30 Year Rail Strategy - Bad Engineering Alert

One of the nice things about regularly reading the Yorkshire Ranter's work is that he's got the measure of politician's vanity projects - from ID cards to new nuclear powers stations, generally spending money on kit to make politicians feel important is a bad way of doing things.  The obvious transport example of this is maglev trains, which surfaces periodically thanks to a tiresome bunch, and has had Tony Blair (and some Scottish politicos) drooling.  Maglev is one of those great ideas on paper ('cool, fast, wow') but when you start examining it as a transport strategy, huge flaws come to light, mainly around resilience and interoperability.  Which brings us to the leaked reports of the Government's 30 year rail plan (a slightly more realistic estimate than Prezza's dead-in-the-water 10 year transport plan), which shows that grandiose planning is still something New Labour thinks it's for.  I have reservations:

Firstly, the history of government transport plans is iffy - the Modernisation Plan of 1955 had serious flaws (like building small quantities of poor-performing diesels and building vast marshalling yards ten years before the concept become redundant).  Prescott's 10-year-plan involved an alleged £180bn of 'investment'  including dozens of tram schemes.  No tram schemes are currently being built in the UK.  The risk is that you get tied into a 2007 vision in 2037, which isn't necessarily going to be fun, or that times change and someone (Gordon via Alistair Darling, in the case of trams) cuts the budget.

Secondly, if the report's writers really think that any of the three levels of European train control can be installed across the UK in a decade, they're barking.  It's just now (at Level 2) belatedly coming into use in some parts of the continent, and has invariably proved tricky - it's new, high-tech revolutionary technology.  Remember that the reason for the West Coast modernisation going overbudget and underspeed was a bunch of consultants thinking that they could go straight to Level 3, forgetting that the railway was going to be used by other people's trains who weren't necessarily going to pay for installation of as yet unbuilt and untested kit.  I'm not at all sure that the current continuous upheaval and sky-high cost involved in maintenance and renewal is the right environment to consider going balls-out for ETCS in the UK.  I have a horrible feeling that they're talking Level 3 here, since the main point of that is running trains closer together - Level 2 merely allows you to run faster than 125 mph, the current UK maximum for driver-observed signalling, by using continuous GSM radio links to tell the driver how far ahead the line is clear instead of relying on lineside signals, which obviously come rather more often the faster you go.  Better to get the current system sorted out and more efficient, then do some gradual smal-scale testing and keep an eye on equipment costs as they come down due to the larger market and operational experience elsewhere.

Thirdly, the journalists' tag lines seem to be based on quack-greenery - 'biofuels' and 'hydrogen' appear in the first paragraph of the Observer story.  Hydrogen fuelled trains are something of a hobbyhorse at the DfT, sadly, despite the obvious engineering drawback that hydrogen power is just a way of moving electricity around, and the railways already do that much more efficiently using something called 'electrification'.  In fact, the e-word is totally absent from the story, and I suspect based on recent Informed Sources articles that it will be soft-pedalled or ignored in the forthcoming wave of transport announcements.  This is a mistake and here's why.  If you wanted to set up, from scratch, the most environmentally friendly way of moving people around just at the moment you'd use high-tension AC overhead electrified railways running frequent services of standard electric trains using regenerative braking to convert their kinetic energy back into electricity and shove it into the grid.  There's an example of this running at the moment - the former 'Misery Line' London, Tilbury, Southend services are run by a uniform fleet of regenerating EMUs which are obtaining startling good energy efficiency figures *now* (something in the order of 85-90% of the power produced at the power station is used for moving people around), not in 30 years time.

The key battlecry of the engineer's revolt against managerialism is 'evolution' - in the long run it's not the big ideas that matter, but the incremental improvement over the best of the previous generation (see the High Speed Train for an example).  If you've already got a form of transport that can operate at 85-90% efficiency on power station generated energy, you aren't really going to beat that by using biofuels on the train or replacing copper wires with hydrogen transported around the country.  The concentration should be on renewable power or other power-station end emissions reduction, since that's where evolutionary improvement will pay off best.  Meanwhile, get a rolling programme of electrification up and running on the Midland and Great Western main lines.  Sign here.

On a related, note, National Express having been battered in the franchising market lately, has gone into bat for the express coach against the train, on environmental grounds:

Quite apart from the maths (which NatEx have used before), getting people out of trains and onto buses?  Surely not, considering the model of the 85-90% efficiency rail is capable of now on the LTS line.  The operators of that model of greenery?  National Express.  They made quite a fuss about it.

UPDATE - Thanks to commenters for pointing out that the Edinburgh tram scheme is going ahead finally, the Scottish Nats having changed their mind about scrapping it.