Delays up, investment static, customer satisfaction down. Random strike action, fare rises, no strategy. When UK foreign minister Peter Hain said in early January 2002 that Britain has 'the worst railways in Europe' (1), was he just saying what we all already know?
| Indeed, when asked on Newsnight on 10 January whether he agreed with Hain, Stephen Pound MP said, 'I think we have one of the worst rail infrastructures in Europe, if not the world'. Chris Jackson of Railway International Gazette sarcastically remarked that 'Hain is hardly accurate in describing Britain's railways as the worst in Europe…as a quick trip to Macedonia, Albania or even parts of rural France will show' (2).
| Downing Street tried to worm its way out of the argument, claiming that 'because of the different transport systems around Europe it was difficult to make comparative judgements'. It went on to claim that the government 'had no intention of getting into beauty contest-style judgements', and that 'some of the transport structures of our European partners relating to freight, for example, were different, which made snap comparisons unhelpful' (3).
| Maybe they have forgotten some of their own research, which made the headlines at the end of 2001. Carried out by WS Atkins for the Commission for Integrated Transport, an independent advisory board to the government, the study found that:
| 'Typically we have among the lowest levels of investment in transport systems and yet we have the highest public transport fares. We also have limited travel choices, with overseas cities having more rail-based options for suburban and city centre journeys…. While investment in urban rail networks is included in the [UK government's] 10-year plan, it will be some time before our large and medium cities have similar levels of provision as the case-study areas.' (4)
| But while the research might have been thorough, the problem was that the criteria for each of the comparators included non-travel issues such as which rail system best 'reduce(s) the need to travel' or enhances 'social inclusion' - curious indices for good transport. So what is the real state of transport in the UK?
| Notwithstanding any windfall payment recommended by the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA), the public expenditure on railways for 2002 is scheduled to be £1.6billion (5). This is just double what Railtrack spent in the six months up to September 2001 on repairing 250 miles of track and sleepers, out of a total of 18,000 miles of active railway track. In short, the public spending budget would be eaten up just by the current level of maintenance.
| According to Rail magazine, 'There still remains a £4billion funding gap between what Railtrack says needs to be spent on the network and the amount the rail regulator allowed. If Railtrack's figures are correct, then this gap exists no matter who owns the national network' (6).
| So massive investment is needed just to keep the system ticking over. Or as Railtrack's Great Western Zone director John Curley pointed out, 'Vast areas of the national network were "life expired" and had not had enough basic maintenance or renewal since privatisation' (7) - effectively condemning 10 percent of the rail network as 'at or beyond its life' (8). At the time of going to press there seems to be a possibility that the SRA will advise making the £4billion sum available - but this is still peanuts.
| According to Nigel Harris, managing editor of Rail magazine, the UK has 'consistently spent half as much per head of population as our European neighbours. By contrast, Japan modernised its railways in the 1960s by taking out such a massive World Bank loan that it took 18 years to pay it off' (9). Meanwhile, the UK is paying 20 percent of its current annual public sector rail budget just to keep it in administration. And while we may have passed the three months' time limit that UK transport secretary Stephen Byers said would be necessary to sort out Railtrack's successor, it is now predicted that sorting out an administration might take up to a year.
| So while Japan's famous Bullet train zooms along its 1220 miles of high-speed track (with a further 400 miles in the pipeline), the UK has no high-speed line at all. Indeed, all major European countries have extensive networks of high-speed rail routes while Britain hasn't built a significant new line, of any speed, since the end of the nineteenth century. The current plans to build the Channel Tunnel rail link - a 69-mile stretch of rail from Kings' Cross to the tunnel at Ashford on the coast - has taken 11 years of haggling and has just about reached the halfway stage at a cost of £5.8billion, half of which is paid for by the Trans-European Networks (TENs) project. TENs projects in mainland Europe include the magnificent road/rail Oresund bridge linking Sweden and Denmark, and the 350-mile Berlin-Nuremburg new and upgraded rail route (10).
| According to the International Railway Journal, Swiss Federal Railways 'runs one of the world's best railways' (11) - which could be because the Swiss government invests the equivalent of 50 percent of the entire UK budget on a network that is only 15 percent of the size of the UK network.
| Not to be outdone, China spent £23billion on the construction of 3500 miles of new track and a major programme of electrification in 2001 (12), while Russia and Finland are due to be connected by a high-speed line within the next year or so. The UK looks very sad by comparison. So much so that ex-transport minister Lord MacDonald recently suggested that rail passengers should stop whinging and take to their cars.
| The UK government's 1998 New Deal for Railways promised 'to establish more effective and accountable regulation, to ensure that public subsidy serves the public interest and to establish a new rail authority to provide a clear, coherent and strategic programme for the development of the railways…putting passengers' interests first and putting the railway at the centre of a radical integrated transport policy' (13).
| But so far it has been all process and no performance. Who knows how long the government can play the waiting game for, in the hope that something will turn up? Recent polls show that most rail travellers still blame the Tories for the current problems. And after four years since its foundation, the Strategic Rail Authority finally published its report in early January 2002, which argues for a little bit more money and vision, but primarily for improving the appearance of the way things are. Byers may have staked his reputation on increasing passenger numbers by 50 percent within 10 years, but he still doesn't care much for the condition in which those passengers travel nor their speed and efficiency of transit. For example, Michael Holden, Railtrack's southern regional director has called for fewer trains in order to increase statistical reliability (14).
| Given the decrepit state of the industry and the dearth of ideas as to how to put it right, it is only to be expected that workers and commuters are threatening protest action. But it looks like the protest is a fragmented and demoralised reaction to the state of the industry and its employers rather than anything positive; more like looting than striking. Similarly, the potential commuters' strikes - described by chair of a Great Western passenger group David da Costa as being more about 'embarrassing the government' than bringing the 'country to a standstill' - are hardly militant action, especially when the demands include wanting 'the service [to return] to its pre-Hatfield crash norm' (15). Ah, those halcyon days.
| With nobody offering a positive way forward, and a general acceptance that spending should be limited; with the government's lack of interest, company uncertainty, a despondent resignation from passengers and cynical opportunism from railway staff, the quality of the industry can only spiral further into decline.
| Austin Williams is director of the Transport Research Group, technical editor of the Architects' Journal, and motoring correspondent at the Daily Telegraph. He is a contributor to Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age, Wiley-Academy, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); and Carchitecture: When the Car and the City Collide, August/Birkhauser, 2001 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
Read on:
The Great Rail Debate, by Jennie Bristow
Off the rails, by Austin Williams
When strikes were strikes, by Dave Hallsworth
spiked-proposals: Transport
(1) 'No Hain, no gain', Anne McElvoy interview with Peter Hain, Spectator, 12 January 2002
(2) 'How money spent on railways is wasted', Chris Jackson, Daily Telegraph, letters, 12 January 2002
(3) Downing Street lobby briefing, 11 January 2002
(4) European Best Practice in the Delivery of Integrated Transport: Report on Stage 3: Transferability, Commission for Integrated Transport, 26 November 2001
(5) Transport 2010:The Ten Year Plan, Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2000, Annex 1
(6) Rail, 6 -22 January 2002, p6
(7) Rail safety crisis may shut down network, Joanna Walters and Kamal Ahmed, Observer, 30 December 2001
(8) 'Railtrack men attack networks' decline', Philip Haigh, Rail, 6 -22 January 2002, p7
(9) Editorial, Rail, 6 -22 January 2002, p3
(10) Trans-European Networks, priority projects
(11) Editoral, International Railway Journal, December 2001
(12) Asia Times online magazine, 9 March 2001
(13) A New Deal for Railways: The government's response to the Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee's Report on the Proposed Strategic Rail Regulation, Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 16 September 1998
(14) Rail chief calls for fewer trains so they run on time, Guardian, 7 January 2002
(15) The man who wants commuters to strike, BBC News Online, 8 January 2002. (The Hatfield crash killed four people in October 2000, and was followed by widespread debate and breastbeating about safety and the state of the UK railways)
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