loan who could develop accommodation and even catering let's discuss this in my office if you're running a small business or thinking of starting one talk to Barclays sellotape original we then find out take one stand by take running and cut and again okay that's a wrap only sellotape original comes with a unique end finder oh yes yes it's definitely the six amp view shorting through the alternator unless of course you've got too many teeth now you can join the AAA from the comfort of your own home just bring a eight hundred nine one nine five nine five baa we're all you need to know with air UK you get a choice of seven flights a day from Gatwick to both Glasgow and Edinburgh and seven flights back it could be just the lift your business needs air UK where business takes off I will do that if I were you Rupert if the wind changes you'll stay like it well I'd get rid of in love you lying onto an easel right I think you should make a nice cup of tea it seems that everyone in the world has plenty of advice to give take the body over the box you're gonna take the money oh the question is which is the right advice and where can you go to get it oh no Peter there's something in my try pulling your eyelid down as far as it'll go and then blowing your nose power and poetry go far were you at the Halifax we've probably given more advice on mortgages than any other lender with all that experience and our wide range of plans and options we believe we can give you the best advice on your mortgage try pulling your eyelid down as far as it'll go then blowing your nose the Halifax for mortgage advice you can bank on for those who like their tea to tastes like tea finding the word decaffeinated might be somewhat disconcerting but when you gently decaffeinate your tea within hours of picking it then getting a modern cup of tea to taste like a proper one Oh looks silly Lyons well it isn't hard to swallow to Lyons decaffeinated tea keep the flavor keep the taste now you know to what degree BMW tests their paint work the BMW 3-series from twelve and a half thousand pounds to 160 Celsius we're running this trail network of the Europeans London is a kind of railway blood clot between our industrial heartland and Europe London's rails were never intended to and probably never will offer a clear way to Europe it's the largest commuter system in the world but it also needs investment to keep its customers without which they too might find European cities more attractive director of network southeast Chris green I think I would invest in more railway infrastructure in the central London area it's obviously going to be the bottleneck to all future transport development in London and if we're not careful it will eventually drive people out of London into areas like Paris and Frankfurt if it becomes too difficult to get into London most European cities have purpose-built lines under their sentence London Europe's largest city has one a once forgotten Freight tongue the tunnel has been reopened and called Thameslink the new trends can run from Bedford to Brighton through London's heart what we really want to do is a to expand Thameslink into a real metro and that means do VAR ducts new flyovers and a train every three minutes and the Russia but I think more important for London we want to go for the big east-west cross rail and that I think is really hitting the top prize this would give us an express railway across London from Paddington to Liverpool Street we could move 48,000 people and our extra journalists Richard hope and Roger Ford I think the real problem for Network South East is that they don't have a remit to find put it that way to make life in London more civilized they don't have the kind of remit that the Dutch railways has - quite definitely carrying more passengers to increase the number of people that are moving by rail specifically to reduce road congestion there isn't the link there in this country and that link is very necessary to make sure that network southeast knows what it's doing knows where it's going and it should be guiding network southeast fares fares policy and it isn't a guide to the success of a railway is the number of customers carried in comfort bottlenecks will limit this capacity this is one of the worst for over 100 years borough market junction outside London Bridge has reduced travel to a crore solutions are not new British rails Roger brassiere we do have a report here made on behalf of the South Eastern Railway perform a private company but on the railway behind us here by John wolfberry and Ajay berry or consulting engineers and this is dated 1894 and it contains a number of alternative schemes for trying to do just what we are still trying to do which is get the trains through this bottleneck rather easier and better and quicker and in fact if you open it up one perhaps of the most fascinating is this one here where the other side of London Bridge in order to sort the traffic out as an approach London Bridge station which was part of the problem they were going to double back the bar gaps down in the where the old spar Road station used to be down towards solid palm but at last relief is at hand Planning Manager Richard mallets well in the background here you have the double track viaduct spanning the borough market which carries the service into Charing Cross and what we need to do is provide an additional pair of tracks over the section which means repeating what the Victorians did which is to put a viaduct over the markets which you see behind us here and that would allow us to run both Thameslink and sharing cross trains over the section in the B cars we estimate that some 15,000 people would use the new link that it will be created between London Bridge the city and Kings Cross during the morning peak 3 hours so that's a substantial benefit and a significant relief to congestion particularly on the northern line which provides the alternative route on the Underground on the trains its technology to the rescue frustrated commuters will get more elbow room with a new generation networker under the government's financial rules they are couldn't justify new trains to increase capacity it was only through new technology in the form of three-phase drives which recover energy when you break that B I was actually able to go ahead with a capacity expansion now in a system where you depend on new technology to provide more capacity because the financial rules won't let you do it with old capacity and I would say thought that suggests that they're not being allowed to address the future in a logical way lucky to get a seat networker project director Jim vine we have a severe overcrowding problem on our lines into Cannon Street and Charing Cross at the moment and many of our trains up to about 50% of them are well overloaded beyond any agreed limits with the Department of Transport either we had to provide a considerable amount of new infrastructure like widening and putting more tracks on existing viaducts and central London rebuilding terminals like Charing Cross where there isn't the land available or we for lengthening trains the most cost-effective way was to extend the present ten car trains to twelve car trains even that is involving of course about 150 million pounds worth of inspector on the infrastructure now we've ordered four hundred vehicles and there was an option for another two hundred seventy six to be exercised last February now it won't be exercised for the end of this year all the time investment plans that have been announced slide back the reason they slide back is because of short-term financial pressures overriding the long-term interest of the railway being a bulk people-mover has a downside empty trends in sidings not earning during the day Network southeast has vigorously marketed leisure travel to keep these trends busy and cut losses with the extra revenue government demands the sector must eventually run without subsidy but the downturn in the economy has reduced off-peak travel so who will pay journalist Mike Smith I think there's no question that the customer will be paying an increasing amount in railway fare so I think it's pretty obvious where the cutbacks in taxpayer support will come from it will come directly from the customers pocket with the exception of major railway construction under central London if that takes place it's the passenger who's going to pay for the future of the railways that is the government's policy to cut down continuously the amount of public money going in and make the customer pay unlike Network southeast on this railway there is no Russia no passengers and their bottlenecks this trend carries nothing but Koch called merry-go-round it's a system for the continuous flow of coal from mine to pass - the Train is just a system for moving it it's what railways were invented for ray'll Fred's cold sub-sector is in direct competition with low-cost road haulage to survive in this market Notting Lee depo in Yorkshire like others in the sector is dedicated totally to the system its staff locomotives and wagons do nothing else area manager Eric straw basically we carry eleven hundred and sixteen tons in each train which incidentally is 45 lorry loads of 38.5 timorous with one guy supposed to 45 lorry drivers and we move the call of five days a week and also Sunday night to the customers requirements the customer advisors as each week in respect of the tonnage that he wants for the following week we get that advice at 1600 on a Wednesday we formulate a train plan employing 116 drivers 44 train prepare as 17 locomotives and wagons sets to meet that train plan presently we're moving 350,000 tons in a week but we can move up to five and a 500,000 tons per week not in this merry-go-round system is virtually a private company this is a private company foster Yurman chorister and sell it in bulk rail is a cheap and reliable where of moving it to the marketplace as of private enterprise they were able to buy the best solution to suit their needs their own trucks and American built locomotives rail freight provide the drivers and track foster yeoman could only make this long-term investment because they knew that their connection with the main rail system would always be there other companies are not secure I think there's a great deal more that could be done to get the private sector involved with non nearly wagons with owning locomotives I don't see why the private sector shouldn't ultimately be able to crew its own trains under license by BR but to do that they must have some kind of statutory right of access to the rail network they must have guarantees that that rail network is going to be their home to use over a reasonable period of time in exactly the same way as somebody who buys a lorry or builds a factory assumes that the road network is going to be there and he's not gonna find himself cut off railways require a great deal of commitment the great new of investment on a very long-term basis you expect to get it back over 30 or 40 years and the there is without the guarantees that the railway network the lines are going to be there that the policies that will be putting traffic towards the railways are there that the financial underpinning will be there without that people are not prepared to put money into the railways foster Yeomans long-term commitment to rail gives them a sharp insight into how British rail runs director Richard painter I think the prime difficulty with British Rail at the moment is they have to react to circumstances and that goes all the way down to the system with us we found that if we can get specialised drivers dedicated maintenance people the right equipment it is a very very effective transport system probably the most effective in the country but it in order to get people to be proactive rather than reactive I would want to have a lot more freedom and be a lot more decisive in my economic planning this is the result of proactive planning backed by British rails biggest subsidy provincial now known as regional railways has restored customer faith in railway travel by selling hard and we equipping it hasn't been easy these early attempts at a quick fix known as skippers and pieces basically bus bodies on goods wagon chassis x' proved unreliable marketing manager all prescott the Pacer was the best vehicle around and it was also very important politically for us to be able to build up confidence with the Department of Transport that there was a future for provincial lines that they could be operated in a low-cost way that we could attract people to travel on them if only we had new equipment and they were extremely valuable in that sense we then having laid that framework will go we're able to to go on to to expand with more attractive trains in the Sprinter this is the most attractive track the top-of-the-range express the final component in the sector's business plans but manufacturing delays of Express at the now privatized British Rail engineering Braille means tight government financial targets to reduce taxpayer support could be missed provincial is not going to be able to meet the targets that have been set out in the corporate plan and agreed with government or at least not without drastic cuts in services and maybe closing some lines I think myself the government will draw back from from such drastic action particularly if there's an election approaching but the fact that they are two or three hundred coaches short simply cannot be cannot be overcome without spending more money and that money has to be spent on keeping coaches in service that would have been scrapped it's even worse than that because the coaches that they're short of are the top of the range they've introduced the new diesel trains in a reverse order they introduced the simplest and cheapest they've gradually upgraded with the Sprinter Express they produced a very attractive mid-range train which pulled in ridership gains of 40 50 percent on some lines the trains that they haven't got are the air-conditioned hundred miles our premier trains so not only are they suffering from lack of capacity they aren't have it they haven't got the trains which would really pulled in the passengers so they've got a severe revenue loss through often not offering the better service Britain has some of the fastest trains in Europe intercity is now a widely copied idea we also have some of the worst travel into the capital is a national disgrace and might even force business to other European cities the bald facts are that British Rail moves people on over 700 million journeys a year British trends travel 265 million miles each year you they carry over 143 million tons of freight British Rail employs one hundred and thirty four thousand three hundred and sixty one men and women here at the Department of Transport 2300 people care for roads 135 deal with trends to whom is British Rail accountable it's not accountable at all really if you exclude the Department of Transport who are the sponsoring Department beyond that the customer has no real say about whether he has a complaint about whether it rains of late whether he's fair to hire whether the rolling stock is no value to him it's basically unaccountable to the customer it might be accountable to the Secretary of State for Transport but that's done in private I think through the present arrangement whereby BR has to agree in advance privately with the civil servants what proposals should be put on the minister's desk so he can sign them with a great flourish and claim the credit I think that is totally wrong it prevents me are from as they should from stating publicly what they would like to do setting out an agenda for investment telling the public and the government what the implications are doing it and not doing it and it allows government to evade the responsibility for blocking investment for stopping investment in certain areas and then turn around and say the railways two or three years later say the railways aren't performing is it a level playing field well this bridge is perhaps a monument to the difficulties facing the railways the Dornoch Road bridge in the Scottish Highlands is being built as a shortcut across the Firth building it to carry the railway to would have saved over 20 miles the dollar bridge story is a classic example of the extraordinary imbalance there is between road and rail investment criteria in this country here we had the a nine Road running parallel with a Far North line from Inverness up to wick having enormous sums of money spent on it more than could it possibly be justified in strictly economic criteria it was a political move at the parallel railway could have been brought up to the same standard by constructing the door lock link and given a viable future the cost was not all that excessive there was money available from Europe if the government had chosen to take it but instead they secretly told British Rail to play down and to withdraw the application BR went along with this and announced that they did wish to go ahead with it and therefore the future of that line is now seriously in doubt well it doesn't show anybody up in a particularly good light British Rail promoted it very heavily I remember one area manager there saying without the Dornoch bridge the line to the north is doomed the sums concerned the bridge was under 15 million the a9 investment is hundreds of millions and and yet BR is now saying it doesn't matter in the surface is perfectly fine it's a said business and I think it shows the way in which BR is unable to actually fight a project through for fear of offending the government and the civil service we do seem to make it very difficult for ourselves I think that the answer is in some way to disengage British Rail a bit more from the Department of Transport and give it its own financial targets which are much more realistic from the broader social need historian Corelli barnett it seems to me the advantage of privatization if it were real privatization that is to say really freeing the railways to operate in the market would be that we get the Department of Transport off the railways back and instead of having this this absurd demand that they should make an 8 percent or whatever it is return on their investment that the railways would then be free to go for investment on what on terms that seem good to them and their lenders technologies on its side the environment is on its side the problem is that it is not seen as an opportunity the railways in this country are always seen as a problem to be managed to limit losses I suspect it goes back to the fact that our railways were built for profit whereas European railways were built for national interest and defense in particular therefore rowers in this country are seen purely in commercial terms rather than a much wider capability as a tool of social improvement provided the channel tunnel does come that I think above all will open the eyes of people to watch railways are all about in the European context and will change the change the rules of the game I think if we continue with the current policies we will only get a smaller more elitist and certainly more expensive railway the railways are very much of the crossroads in the next few years as to which way they're going to go with them particularly the size of the railways that we will have in the future

Channel: stablestaple

Views: 159,002

Keywords: Channel 4, Equinoxe, British, Rail

Id: WJfaKKVS5Hc

Length: 54min 22sec (3262 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2011