Memorandum by Gloucestershire County Council
(RR 05)
RURAL RAILWAYS (Including Visit to the Cotswold
Line on 21 April 2004)
INTRODUCTION
1. Gloucestershire County Council is one
of the local authorities whose area is served by the Cotswold
Line (a railway from Oxford to Hereford via Worcester), with a
station in the county at Moreton-in-Marsh, and county residents
and visitors using other stations on the line which lie beyond
the county's borders. Over 100,000 journeys/year are made to or
from Moreton station.
2. The Gloucestershire Local Transport Plan
sets out the County's rail strategy, including the following objectives:
— To maintain and develop local and
long-distance services on the Cotswold Line, with half-hourly
peak and hourly off-peak trains to Oxford/London and Worcester.
— To promote the construction of new
stations to increase accessibility to the rail network.
— To work in partnership with Network
Rail, TOCs, Town Centre Managers and associated organisations
to promote stations as an integral part of the town centre economy,
and where appropriate develop retail activities on stations.
— To provide, in conjunction with TOCs,
easily understandable information about passenger services, and
other key public transport links.
— To provide, in conjunction with TOCs
and bus operators, easy to understand information on fares, rail
tickets, add-on bus fares and through ticketing arrangements.
— Through partnership to bring about
a significant modal split from the private car to rail.
The LTP also commits the County Council to work
with partners to open a new station at Chipping Campden on the
Cotswold Line.
3. The County Council is a founder member
of the Cotswolds & Malverns Transport Partnership (and currently
provides the Chair and Secretary to the Partnership), which brings
together local authorities, rail enterprises and passenger groups
to promote the upgrading of the Cotswold Line in order to provide
increased capacity to cater for passenger growth which cannot
be accommodated within the current infrastructure constraints.
COTSWOLDS AND
MALVERNS TRANSPORT
PARTNERSHIP
4. The Cotswold (and Malvern) Line from
Oxford to Hereford runs through three English regions, serves
five counties and trains are provided under three franchises.
It is of strategic importance to the cities of Hereford, Worcester
and Oxford and a vital link for communities such as Moreton-in-Marsh,
Evesham, Malvern and Ledbury, providing their link to London.
It is important for local people, tourism and businesses, carrying
over five million passengers/year.
5. In the Beeching era the line was threatened
with closure; long sections were downgraded to single track, signalling
was rationalised and train services reduced. As a result, when
passenger traffic increased again the capacity of the line was
constrained by the inflexible infrastructure. In the new millennium
the maximum possible number of trains is being squeezed along
the line, yet overcrowding is a regular occurrence. Because the
line is operated at the limits of capacity, the slightest irregularity
has a knock-on effect on reliability that can last all day.
6. The Partnership was created in 1998 after
the Cotswold Line Promotion Group took the initiative to produce
a study of the line's problems and opportunities. Members include
all the County Councils, several District Councils, Network Rail
and the three TOCs and the CLPG. It has commissioned and financed
studies by consultants Oscar Faber and Halcrow, which have studied
the benefits of upgrading the line, and identified a number of
schemes which are capable of addressing the problems. Whilst the
ideal solution of full redoubling and resignalling throughout
might cost £200-250 million, significant benefits can be
achieved by more modest schemes to increase the lengths of the
double track and improve the signalling.
7. The Oscar Faber study identified a £100
million scheme, and the Halcrow work a £50 million phase
one, which would achieve more capacity, better reliability, time
saving for existing passengers, generation of new passengers (with
decongestion and road safety benefits), reduced overcrowding and
wider economic generation and tourism benefits. The Net Present
Value of the benefits was £51.3 million, giving a benefit/cost
ratio of 1.32. Operating costs would increase by £465,000/year,
but 123,700 extra passengers would be generated bringing in additional
revenue of £620,000 (year 2000 prices).
8. Whilst the TOCs are able to support these
aspirations, there is no business case for their financing the
capital investment that is required. Neither is there a business
case for Network Rail investment, even if this were possible in
the current circumstances. Major funding must come from national
and local government by grant from the Strategic Rail Authority
and investment of Local Transport Plan funds (although DTp rules
prevent these being invested in rail infrastructure at present).
9. It is recognised that the current situation
on the railways means that even this Phase one must be achieved
incrementally. It proved possible to devise a timetable offering
a regular-interval hourly service for most of the day, and seven
extra trains/weekday, supported by infrastructure upgrades estimated
to cost £12-£15 million, which could have been achievable
in 2005-06. This fitted in with the important Worcester area IOS
improvements in the SRA's Strategic Plan, and were within scope
of a bid for Rail Passenger Partnership (RPP) funding.
10. The Partnership had hoped to lodge an
RPP bid in 2002, but the Railtrack crisis and the SRA's decision
to suspend the RPP scheme due to funding constraints ended this
aspiration. The SRA was able to finance a VISION modelling study
of the line, which identified that the introduction of 125 mph
stock would make possible an hourly off-peak service between London
Paddington and Hereford within the current infrastructure constraints,
though this timetable would not be particularly robust to the
effect of disruption and delay. One modest investment which could
improve the robustness would be the replacement of the token block
working between Moreton and Worcester by an automatic block system
such as axle counters. However the SRA did not have the funds
to even commission a study which would have identified the cost
of such a project to a high degree of certainty.
11. The proposal for the use of 125 mph
trains to provide the whole service on the line came from the
SRA's decision to award a two-year Thames franchise in 2004, to
cover the period from the expiry of the existing Thames franchise
to the creation of the new Greater Western franchise in 2006.
First Great Western (FGW) made public their plans to bid for the
two-year franchise on the basis of using their Adelante 125 mph
trains to provide most of the service on the Cotswold line, replacing
the Thames Turbo 90 mph stock.
12. Although FGW were awarded the two-year
Thames franchise, their improvement plans were compromised by
the SRA declining to provide sufficient funding to lease enough
High Speed Trains (HST) for Wales and West of England services
to release all the Adelantes to the Cotswold line. Thus a draft
new timetable for December 2004 implementation has been produced
which provides only a two-hourly Adelante service between London
and Great Malvern, with some intermediate shuttle services Oxford-Great
Malvern using Thames Turbo trains, a very retrograde step.
13. It can be seen that the Partnership's
aspirations have thus far been thwarted by the institutional processes
under which the railway operates and the financial constraints
which affect all its decisions. The next opportunity to retrieve
the situation will come with the award of the Greater Western
franchise, and the extent to which this can incorporate improvements
will be heavily conditioned by the outcome of the comprehensive
spending review in regard to SRA budgets.
CONCLUSION
14. Whilst the Cotswold Line is undoubtably
a rural railway, it is mostly not a community railway as defined
in the SRA consultation document "Community Rail Development".
The only section to fall within this category is Great Malvern-Hereford
(Shelwick Junction). However the County Council and the Partnership
would argue that this section of line should benefit from an hourly
or two-hourly through service to London and Birmingham, which
would place it outside the category of a community railway.
15. The Cotswold Line presents a microcosm of
the sort of issues that local authorities have to wrestle with
in seeking to embrace the railways within their transport strategies.
April 2004
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