Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to the Rail Technology Magazine Podcast. Keeping you up-to-date with the most current rail industry news, giving you an all-access pass to the key insights and innovations helmed by the decision makers in our industry
This is a temporary plan. I'm making no secret of that. This is to, launch high speed two in a little over five years time and provide more seats on all routes and faster journey times on all routes. There are a lot of people flying still. People shouldn't be attracted to fly on a 400 miles journey. We should be running a train service that will attract those people onto rail. What I'm proposing doesn't require any new railway line to be immediately built. It doesn't require anything that isn't already committed. It's about making the most of what we've got.
This is the Rail technology magazine podcast, bringing you views, insight and conversation from leaders across the rail industry.
Hello, I'm Peter Johnson. Welcome to the new episode of the Rail technology magazine podcast. I'm joined today by Chris Gibb. He's got over 40 years of experience in the rail industry with previous roles including being CEO at Scottish Rail holdings and chief operating officer at Virgin West coast. He has, like the rest of us, been watching the unfolding drama of HS two as phases two A and two B were cancelled, and has presented a plan of how to make the best use of hs two to create maximum benefit for all passengers and freight as well. Chris is currently the non executive director of Dohl, but, he's done this project in a private capacity for himself. With little over five years until HS two will be ready to host its first passenger journeys, Chris believes it's time for a debate over the future of HS two and to create an executor plan that will serve the UK as well as possible. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.
Hello.
Now, rather than, explaining in my own words what this proposal is that you've put forward, I think it's best hearing it from you yourself. So if you could just give us a little flavour and an overview, really, of what it is that you've proposed.
Yeah. So I believe that with a little over five years to go, as you've said, we need to make the most of what is being built and what is committed. So that means the high speed two phase one, from initially old Oak common to Birmingham, Curzon street and Hansacre, and the fleet of 54 trains that has been ordered, and we need to make the most of that using the conventional network to provide a holistic outcome that makes the operation of the west Coast Main line and high speed to side by side deliver the very best that we can for the immediate future. I'm not talking the next 2030 years here, I'm talking, a ten year phase while we decide what more high speed line we want to build and what future agenda is. So this is a temporary plan. I'm making no secret of that. This is to, launch high speed two in a little over five years time and provide more seats on all routes and faster journey times on all routes.
You set out this plan, a, roadmap, really, from 2030 to 2042, which we'll discuss in a little bit more detail in due course. But as you say, just looking to the more immediate future, you see a problem with the current proposals, really, to run HS two services on existing lines north of Birmingham. Obviously, the new HS two route north of Birmingham has been scrapped. There are still plans to run services just on the existing network, and therein lies the problem, really? You don't think that we've got the capacity to be able to do that?
Well, I think the plan that high speed two have in play, was a very good plan at the beginning when there was a large, wide network and a very dedicated high speed two operation with many dedicated high speed two, stations. Unfortunately, the, plan has changed multiple times since then and we're now faced with a situation where the trains that are, ah, being ordered are 200 metres long. And because we're using the older stations on the conventional network, we're faced with a reduction in seats compared to today's train service. You, know, what is the point in building a new railway if we can't provide at least as many seats as we have today and faster journey times? So what I'm proposing overcomes that m and keeps the seat numbers the same, or increases the seat numbers as well as reducing journey time. And it brings together the high speed two fleet and also the existing Pendolino fleet, which we've got.
I mean, something you've talked about in your proposal is you look at the current situation at the moment and the fleets are the services that would be running would actually have a lower total capacity than the capacity of the fleets before this investment and this infrastructure development began in the first place. So how do you think we've ended up going backwards, in a sense?
Raoul? Well, because we've set out a plan to build a new railway and we've been stopped after building about a third of it. And we've got to now bring together the conventional network and older stations like Glasgow Central and Manchester Piccadilly, with the new railway like Birmingham Interchange, Birmingham, Curzon Street, Old Oak Common and a little bit later, hopefully Euston. So the new stations have a platform length of 400 metres. You can get one of these giant 16 coach, high speed two trains in those platforms. The older stations, like Glasgow Central, are limited to a little over 260 metres, which is the length of an eleven coach pendolino. And we can't reduce that, in my view. We can't face a scenario where we've got less seats from Glasgow to London and less seats from Manchester to London in particular than we have today.
Okay. And that brings us then, I think, really onto kind of the alternative plan. You set out, maybe slightly more long term, some of the other proposals you have for infrastructure where we could maybe take this development. And you talk about a new northern line which will triangulate my understanding. from what I've read, it will kind of triangulate. Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham will have connections to Blackpool and Glasgow as well. Could you just explain a little bit more about this new northern line proposal that you've made?
So, first of all, my planned train service would operate successfully with just phase one of high speed two. So, from Old Oak Common to Hansacre Junction, what I would hope to see very soon afterwards, though, is a new line from Hansacre Junction in Staffordshire to Crewe and on towards Manchester Airport to join up with the Northern Powerhouse rail network. Now, I don't believe that's going to happen in 2030, but I'm hoping it'll happen soon after. And the difference between what I'm proposing with a new northern line and high speed two, phase two b, which has been cancelled, is that I'm proposing a much more conventional bit of railway with a maximum speed of 155 miles an hour, with ballasted and sleeper track, rather than slab track with conventional overhead wires, still with etcs, and still a brand new bit of high speed railway by uk standards. But I believe that could be built cheaper and quicker as part of the crew renewal scheme. The whole crew layout and signalling system is life expired. There's control period eight renewal, from 2029 onwards. And Network Rail will be undertaking that scheme. It'll be a massive scheme and plugging in the new northern line at each end of that new layout will be a very big part of that scheme. And I believe that that would be best done by Network Rail as part of the cruise scheme. It is, after all, essentially plain line from crew to handsaker Junction. We're not talking about any stations, any junctions, we're talking about a two track plain line railway, a bit like the recently built northern bridge bypass.
And then obviously, you mentioned they talk about cost as well, efficiency of time, efficiency, of money, getting bang for your buck, really. And something you have suggested is if we can pack as many people and as many services as we can onto that Houston to Birmingham line, then we can free up the surrounding network and the surrounding line without actually really having to spend that much time or money on improving existing infrastructure. I think the only line you said would really be in huge need of a bit of a revamp is the west coast mainline. So is that, in a sense, really your philosophy? Make the best of that high speed service that we have now got between Birmingham and London, divert as many people and services as we can onto that line.
I very much believe that we need to make full use of high speed two to provide more capacity on other lines, the west coast main line and the Chiltern main line into London. What I mean by that is everybody travelling between London and Birmingham and the M M 42 at Birmingham interchange needs to be attracted off the conventional rail network onto high speed two. That means having cheap fares on high speed two, similar to Chilton and West Midlands trains. It means having a very frequent service with plenty of seats and no restrictions on travel. We'll have those 400 metre trains running between Birmingham and Euston on high speed two. So lots of capacity, over 1000 seats on each train every 20 minutes. Now, what that will allow is that capacity to be redeployed for journeys like Milton Keynes to London, Bicester to London, even closer into London. Places like Hemel, Hempstead and High Wycombe into London will benefit from the high speed to attracting the passengers off those services. So we can refocus bits of that conventional railway onto providing more capacity. And that has a direct link to the need to provide more housing for London, more jobs and a, flourishing economy. So rather than building new line from Milton Keynes to London, or from High Wycombe to London, we can do this by making capacity on existing train services available.
Raoul, you talked there, a little bit about demand as well, and creating more jobs, creating more homes, all these brilliant socioeconomic benefits. Let's just look a little bit further back. Obviously, a couple of years ago, we did have the pandemic, and that changed a lot of people's work life balances, patterns of people's lives. Quite a lot. Is the demand for hs two the same as it once was? Are there still as many people who want to be able to get from Birmingham to London and from Manchester to London and vice versa?
I don't think the demand is the same. I mean, I travel a lot on the UK rail network and I've got a lot of friends that are still in frontline executive jobs. And it's very clear that the demand for the rail network has completely changed. And crucially, nobody can tell you what the demand will be like in a year's time or two years time. We used to be pretty good at, forecasting demand and influencing it, but we're in a new world now. There is less business travel, there's less daily commuting for five days a week, but there is a big increase in leisure travel. If you look at the motorways that the railway competes with on this corridor, the M M one and the M 40, they're incredibly busy. We can attract a lot of those people out of those cars on those flows. On the longer flows, like London to Scotland, there are a lot of people flying still. People shouldn't be attracted to fly on a 400 miles journey. We should be running a train service that will attract those people onto rail. So whilst the demand is different, I am quite convinced that the demand is easily there over the forthcoming decades to fill those trains on high speed two and the west Coast Main line, as long as we develop the product in a way that appeals to the market.
Fantastic. So you talk about then, obviously, this 2030 to 2042 plan, which we've kind of discussed various aspects of it so far, but what is it overall by 2042, once all aspects of this plan, should it be followed as you've proposed it, what would the railroad network look like at that point?
So when we get to 2040, 2042, the Pendolino fleet will be life expired at that point, and we will have to make some decisions then about what we're going to do with high speed two and its ongoing services after that date. Do we buy another fleet of trains? Is the new high speed line being built? Will it be possible to get a 400 metre train into the city centre in Manchester? All these sort of questions. I very much hope that from 2030, high speed two will be a success and people will call out for more high speed services around the UK. You know, that's the example that has happened in France, where the first few high speed lines were extremely popular and everybody else in France wanted a high speed line to their city. And the result is, some 40 years later, an amazing high speed network, not just covering France, but covering Spain, much of Italy, parts of Germany. All these countries have, got high speed networks and they all started off small with one or two lines and they've all grown. So I'm hoping that the first ten years of high speed two will be an outstanding success in other parts of the country, will be calling out for high speed services. But at the end of the day, we're a small country, a very densely populated island, and it's very challenging to build new railway lines through areas that are well, densely populated.
So within that sense you've just given me, you very usefully brought up kind of two aspects that I really wanted to come onto next. You talked about the Pendolino fleet, which will be expiring, as you say, in the early two thousand forty s. And you also refer to several of those other european countries that have now got established high speed rail networks. I really want to bring those two things together. Talking about fleet, you talk about, a mixture of mixed tilt and non tilt trains. You talk about the italian model of mixed tilt and non tilt trains that we should be following. Could you just expand on that a bit more?
The italian high speed network bears a lot of similarities to the UK. They have a core spine of high speed lines, purpose built, brand new lines, but their train services go off these high speed lines onto conventional railways and they use a mix of non tilting, very high speed trains called red arrows on the dedicated high speed lines. And also they have a fleet of Pendolino trains that run from the high speed lines onto the conventional lines. And when they're on the high speed line, they go a bit slower than the red Arrow trains. When they're on the conventional railway, they tilt and they run as fast as they possibly can on the conventional railway. I think that's a great lesson. The Pendolino trains in Italy are very similar to the Pendolino trains in the UK. They've all come from the same design, the same builders and, the same expertise, and those trains are still available. So the italian model mixes the type of train for the best kind of route to serve the market as well as it possibly can.
Brilliant. So just to be clear then, in terms of the HS two infrastructure, you're not proposing continuing with phase two a or two b at any point. You're just planning on the best we can do with that Birmingham to London connection and then the existing rail network around that. and the way you'd suggest doing that is by constructing a fleet that, is best prepared, kind of to deal with all kinds of terrain, really, if you like.
Well, there would be two fleets in my plan. There's the high speed two fleet which has been ordered, which will be built in the next five years. At factories in Derby, Newton, Acliffe and crew, and will be introduced as a new fleet, in a little over five years time on particularly Birmingham to London. But I'm also suggesting we should use the Pendolino fleet alongside that, because the Pendolino fleet has more seats and will provide a 260 plus metre train into Manchester and Glasgow, where it will m make a real difference, providing today's seat numbers with a reduced journey time. What that means on high speed two is you have a mix of trains running at between 140 and 155 miles an hour, that's the Pendolinos, and 186 miles an hour, which is the high speed two new trains, which is what they do in Italy. It's what we do on high speed one with the mixture of the Eurostar trains and the javelin. so I'm proposing we should do that on high speed two for the first ten years in order to maximise the number of seats that pass over that bit of railway in every area.
I'm just looking at your proposals here that you're talking about. Just referring to those two fleets, the proposed future of the HS two train fleet. As you say, 54 trains have been ordered, eight coaches, 200 metres long, maximum speed of 225 mph. Then you then mentioned the Pendolino fleet, the class 390 Pendolino fleet. Well, there are 56 of those, in service, so that brings you up to a fleet of 110, passenger trains, which I think we've now covered. Let's move on then to freight, maybe. I just wonder what your plans are. If you could outline a little bit what your plans would be then for freight services.
Yeah. So providing freight capacity and more freight capacity on the west coast main line is absolutely critical. This is already the Europe's busiest mixed traffic railway, and as part of this whole package, we need to provide more freight capacity. Now, the key corridor is from the London area, the southeast up to the north west and Scotland. The constraint on that capacity is in Staffordshire with the two track railway from college to Stafford. And there is no easy solution to that. If we're going to provide more freight capacity, we need to build what I'm calling the new northern line, which is essentially a second pair of tracks between Staffordshire and Crewe that will provide for that extra freight capacity. If we do that and we move most of the long distance trains onto high speed two, I believe we would be able to operate two freight trains additionally every hour up the west Coast Main line through the Trent valley, which would make a big difference to, freight capacity on the railway.
So just going back to an original point, then that would mean that we would need to see some significant redevelopments to West coast mainland, then, would it?
Well, we need that new pair of tracks for, from Hansacre Junction up to Crewe, which, is effectively four, tracking the bit from college to Stafford, but bypassing Stafford as well. And that would take all the long distance trains onto that new line, providing additional capacity for freight on the existing railway.
Ok. Yes. That really demonstrates then, doesn't it, back to the overall point about how we can then maximise, the existing network to the best of its capability. I think we've kind of got a pretty good sense then of what it is you've been proposing. I think we've covered most of the areas fundamentally. Then what do you believe likelihood is that this proposal, this project of yours that you've put forward, what are the chances of it being realised in any sense, do you think?
Whatever we do, we've got to make a critical decision within the next six months as to how we're going to operate high speed. Two, even now, with a little over five years to go, if you think how long it takes to commission new trains, train new people, build all these things and get them all operational, five years will fly by and we need to be making these decisions in the next six months. So this is going to be top of the in tray for the new government in a month's time. And I urge them to make those decisions as quickly as possible and get on and make the most of what we're already building. What I'm proposing doesn't require any new railway line to be immediately built. It doesn't require anything that isn't already committed. It's about making the most of what we've got. And yes, lots of people have got different ideas as to how we can do this, building new lines here, building new trains there, but it all has to be done within five years and made to operate successfully from 2030 onwards. So now is the time for decisions.
You, of course, have put this project together in a private capacity, but would you be prepared to take on some sort of advisory role, advisory position, or offer any guidance that may be needed? Are you prepared to put yourself out there and kind of be a driving force behind this?
Well, I'm not after anything particular out of this. I'm at the end of my career. I've amassed a huge amount, of experience over those years and made many friends and contacts in the rail industry, many of whom have helped me with this proposal. So I've got no fixed agenda other than to see high speed two successful. If I can play a part in that and what I've learned is of use, then I will use that and I'll play a part if I'm asked to. But we need to have that discussion as an industry and the country, and we need to make some decisions pretty quick if we're going to make the most of what we're already building.
Okay. And just finally, five years until the first HS two services will be operational. And then obviously, whatever happens beyond that, what instinctively is it going to be successful? Are you positive about its prospects?
Well, as long as we provide the same or more seats than we provide today and reduce journey times on all routes, yes, it can be a success. If we have to talk about how we're going to limit demand and reduce the number of seats on specific routes and change train services in a way that won't provide for growth, then I can see how it can be a failure. we're building a fantastic new station in the centre of Birmingham at Curzon street with seven platforms. At the moment it's going to have two trains an hour leaving from seven platforms. This can turn into a white elephant if we're not careful. I'm, determined to do my bit to make sure we have this debate to stop that happening.
Chris Gibb, thank you very much for joining me today. Everything you've talked about there, of course, there is currently no alternative proposal to what you've put forward. We'll wait and we'll see what other operators may, make of your proposal if they choose to act upon it in any way. But it's certainly fantastic to get that insight from someone so experienced and knowledgeable as you today. that makes, the end of another edition of the Rail technology magazine podcast. Thank you very much for joining me. I'm your host, Peter Johnson. I will see you next time for another episode with a rail industry expert to cover another important aspect of rail policy.
You've been listening to the latest podcast from Rail Technology magazine. Don't forget to like and subscribe to. Make sure you receive every new edition.