Almost unnoticed, the railways are enjoying an investment boom. Major projects, such as Crossrail, Thameslink and the East London Line extension are under construction while electrification of the Great Western line to Bristol and South Wales and the Liverpool to Manchester route has been promised. There is even talk of building a North to South high-speed line but that will take years to even get on to the drawing board, although the idea has cross-party support.
There is big money involved. Crossrail, which will connect east and west London, is £16bn; Thameslink tops £5.5bn; and the East London Line will cost around £1bn.
Then there is Network Rail’s current five-year investment programme, which started in April this year and is worth over £30bn (though some of that is double counting and much is being spent on routine maintenance and renewal). It includes the redevelopment of Reading and Birmingham New Street stations, as well as a whole host of line improvements to speed up journeys on major routes such as Edinburgh to Glasgow and London to Sheffield.
This is the biggest programme of railway improvements in decades, but – and there has to be a ‘but’ – there is an air of unreality about it given that we are in a recession and public spending cuts are on the way. One train franchise, National Express East Coast, has just thrown in the towel and there are fears there might be others as passenger growth stalls.
And while there is a pretence that some of this money is coming from the private sector, the bald fact is that almost all of it is being paid for out of the public purse. There is an air of disbelief in the industry that all this investment will really go through during the spending squeeze.
There is, too, a worrying historic precedent. The last time that the railways had comparable amounts available for investment was the Modernisation Plan of the mid-1950s, when the Conservative government of the day embarked on a programme costing over £1bn (worth £22bn now, but proportionately even more). Electrification was going to be a central plank but much money was wasted on redundant schemes, such as huge marshalling yards and new steam engines. Within a few years it was dubbed a failure and a certain Dr Richard Beeching was appointed chair of British Railways. His recipe, of course, was quite the opposite and a third of the network was closed in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, the railways are better protected against such an eventuality than they have ever been. Thanks to the complex system of Network Rail negotiating its investment programme with the Office of Rail Regulation in five-year periods, with a budget guaranteed from the government, the railways’ money is virtually ringfenced.
An incoming government – Tory or Labour – intent on cuts to transport, would find it very difficult to cut back on the agreed programme, which happens to run until 2014. Privatisation might have been botched, as virtually all politicians agree, wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money through the cost of making the changes and the continued extra subsidy that feeds through to private companies’ pockets. But it has had the undoubted advantage of guaranteeing the budget for the railways for the medium term.
There is a risk that some of the big projects might be scaled back or not go through. Crossrail, in particular, is vulnerable as the Tories are not unequivocally committed to it, and station redevelopments are inevitably dependent on property values, but most of this programme is safe. Rail is back in fashion and, while it does not yet have the status of education or health, there are no votes to be won in cutting rail investment.
The all-party support for a new high- speed line will also survive an election. For a few years, while studies are undertaken, it is a cheap commitment. It is only towards the middle of the decade, when real money will need to be spent, that the economic climate will dictate whether work actually proceeds.
Indeed, it is the roads budget that would be a more obvious source of savings since it does not have the same long-term protection as Network Rail’s programme. There will be no second Dr Beeching and the survival of the existing rail network is guaranteed.
Christian Wolmar’s new book, Blood, Iron and Gold: how the railways transformed the world, has just been published by Atlantic Books
