Transport -
Railtrack
In
1996 Railtrack executives described travel on
Britain's railway artery of the future where
high-speed airline-style trains would whisk
passengers up and down the country at 140 miles
an hour. Futuristic computerised signalling would
constantly calculate how fast trains should
travel, enabling slow commuter services to mix
with expresses. Passengers would delight in a
speedy and reliable service - at last. It has not
happened. Railtrack is shortly to become an
ex-rail company and the government is left
sorting out the mess. The West Coast Mainline has
become the biggest fiasco in the short history of
rail privatisation. It has become quite normal
for big engineering projects on the railways to
fail to meet their own deadlines.
By this year, Richard Branson's new Pendolino
trains were supposed to be living up their name,
and tilting around bends at 125 miles an hour.
Some Pendolinos have been in operation this year,
during the Manchester Commonwealth games. But
most have been withdrawn while driver training is
carried out. And they do not yet tilt, because
the track still needs work. Much of the £9.8bn
is being spent on replacing worn out track - a
legacy of years of under-investment. The rest
will go on redesigning the bottlenecks -
straightening a bend here, adding a flyover
there, to enable high-speed trains to shoot past
without delays. The signalling will have to be
improved as well. By 2005 the top speed should
have been 140mph - cutting an hour off the
journey time to Glasgow.
The Strategic Rail Authority has now abandoned
that goal because it believes the vast cost of
improving the track to 140mph standards would not
be value for money. It might happen one day, but
no-one is holding their breath. Virgin has spent
£1.2bn on its new trains, which have impressed
the few passengers who have travelled on them.
Because they will not be able to reach their top
speed, Virgin will need up to 10 extra trains,
costing more than £200m, to maintain the
frequency of the planned timetable. The company
has already been paid £100m in compensation for
the problems with the project, and is likely to
want much more. The SRA is hoping passengers will
forget the slower speeds of their trains when
they realise they're more likely to arrive on
time.
Next >>>
Home
These articles
have been collected from various sources. If you
are the copyright owner of any of them, contact us for
either a credit and link to your site or removal
of the article.
--------------