The Sustainable Railway: a read of yesterday’s white paper

It’s a good one. There are many encouraging signs of clear analytical thinking and lots of commitments by the Government to do sensible, pragmatic things and get the other stakeholders (Network Rail, train operators, local authorities and us) to do likewise.

Things I particularly like:

• nationwide Oyster-compatible travel smartcards to be introduced;
• a requirement for train operators to monitor how full every service is that they run;
• recognition of the huge amount of capacity in the network that is currently wasted, and of the primary reasons for that wastage;
• recognition that people are travelling in new patterns (eg. commuting twice a week rather than Monday to Friday) and that they need ticketing, service and staffing provision to reflect this;
• recognition of the environmental cost of rail travel and the fact that individuals may begin to see this as a disincentive to commute (According to the report, rail accounts for less than 1% of the national emission of CO2 – road takes almost all of the 23% due to transport). The chapter on environmental concerns makes interesting reading [and it’s good news if you happen to be a ‘retention toilet’ manufacturer];
• a serious plan for freight that includes widening track clearances (‘loading gauge’) so that wagons from the rest of Europe can travel on certain routes in the UK.

Interesting factoid: ‘Increasing the maximum speed of a train from 200 km/h to 350 km/h means a 90 per cent increase in energy consumption. In exchange, it cuts station-to-station journey time by less than 25 per cent’ (page 62/171 in the PDF).

There are plenty of things in the report that are not so good; amongst them the fact that the unpleasant ‘pacer’ trains are going to have to keep going for at least another three years. And there’s an unqualified acceptance of the Eddington report’s contention that demand for international air travel is going to double by 2030; the environmental angle that’s deployed well elsewhere in the report seems to have been dropped from this part of the discussion. Of course, the forum for challenging the growing demand for long-haul flights is elsewhere.

In all, a stimulating read and something that I hope forms the foundation for significant future improvements. If you believe the figures in the report, seriously-delayed trains are becoming something of a rarity. Wonderful; but, like this report, such an achievement could have arrived considerably earlier in the day.