The rail debate: New Street and its future

Jul 30 2008 Agenda

Britain’s railways are suddenly poised on the verge of an exciting new era of development. Terry Grimley looks at the national issues and the way they could impact on the West Midlands.

With support growing for a new national network of high-speed lines and even Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly apparently converted to the cause of electrification, things are looking up for Britain’s railways.

True, they have yet to shrug off the effects of a mad Tory privatisation which means that they now cost the taxpayer three times as much in subsidy as they did when they were in public ownership. Indeed the UK can claim to have set the world standard in how not to privatise a railway – or, as someone neatly summed it up, how to get the least railway for the most money.

Privatisation has left elements of fragmentation across the national network, but in other respects a railway renaissance seems quite suddenly upon us. Last year more passengers were carried on Britain’s railways than in any year since 1946 – even though the network is only half the size it then was.

Despite the highest fares in Europe, growth in passenger demand is outstripping the most optimistic forecasts. From a historic low of 630 million passenger journeys in 1983, they have climbed back to 1.2 billion and are expected to top 1.5 billion in the next decade.

This year’s leap in oil prices, perhaps marking a historic shift away from an era of cheap fuel, has added what may be a decisive impetus to the already gathering momentum behind an environmental agenda.

Only last year the Government’s White Paper on the future of the railways over the next 30 years, roundly derided by rail commentators for its lack of ambition, was at best non-committal about the prospects for further electrification: “It is not clear at the moment what problem electrification is trying to solve,” said Ruth Kelly when pressed on the subject by the late Gwynneth Dunwoody, the formidable former chair of the all-party Parliamentary Transport Select Committee.

But last month Ms Kelly said that she could “see great potential for a rolling programme of electrification”, and she even wrote a forward to a supplement on electrification in the current edition of Modern Railways magazine.

The major benefit to the West Midlands from a national programme of electrification could be the cross-country route from the north-east to south-west via New Street. But that would be many years in the future, with the Great Western (Paddington-Bristol/Cardiff) and Midland Main Line (Bedford-Nottingham/Sheffield) expected to be at the front of the queue.

In the shorter term, it has been suggested that a new generation of wiring teams could cut their teeth on smaller “infill” projects. Examples in the West Midlands could include the Walsall-Rugeley gap and Barnt Green-Bromsgrove, to extend Cross-City services.

At the same time, new high-speed lines are suddenly on everyone’s agenda. The impetus comes from the success of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, now renamed HS1. Opened last November at a cost of £5.8 billion, it was a welcome demonstration that Britain can deliver major infrastructure projects on time and budget, though naturally such triumphs are noticed less than disasters like Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

The name HS1 implies that it will be followed by at least HS2, and while Network Rail has commissioned a study of five potential corridors, the general consensus is that the obvious first route is London-Birmingham, probably carrying on to Manchester and Glasgow.

The proposal put forward last year by Greengauge 21, a not-for-profit organisation campaigning for rail development, would give Birmingham two bites at high-speed, with a new line built alongside the Chiltern Line splitting near the M42, one line running directly into Moor Street and the other serving Birmingham International before linking into the West Coast Main Line to reach Manchester.

As well as shrinking the travelling time between Birmingham city centre and St Pancras to as little as 45 minutes (with a similarly rapid link to Heathrow), a high-speed network has the potential to supplant many domestic flights in Britain, with significant savings in carbon emissions. As important as its speed benefits would be, its potential to free-up capacity on existing lines for further development of local and regional services.

While Birmingham’s location makes it an early candidate to benefit from high-speed development, the major rail project coming up in the city is the £600 million redevelopment of New Street Station.

The so-called Gateway Project, on which work is due to start next year, will bring three major benefits, increasing passenger circulation space and improving the aesthetic quality of the station (a decision is expected soon on a star-studded architectural competition to redesign the exterior and roof), while also improving pedestrian circulation and environmental quality around the perimeter of the station.

What it will not do, however, is provide any additional track or platforms. Critics fear that the narrow approaches, with just four tracks in each direction, will doom the redevelopment to almost immediate redundancy. The scheme was dismissed as “cosmetic” by the Parliamentary Transport Select Committee last week, although some observers may wonder why the committee has taken so long to enter a debate about a station which stands right at the centre of the national rail network – its criticisms could equally well have been made three years ago.

Network Rail, on the other hand, insists that there is enough capacity to cope for the next 25 years. With the alternative proposal of a Grand Central Station at Curzon Street now lost (the site has been disposed of), the only remaining option for increasing capacity at New Street would be to put the Cross-City line underground, taking four trains an hour in each direction out of the platforms. Walsall services could also use this tunnel.

Though expensive, this is feasible and if this was a German city it would probably have been done in the 1970s. A strip of land alongside the viaduct approaching through Eastside has been reserved in case it is needed for this.

If the high-speed network does go ahead, it could be that this would take some inter-city services out of New Street. The fastest way for it to access the city centre would be along the Snow Hill line, where until the 1960s there used to be four tracks all the way from Moor Street to Lapworth.

Moor Street has been proposed as the city’s high-speed terminal, but the terminal platforms there, currently disused, are also earmarked by Centro for its proposed Moseley/Kings Heath and Tamworth services. With a new high-rise business district growing up alongside Snow Hill surely that would be the more logical place from which to start and end high-speed services, if space can be found alongside Chiltern’s Marylebone trains and regional services on the Stratford/Solihull to Stourbridge lines.

Rail freight is also expected to see strong growth over the next 20 years, and in the West Midlands this is expected to see the reopening of the South Staffordshire freight line from Walsall to Stourbridge Junction, which has been closed since 1993. Parts of this are earmarked for the currently stalled Midland metro line between Wednesbury and Brierley Hill, and this is being looked at again to see whether trams and freight trains could share tracks, as is now commonplace in Germany. Another possible application for “tram-trains” could be on the under used Coventry-Nuneaton line, with the possibility of street-running in Coventry city centre.