News from the East Anglian Branch of Railfuture, Edited by Martin Thorne and Jerry Alderson.
Railfuture News Snippets 282 - 30/09/2016
Following the announcement that Abellio Greater Anglia (AGA) had won the new nine-year franchise, on Monday 26th September 2016, Railfuture East Anglia had a meeting with AGA's head of mobilisation to discuss how Railfuture believed the service to passengers could be improved. Railfuture has also been attending the Wisbech 2020 meetings to keep up the momentum for reopening the Wisbech railway line.
Govia Thameslink Railway has confirmed that its nearly-new Class 387/1 Electrostar trains will start passenger service between King's Cross and Cambridge (some only as far as Letchworth Garden City) on Monday 10th October 2016. They will be used on stopping services operating as four-carriage trains. Initially they will be used on six services a day but this will increase as more trains are transferred and move drivers have been trained.
Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) will be holding a Meet the Manager session for its Great Northern services on 30th November 2016 at Finsbury Park station. GTR has also announced that Nick Brown has been appointed as the new Chief Operating Officer (and will be joining in November 2016). He will replace Dyan Crowther who is leaving after two years to become the new CEO of High Speed 1.
In a small positive sign that Network Rail supports the reopening of the Wisbech branch, Network Rail renewed the junction with the Wisbech line at Whitemoor Junction over the first weekend of September.
GB Railfreight, which began it operations in East Anglia, celebrated its 15th anniversary with a railtour to raise money for charity. On Friday 9th September it travelled across East Anglia (including to Whitemoor Yard).
The Cambridge University Railway Club has announced some of its guest speakers for autumn 2016. On Friday 28th October (from 20:30 in the William Thatcher Room at Fitzwilliam as usual) Mark Beckett from SLC Rail will give a talk entitled 'Quo Vadis? (Where are you going?)- a prospectus for the railway over the next 20 years.' He was the Development Director of Chiltern Railways for 11 years, and led the bid for the 20-year franchise and all the Evergreen project work.
ESTA will be holding its autumn meeting at 14:00 on Saturday 15th October in St Johns Church Hall, St Johns Street, Woodbridge. The guest speaker will be Therese Coffey MP, the Member of Parliament for Suffolk Coastal. From the railway station, go up Quay Street, turn right into the thoroughfare and then left into New Street. The library is then on your left and St Johns Street on your right.
On Monday 24th October at 14:30 there will be an Illustrated Talk by Allan Mot entitled '45 years of Fenland Railways' at Huntingdon Methodist Church (river bridge end of the High Street). There is free admission but a donation for tea and biscuits is requested. No need to pre-book.
Network Rail announced on 21st September that tracklaying had been completed on the western section of the East West Rail route between Oxford Parkway and Oxford to enable Chiltern Railways services to run to Oxford from 11th December 2016.
RAIL FRANCHISES
Financing agreed by Angel Trains for Bombardier to construct 665 carriages for Greater Anglia
Keywords: [GreaterAngliaFranchise]
Just over seven weeks after the Department for Transport had named Abellio as the winner of the Greater Anglia franchise, finance has been secured to build the 665 Bombardier Transportation electric multiple-unit carriages, which cost £900m and will be delivered in 2020, once Bombardier in Derby has completed its order for Crossrail trains. The signing of the rolling stock deal was held up when Siemens announced a legal challenge to the award to Bombardier, but it soon withdrew the legal action, allowing the contract to be signed on 29th September. Leasing company Angel Trains will own the trains - GA will lease them from Angel - and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is providing the finance. Greater Anglia's new fleet of 1,043 carriages, which will be sourced from Bombardier and Stadler, has been described as the 'largest rolling stock deal since the privatisation of Britain's railway.' The basis of this claim is a little unclear since, for example, Siemens is providing 1,140 Class 700 carriages for Govia Thameslink Railway, but that was procured by the DfT. Greater Anglia's new trains are the largest-ever privately-procured train order in Britain.
Bombardier will be building 22 10-car and 89 five-car Aventra EMUs - a total of 665 carriages - which will serve mainly suburban routes into London. The bad news for passengers is that the trains will have 3+2 seats, making travelling rather cramped. Although the seating layout and number of carriages was Abellio's choice, the DfT's franchise specification had stipulated the number of seats to be provided at peak time, leaving the operator with limited options.
Despite the Bombardier trains being delivered a year later than the Stadler trains, its financing was signed up first. Abellio expects that a separate contract for the financing of 378 Stadler multiple-units cars will be signed in October 2016.
RAIL SERVICES
Proposed Great Northern/Thameslink timetable changes from December 2018 published for public consultation
Keywords: [TSGN]
A Great Northern/Thameslink consultation about its planned timetables from 2018 onwards was launched on Thursday 15th September and closes at 17:00 on Thursday 8th December 2016. The full Thameslink scheme that allows trains from Cambridge and Peterborough to use the new Canal Tunnels to access St Pancras International and beyond, ultimately to Gatwick Airport and Brighton will lead to a significantly changed timetable. See: http://www.thameslinkrailway.com/your-journey/timetable-consultation.
Railfuture East Anglia has been carefuly analysing the proposed services (within East Anglia) and will be having a private meeting to GTR to make its views known.
- The number of trains per hour at the East Anglia stations on the Royston corridor confirmed (and from Ely) that Railfuture had been told would be provided have been confirmed
- From Cambridge two Thameslink semi-fast trains each hour will go to Brighton while the two slows will now go to Maidstone. This destination is to reduce the traffic via East Croydon which has a lot of trains going through it
- Disappointing that Waterbeach remains at 1 train per hour - understandable given limitations caused by Littleport-Downham Market single track
- So-called 'fast trains' to/from Peterborough, Huntingdon and St Neots to/from King's Cross, most of which stop once between St Neots and King's Cross, will now stop twice, adding to journey times and are likely to become more crowded
- Most of the new through-London services will stop frequently with poor journey times between the important places such as Cambridge, Gatwick, and Brighton
One side-effect of introducing more GTR trains on the East Coast Mainline is that the passenger service between Stevenage and London via Hertford is severed at Watton-at-Stone where a bus service will be provided to Stevenage. This is not desired by the operator or Network Rail but is a consequence of there being no capacity to terminate and then reverse the train at Stevenage station until a new, fifth, platform is built. Network Rail had intended to construct it by 2018 but it has been deferred. Platform 5 will be on the western side of the station, allowing trains to terminate and reverse. However, the new track for it is likely to be accessed by the down slow line. This is not ideal as it will be in conflict with other north-bound trains and therefore reduces capacity. Ideally there should be a separate line off the track that emerges from the Hertford line.
The proposed changes are useful in that they show the services before the changes come into effect, hence it is now apparent that the new Cambridge North station will have only one GTR train per hour from May 2017 to May 2018. GTR has confirmed that no trains will call at both Cambridge North and Waterbeach until the latter's platforms are extended. While the King's Cross to King's Lynn service will become half-hourly initially as far as Ely, the existing service will remain 4-car to serve short platforms but the Ely-terminating one will have eight carriages.
STATIONS
Addenbrooke's station in Cambridge looks increasingly likely as opening date of 2019 hoped for
Keywords: [CambridgeSouthStation]
One of the drastic options devised by the Serpell Committee in its report published in 1983 would have seen Cambridge without a railway station and many miles from the nearest railway line. Cambridge station, which was once on the edge of city but is now the centre of a main district of the city, now has annual footfall of around 11 million. Despite sustained lack of interest by local politicians in the past, many of whom abandoned the St Ives railway line to a future as a guided busway, Cambridge is fast becoming a railway city, with the new Cambridge North due to open in May 2017 and another, at Addenbrooke's, which it is hoped will open in December 2019.
According to an article in the Cambridge News, local authority transport bosses say the new stations will take pressure off the roads and give people a quick route to emerging economic centres in the city - something that Railfuture has been saying for decades.
Apparently house prices in East Chesterton have risen in anticipation of the opening of Cambridge North, and Cambridge's MP, Daniel Zeichner, whose constituency covers the new station says it "will have even more of an impact on Cambridge's traffic than people think." He also believes that the station at Addenbrooke's Hospital, which is looking very likely to be built in the next few years, "will also make a significant impact." The station, which would be located between the two recently-built road and busway bridges over the railway will be provisionally called Cambridge South. A station in the Chesterton area was first proposed in 1987 - which along with one at Addenbrooke's was a key part of Railfuture's proposal for a cross-city rail service utilising a reopened St Ives line - but it was not until 2009 that it looked like happening, when Cambridgeshire County Council produced a business case for government. That will have taken eight years for it to open. Although a political aspiration for decades, it took until 2015 for serious proposals with major business backing for Addenbrooke's to become apparent, spurred on by the arrival of AstraZeneca to the Biomedical Campus, where their £330m UK headquarters will be built. With the East West Rail consortium developing a link into Cambridge from the south, which would pass Addenbrooke's, the political, economic and commercial imperative to build the station has never been higher.
WEBSITES
Rail Delivery Group launches new 'Britain Runs on Rail' website to promote Britain's railway
The Rail Delivery Group, whose members comprise Network Rail and all of the passenger train operators, is increasingly coming out of the shadows and rather than just being an internal industry management group it is starting to market Britain's railway to promote growth, somewhat like the much-missed Railway Forum once led by Adrian Lyons. Stressing how important Britain's railway is to the UK economy and to the public, it has launched a campaign with a www.britainrunsonrail.co.uk website (somewhat light, sadly) called 'Britain Runs on Rail'. Its logo is a coloured version of the BR arrows logo. The campaign, which was developed by M&C Saatchi, aims to "tell the story of today's railway, its ever more crucial role in Britain and how money from customers and taxpayers is paying for the Railway Upgrade Plan, the biggest programme of investment since the Victorian era." Whether the website is worth the effort is debatable given that Network Rail's Media Centre and the TOCs' websites all promote the railway rather well already.
Railfuture East Anglia Branch News Snippets 282 - 30/09/2016
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