The constant obstacles to maintaining infrastructure

Is what happened between Reading and Paddington symptomatic of wider problems? Are these failings coming soon to a railway near you?

“No,” says Network Rail’s Martin Frobisher. “We’ve done lots of analysis.”

Frobisher, Network Rail’s safety and engineering director, believes the dismal litany of failings on the busiest section of the Great Western Main Line are specific to that route. Which indicates that the infrastructure management is not consistent across regions. And Frobisher concedes that other parts of the network face even greater challenges.

“I started by asking whether we have a problem with the reliability of the overhead line,” he explains.

“We compared it with other systems around the country. When you benchmark it on the number of failures per gigawatt hour drawn, it is actually the most reliable in the country. That shocked me.

“When you look at Western versus the rest of the country, it appears reliable when normalised that way. If you normalise it by how many failures occur per month, you come up with a different answer.

“There is something unique about the traffic pattern - a vast difference since the Elizabeth line. The power draw is very different. I don’t think anywhere in the country has that density of trains.

“I have lots of data that shows the incidence of broken rails is better now than it has ever been, across the whole network. We do not have an adverse trend. There were instances on the Paddington approaches which caused huge passenger delays. But I can demonstrate there isn’t a nationwide trend on cracked crossings either.”

It’s all about the money

“The railway has slightly less money to spend on operations, maintenance and renewals in the next five years than it had over the last five years,” warns David Clarke, technical director at the Railway Industry Association.

“In other words, less to keep the infrastructure in a steady state.

“And it has redeployed quite a lot of money to deal with climate resilience. As a consequence, there is less work on traditional assets - track, signalling, and so on. Network Rail acknowledges there will be a decline in asset condition. It expects a deterioration in performance.”

But the funding is defended by Will Godfrey, finance director at the Office of Rail and Road: “The funding settlement is £43.1 billion for the next five years. While there are challenges, in real terms that is only 1% less than the previous periodic review.

“But the nature of the risk and challenge has changed. The way the business is managed has to change, too. It has to get smarter about targeting the response to the risks. It can’t just chuck money at the same things it was doing five or ten years ago.”

Steve Fletcher, deputy director at ORR, agrees: “There’s not enough money for the whole railway to run like a Swiss clock. There just isn’t. It’s about managing risk with the funds available - a sound asset management strategy to enable us to get the best bang for the buck.”

RIA worries this will only build bigger challenges further down the line.

Says Clarke: “Redeploying resources now will leave Control Periods 8, 9 and 10 spending more money to recover from that. What do we think is the likelihood of the government giving them more money in the future than in the recent past? I would not put any bet on that.

“If you learn from the past, this is a big driver of why we now have a backlog of signalling work. Because the same sort of decision was taken ten to 15 years ago, when signalling was life-extended and under-invested, unable to remain in a steady state.

“In the next control period, from 2029, the climate resilience work we are tackling now won’t have become any less. So, unless the economy has grown sufficiently for the government to give us more money, I think it is unlikely we will be able to recover from what is not being done now.”

RIA Chief Executive Darren Caplan chips in: “The Government seems to be deciding what enhancements it will fund one year at a time. And HS2 sets a precedent: regardless of what you say you will spend, it is now easier to cancel things that had been agreed and promised.

“How on Earth can Network Rail plan ahead if it doesn’t know what enhancements are to happen, where or when?

“For example, the whole strategy for the West Coast Main Line is having to be redrawn as a result of the cancellation of HS2. That incurs cost.

“There is chaos at the heart of government at the moment. Between the Department for Transport, the Treasury and No. 10. In the last few years, we have had so many Transport Secretaries, Rail Ministers and Business Ministers that there has been no one piloting good policy.

“It seems to us that No. 10 has set its face against rail. They are spending what they have to… but no more. It’s not a priority.

“Look at the UNIFE global rail study, or any other international comparison. They all show growth in rail all around the world. Everywhere. Except here. Some places at 3% a year; many at double that rate.

“We are the only country where rail is contracting. Yet we are good at rail in this country. It is an astonishing position to be in, caused by the hiatus in decision-making.”

For five years in a row, RIA asked its members the same questions about confidence to invest. In 2023, it found they were more pessimistic than at any time since 2019, even through the pandemic. It found that more than half the industry expects to shrink during 2024.

Clarke adds: “No matter who gets into power next, they are not going to reform rail overnight. Turning ideas into projects is measured in years. They are going to appraise projects.

“Any individual project that is not yet in development - and very few of them are - is years away from spades in the ground.’

Shifting focus to a changing climate

“For Network Rail, a lot hinges on doing things differently in the coming years,” says ORR’s Will Godfrey.

“The root cause of incidents varies by region. The health of the assets varies by region. Consistency of response between regions is something we need to pursue. Climate change in particular distinguishes between regions.

“We’ve seen Scotland performing particularly well, not surprisingly, in responding to the issues arising from Carmont. We want to see more of that learning spread across the regions.

“Where we need to look closely is the changing risk around weather and climate. Incidents will always happen. The point is how well they are anticipated and mitigated in advance, and how well Network Rail responds.”

ORR’s Fletcher: “If you’re managing the North West, particularly around Carlisle, it has been pummelled by the weather. The delivery units, the maintenance gangs, are all tooled up and they know what to do.

“If you go to another maintenance gang in East Anglia, say, the chances are the experience and competency in responding may not be as good. It’s vital we get these skills and learning taken across the network.

“What they’ve not done until recent times is develop the means to understand how their exposure to risk changes over time.

“Climatic change planning is vital, particularly in exposed regions. Both data competency and structural examinations - we started to get twitchy about lack of compliance in examinations, and we did not hesitate to raise it as a big issue.”

Frobisher concedes: “We are making compromises on asset sustainability, because our budgets for renewals are tighter and the assets will be older at the end of CP7 than at the start. But we are spending more money on maintenance, and we have better technology to get more from our assets.

“We’ve diverted money from things such as high-output renewals, which were ripping up large lengths of track to replace them on a cyclical basis.

“We are focusing on specific renewals at the places where we have problems. We are

investing in technology such as telemetry and better weather forecasting to manage the impact. Asset sustainability is something we will have to manage in our constrained financial environment.

“We are investing more in drainage now. We are hiring lots of people for drainage maintenance, and we are investing in drainage renewal. We have reduced track renewals to pay for more drainage work because that gives the best overall balance in terms of risk.”

For anyone still doubting the depth of impact of climate change, this is already having a very clear effect on how Network Rail operates.

Its data shows that it rains 8% more in Scotland than it did before. The climate pattern in Scotland has changed more profoundly than elsewhere on the network. As it worsens, more change to the way Network Rail operates will be needed there.

“The climate change risk is really on us right now,” says Frobisher.

“As this gets worse - and it will - we will have to change further.

“Flooding in particular will be pressing in the next few years. We know there will be more rainfall. But it is nuanced: we could have one storm that is on a different scale. In the longer term, by which I mean 20 years, all the models have to include the profound effect of sea levels rising.”

Frobisher concludes: “Make no mistake, there will be more storms, and they will be harder to deal with. We have a Victorian network that we cannot completely rebuild.

“The scale and pace is hitting us right here, and right now. We do what we can within funding limits. That means better forecasting, better telemetry to understand the assets, better risk modelling, and investing in the weakest assets wisely. But we cannot fix everything.”

Hope for the future

The Office for National Statistics reports that the UK population will increase by seven million by 2036, mostly through inward migration and predominantly into large urban areas. That has enormous implications for transport, health, and housing.

“The Government’s actions towards rail suggest it does not expect there to be growth,” says RIA’s David Clarke.

“But demand for rail has always tracked population and economic growth. Common sense says the railway will keep on growing. But nobody is planning for that. It looks increasingly clear that COVID was only a big blip on the graph.”

In February, RIA commissioned consultant Steer to assess long-term passenger demand. Taking scenarios that ranged from sluggish to rapid up to 2050, it anticipates growth of between 33% and 100% from the pre-COVID peak.

“So, at either end of that very broad spectrum, you have to plan for very significant growth,” says RIA Policy Director Robert Cook.

“There is a long-term positive here. But you have to layer onto that what the Government is doing to prepare for it.

“It is not coming clean about its own analysis of the implications of the decisions to reduce rail spending and to cancel part of HS2. It is sitting on all that stuff, because of its narrative that says, broadly, that we don’t need investment in rail and can make do with improving roads instead. It doesn’t make clear whether it sees rail as a cost or an investment.

“The Treasury budgeting system today is focused on the short term, and not the long term. An extension of that focus cannot come soon enough.

“The financial model needs to consider what happens if you don’t sustain the railway to an adequate standard. There is a mature question to ask about the cumulative effect, and to understand the long-term trade-off between a safe railway and an efficient railway.

“The business case to focus on is how the assets have been allowed to reach a condition in which they cannot withstand bad weather. The railway needs to understand and communicate what the long-term societal hit will be because of that.”

ORR’s Will Godfrey cautions: “I can’t tell you what the Chancellor will decide about railway expenditure tomorrow, let alone in ten years’ time. Nevertheless, we have to look ahead.

“In British Rail days there was a steady state. But steady state is different in every control period. The technology is changing fast. We have to look now to Control Periods 8 and 9 (2029-39) for challenges that will grow.

“Achieving steady state - a given level of performance of the network - requires doing things really radically differently in the medium term.

“To me, that is the big picture beyond the immediate problems we face today."