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Network Rail promises £35 billion railway revolution
Dick Murray, Transport Editor31.03.09
THE head of Network Rail promised today the biggest expansion of the national railway system since the days of the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Iain Coucher said the company is planning to spend £35billion over the next five years.
Of this, £12billion will go on easing chronic overcrowding with longer platforms to take 12-carriage trains. A further £11.5billion is to be spent on replacing old parts of the network including tracks and signalling to enable trains to run faster. A total of £11.4billion is earmarked for day to day maintenance.
Among the projects to benefit will be Thameslink which will see capacity increase through London by 400 per cent, said Mr Coucher.
Crossrail is to get more money, King's Cross station will be re-developed and the track bottleneck around Reading station will be eased. Mr Coucher, NR chief executive, said: "Britain is poised on the brink of a rail revolution."
He pledged that over the next five years "we will see a transformed railway through ambitious plans that will deliver more trains, more seats, longer trains and faster trains.
"Services will be even more reliable, delays caused by the infrastructure (such as signal failures) will be cut by 25 per cent. We will embark upon an investment programme that is bigger and more ambitious than anything seen in generations."
But, he warned: "Delivering all this will require major changes across the industry and we should not underestimate the difficulties that are ahead."
He said that the previous five years had been all about "putting right the ills of the railway...the next five years will be focused on doing the basics even better and delivering a bigger, better railway for passengers and freight." He said Network Rail was embarking "upon one of the most exciting chapters in the history of our railways", adding: "Network Rail is ready to unleash the biggest expansion since the age of Brunel."
He said Network Rail has around £4billion extra to spend between now and 2014 than originally thought. Last year NR submitted plans to spend about £30billion - but this was cut back by the controlling Office of Rail Regulation. But, following negotiations with the ORR and recalculations to include future interest rate reductions, NR will now be spending a record £35billion.
More than three million passengers travel by rail every day - the vast majority in London and the South-East.
Although the number of extra passengers using the railways has slowed due to the credit crunch, overall the figure remains on the increase. This means chronic overcrowding, particularly on routes from Kent and south-east London in Charing Cross, Victoria and Cannon Street stations and on Thameslink, the north-south through London service.
NR aims, by 2014, to achieve record punctuality levels of 92.6 per cent across England and Wales and 92 per cent in Scotland. This compares with 90 per cent now and 78 per cent when NR took over from Railtrack seven years ago.
Mr Coucher, who has placed his head on the block with such bold predictions, concluded: "Stations will be transformed and new ones built. Speeds will be increased. Bottlenecks will be unblocked. Thousands of new trains will debut, services will run more frequently at weekends and at bank holidays." NR is currently under fire from the rail watchdogs for closing key routes over Easter and for the number of weekend shutdowns while maintenance and rebuilding work takes place. And yesterday it was revealed that the number of new train carriages trumpeted by the government has been cut back from 1,300 to 1,000.
Reader views (36)
Nice promise - pity they don't have the cash (except for the tax paying cash-cow public, that is).
- Rogan, Irving
Bonjour High speed lines, electrification of Great Western?? All this is a rehash of previous announcements. How New Labour.
- Jules, Paris, France
Agree, it's all spin. If this story was true why would one of Network Rails main contractors be shedding 450 jobs due to scaling back on rail spending, see link.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/engineering/5083798/Jarvis-cuts-450-jobs-as-work-falters.html
- Glen, Lancashire
Who was it who said 'if you repeat a lie often enough it will eventually be believed'? Judging by the emails received to date we are likely to see a lot more such announcements in the run up to the next election.
- Dave, London
Please remind me what happened after and a directly caused by the railway mania of the Victorian age. Was it the long depression by any chance?
- Paul John Graham, Greenwich
More spin
No new spending
Punctuality has increased because journey times have been slowed to allow for delays
Paddington to castle cary was 1.35 or 1.40 but now is often schedules for 1.50 or longer
More truth in government please.
- William Salomon, london
Getting near to General Election time as the spin and splutter of promises are rolled out from this busted flush, swindling government as it gets into gear with a crunching of cogs. Nothing will be believed Gordon. You are wasting your time. Just say you are going back to Scotland. I will even buy your one-way ticket.
- Albert Hall, hove england
We need NEW high speed links.
- Steve, Hackney, London
Many of the projects were already announced, .e.g. crossrail, longer platforms for 12 carriage trains, cobgestion arounbd reading.
- Jeremy, London
And tell me where is the provision the billions that will be going into the coffers of the privatised railway companies, as they dream up more and more ingenious ways to get Network Rail to pay for all manner of expenses. So much so that current Train operators have increased their profits by millions due to Network Rails largess.
- Alan, carlisle uk
Network Rail promised to implement these projects a year ago. Perhaps they should stop spinning out endless press releases regurgitating the same thing for the millionth time and try to get basic things right e.g. not closing BOTH East and West Coast Main lines at the same time...
- Ed, London
What we will end up getting after several years of disruption is a better service for a few people I don't need really fast trains what I need is a reliable service that runs to time and a seat to sit on. Oh and I forgot some heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer.
- Mike Melbourne, Bedford England
Gosh, £38bn worth of promises. I'm going to lay this figure out so that I can get to grips with such an amount. £38,000,000,000. No - I still can't comprehend. I shall ask my barber to explain next week. And he might know where it's all coming from too. Talk is so cheap with a general election on the horizon.
- Brianonthecam, Cambridge UK
....lets just make sure that not one single penny of this money gets spent on overseas workers or importing items that could and should be manufactured in the uk.
- Clifftop, london
Perhaps someone could use a bit of the money to sort out the points outside of Clapham Junction in the mornings. I've no idea what happens but my train is on time right up until it gets about 500 yards away from Clapham when it just sits there for 10 minutes.
- Bob, Cheam
And what if your station already runs 12 carriage trains???
And Johnofenfield, I can guarantee you that you'll pay for it twice. Once through a substantial fare increase and once as a taxpayer when the government has to step in.
Old ground, nothing new here. Keep moving.
- Jay, London
Trains frighten me.
- Mervyn Blister, Penarth, Wales
Very laudable, but it's hardly Brunel, is it? It is in fact the kind of work that should be ongoing, and much of it should have been done a long time ago. We might have had a half-civilised railway system if it had. What a pity someone didn't strangle Dr Beeching at birth: we really would have had the world's best railway system now if he hadn't chopped it to pieces.
- Ken, Bexleyheath
So did they save the money from the good times to spend in a recession? Blimey: it looks likes even Britain's railways are better run than the economy. And that's saying a lot . . .
- Roz, Chamonix, France
What utter nonsense
- Wallytrader, London
But the Thameslink improvements were originally called "Thameslink 2000". Nearly 10 years late already!
- Michael, London
How much will a train journey cost at the end of all this investment?
A 100 mile return journey peak times costs me 26 quid, so I drive instead, which costs a tenner. Only business travellers will be able to afford train journeys.
- Darren, london
A very laudable set of aims, but why wasn't this started in May 1997 when Labour started annually taxing the motorist to the tune of £50bn? A few years of taking a small percentage of that amount would have paid for this project.
Unfortunately, the government has been too busy making the civil service bigger and wasting money on free porn to notice that the country's infrastructure is crumbling.
Now that Labour has woken up to the fact that an election is around the corner, they are peppering the public with these grandiose schemes. But we are smart enough to realise that none of this will ever see the light of day as the bankers have all the money.
- Nobby Clark, Perth, Scotland
Funny, I thought all the outrageous inflation busting ticket price rises over the years have been for the sole intention of improving the network infrastructure? My mistake.
Guess we will continue to have incredible ticket price rises, huge profits for rail companies and their share holders, and continued staff reductions and reduced services. Added to that more excuses for disrupted services.
- Frank, Home Counties, England.
...and where, prithee, will this money come from?
By the time of the next election Gordon Brown's scorched earth policy will have spent enough to keep us in debt for the next thirty years.
I can't even work out what this piece of spin is trying to distract our attention from - is it perchance the Conservative Party's transport plans?
- Johnofenfield, Enfield, UK
UK trains and railways are the pits.
A First Class single ticket from Marrakech to Tanger - a 10 hour journey - costs just GBP18.00.
How does that compare with Preston to London @ GBP340.00?
Rip-off Britain. Indeed it is.
- Reuben Camara, Morecambe UK
It's rather like the public enquiries every time somebody dies due to the negligence of Network Rail and British Rail before them. Lots of money spent, lots of promises and zero improvement
- Bj, London
Corporate bull****, frankly. He's announced absolutely nothing new here, these are all schemes that are currently being progressed, apart from Reading which was about to start anyway. And what's happened to the rebuilding of Birmingham New St, the widening of Welwyn Viaduct, the reopening of the Edinburgh-Galashiels line? Have these been quietly dropped?
- John, Biggleswade
I have worked briefly with Ian Coucher and in a rail industry that generally no longer attracts high calibre engineers (because of the silly money they could earn until recently in the financial sector as accountants,etc.); an industry post-privatisation that has been riddled with snake oil peddling management consultants talking a lot, but delivering very little, Coucher at least is one of the very, very few heavyweights at the top for which we should be grateful.
- Mike, london
Is this the same Network Rail which can't find £35million to put back 12 miles of second track at Swindon so that the people of Cheltenham and Gloucester can obtain some improvement on the present Third World rail service down the Stroud Valley line? For 10 years or more, the six Cotswolds MPs have been begging for this redoubling work to be done. It has featured in a number of debates in the House of Commons (the last on 30 June 2008). Despite a petition signed by many thousands of people and many businesses and councils in Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, the Cotswolds and S Wales, the work was left off NR's 2009-2014 master plan. Once Network Rail gets serious about relatively-small, long-long-overdue work such as redoubling of Swindon-to-Kemble, I'll pay some attention to their £35billion pie-in-the-sky plans. Until then ....
- Phil Jones, London UK
Revolutionary? A third on maintenance, a third on upgrading existing track, and a third on lengthening platforms. Isambard Kingdom Brunel would be turning in his grave.
- Euan, London
Am I just too old/cynical to believe any of this rubbish? British Rail/Network Rail (whatever they choose to call themselves) have had YEARS to improve the service but I've watched it for the last 30 years go from bad to worse. One of the many reasons I gave up and left!
- Marianne, SW France
Mr Coucher will no doubt fail in this exercise, Network Rails performance to date has been less than inspiring. Mr Coucher will probably be rewarded for failure with a huge 7 figure bonus and massive pension for life. Seems to be the way of things at this moment in time.
- Steve, London
HOW MANY OF NEW TRAINS WILL BE BUILT IN BRITAIN> WILL THE CONTRACTORS BE BRITISH OR FOREIGN> IN SHORT HOW MANY BRITISH JOBS WILL BE CREATED>
WILL THE ANSWER BE, AS WE HAVE SEEN IN YHE OLYMPIC SITE OR CROSSRAIL CONTRACTS,VERY FEW> I NO LONGER LISTEN TO GRANDIOSE PLANS WE HAVE HEARD THEM BEFORE>
- alan green, Woodford Green
Is this the same promise they made 12 years ago?
Yeh right!!!
- C Cusano, Bedford
Now I'm not a rail buff, but I'm pretty sure that the funding for the major works at Reading Station, and the extended trains on Thameslink, have already been announced previously.
Are any of these projects new? Is this just a batch of old projects packaged up with a bit of spin to win headlines?
- Mark Lee, Vauxhall
