Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 299)
WEDNESDAY 26 APRIL 2006
MR ADRIAN
LYONS AND
MRS LOUISE
SHAW
Q280 Chairman: The point was very
fairly made that the biggest contribution which railways can make
in cutting carbon emissions is not by reducing what is already
quite a small proportion of emissions from railways themselves,
it is by getting a bigger share of both passenger and freight
traffic moving from either roads or air onto railways. Given that
that is where the big gains are to be had, what will you be suggesting
to the Department they should be put in the rail strategy? You
say they are consulting, and that is good. This is an opportunity
for you, as it is for us, to make some strong pleas and partly
in the line of what you tell us we may want to back it up. What
would you be hoping for now when this document comes out next
year?
Mrs Shaw: Technically, we know
we need to move on from the fuel sources we have at present, so
there needs to be some recognition of some diversification of
fuel source in addition to what we have, the diesel and the electrical
supplies we have presently[23].
We know that has to come into the technical strategy. Hybrid locomotives
show some significant promise but have a long way to go in terms
of whether we can practically implement them. Certainly in the
short term, even in the medium term, we will lag behind road.
We are quite comfortable with that. That is where the volume is
and the proving ground can be, and we are very comfortable with
lagging behind road on that. In terms of the overall strategy,
there are many more things which rail can do which are very specific
in terms of managing or improving the capacity we have. We have
a very mixed railway at the moment, freight trains running in
amongst passenger trains, and that is a constraint on capacity
because they run at different speeds and have different technical
characteristics, but it also means in terms of the energy consumption
particularly it is not good for the freight trains to have to
keep stopping and starting to make way for fast passenger trains.
Equally, it is not good for the passenger trains to be kept down
to the speed of a slow freight train. So we need to do some specific
capacity-related things, and things like the high level output
specification will enable the sustainable development of the railways—indirectly
almost, it is not an objective in itself, it is what you will
get from a high level output statement—to proceed that much
better. There are two angles, the technical angle and the strategical
angle, which will work by themselves but effectively work together.
Mr Lyons: If I could add, Chairman,
we do face a fundamental problem. The network is tiny in relation
to roads and it is a very simple calculation that every 1% shift
from road equals a 10% increase in demand on the railway network.
Quite frankly, we are reaching the limits of what the present
network can do. Of course, in the short term we can lengthen trains
and we can sort out some of the bottlenecks, but they are not
going to increase the capacity to significant levels if you are
going to make a really major shift from road and short-haul air
to rail that is needed. Clearly, we have got to build some new
capacity at some time, if not in the next five years in the next
10 to 25 years. Again, I think there is an increasing recognition
that in so many bits of Britain's infrastructure capacity is one
of the big problems and at last we are seeing some movement from
Government to try and address these with the Eddington Report,
the strategy, and so on.
Q281 Joan Walley: I just wanted to
pursue that a bit further with you because in my own constituency,
where we have got EWS, there is a conflict between the high speed
trains down to London and extra capacity and freight. What I am
really interested in finding out from you is, given what you are
saying about welcoming the Department for Transport's long-term
strategy this is as much about incentivising in terms of Treasury
as it might be about PFI bids in terms of getting capital into
building new infrastructure. How much do you think the Treasury
and the Department for Transport are really taking on board the
need for decisions to be made now for that extra designated capacity
for freight in terms of the long-term rail strategy, without which
the train operating companies cannot really operate either because
you have not got the space?
Mr Lyons: Absolutely. I think
you are exactly right. As at today, to be quite honest the railway
does not have a longer term strategy at present. Network Rail
has targets for another few years, to 2009. There is, of course,
the Government commitment to Crossrail, which we welcome, and
we know that the Eddington Report is looking at such things as
high-speed lines, but those are not firm commitments yet. I think
the key issue now is at two levels. One is, there is a great deal
of work taking place led by Network Rail on the Route-Utilisation
Strategies (as it is called) which looks at what you can do in
the short-term to try and increase the capacity on the network.
One of the key ones which are going to be introduced is the freight
utilisation strategy, which is due for production sometime in
the course of next year. This is going to look at freight nationally
and see what needs to be done. It could be argued that this should
have been done some time ago, but again like lots of other things
other priorities overran it, but now at long last that issue is
being addressed. However, I would say that too often decisions
have been made in such things as the port expansion at Thames
Haven, as a good example, where a major infrastructure project
is put in for one mode of transport without thought of how land-side
distribution is to take place and these sorts of issue have got
to be addressed.
Q282 Joan Walley: Yes, but my point
also is that unless that is matched by a similar priority, for
example in terms of the comprehensive spending review and getting
it into the Treasury at this stage, whatever the transport strategy
says unless it is backed by the Treasury how are you making sure
that those representations are being made to Government?
Mr Lyons: They are being made
very strongly. Freight is very interesting because rail freight
is not seen as a rail-only problem. The Freight Transport Association
has been extremely active, as you may know, in promoting with
the Rail Freight Group a better future for the industry overall,
which includes rail. There has been, as you may know, a concern
over the various grants for freight, the Freight Facilities Grants,
which are relatively small sums of money but have a significant
multiplier effect, which tend to have been cut at short notice,
and this causes significant problems with local stakeholders because
they suddenly find they have got a good idea for freight and find
they cannot introduce it because barriers are put in their way.
I am not at this stage 100% confident that Treasury in the forthcoming
Comprehensive Spending Review is going to meet every rail need.
I would like them to do so because I think if they do it will
be money well invested, but at this stage I think they need a
lot of convincing and we are trying to do it.
Q283 Mr Hurd: In relation to the
need for expanded capacity in the context of what you have just
said about concerns about the spending review, where would you
prioritise geographically? Where is the capacity most needed?
Mr Lyons: For freight?
Q284 Mr Hurd: Not necessarily for
freight. You were talking generally about the need to expand rail
capacity—
Mr Lyons: You basically start
in the greater South East, where for a whole number of reasons
we are seeing increased longer distance commuting, huge population
growth, the ODPM's Sustainable Communities policies, and so on
and so forth, all of which point out the need for extra capacity,
not just on the railways themselves but in the car parks to put
cars in so that people can get to stations. Those are being addressed
in the Route-Utilisation Strategy. There is a very interesting
one for South West Trains issued, which I think was very much
a benchmark of what we should be seeing. We have got to have Crossrail,
whatever the difficulties of it. That sort of major enhancement
of east-west flows across the South East is absolutely vital.
Again within the South East, freight from ports, particularly
Felixstowe and the ports in the Thames estuary and Southampton,
has got to cross the grain of passenger services over extremely
busily used lines and must be separated. Further afield, we have
clearly got some major capacity constraints on the East and West
Coast mainlines; these are arteries for the future. Regrettably,
the West Coast Mainline upgrade, although it has very significantly
improved the reliability of the line, has not increased the capacity
enough for future growth which we can see over the next twenty
years. Finally, we need to look at the other conurbations outside
London, because many of those have capacity constraints as well
on them, and that is actually where a mixture of probably light
rail and heavy rail coming together can produce some solutions
which actually meet local needs. It is a big agenda, I fear. Almost
everywhere you look we are stuck.
Q285 Colin Challen: Just following
on from that, we are well into the Government's integrated transport
strategy. Could you point to its greatest success for us?
Mrs Shaw: How big a hole do I
want to dig for myself? There are a number of spots where the
simple application of sensible policies has demonstrated quick
pay-backs. If I could point to the Nottingham tram scheme, for
example, the tram station has been sensibly positioned right next
to the main railway station in Nottingham. The passenger numbers
are well in excess of those forecast for the first year's operation.
It is a very well introduced scheme, very well run presently and
in its introduction by the operator and is now being held as a
flagship for Nottingham going forwards as a good place to live.
The layout of the tram stop at the station is such that the extension
south into other parts of the city has been easily enabled because
the bridge is perched right at the level to go straight over the
top of the station. So that will enable a much easier extension
of the tramline should the local authority venture to try and
persuade the Secretary of State that trams really are not such
a bad idea after all. Integration between buses and trains has
much less of a profile[24],
I would say, nationally because people tend to think of buses
much more as a local service than a service which enables them
to go longer distances which the trains usually serve, but if
I could think of integration in terms of local train services
meeting and working well with national train services, Ashford
and Waterloo, particularly with the Eurostar, I would say is an
excellent example of an integrated system. Clearly Waterloo is
a huge volume station and feeds huge numbers of people straight
into the Waterloo terminal for Eurostar, but similarly we are
seeing increasing numbers of people in the South East using the
local services to get into Ashford station to access Paris, Lille
and Brussels. If one could see similar examples of high-speed
rail in this country with high-speed rail stations being fed by
local rail stations from conurbations for larger cities which
do not have the direct high-speed rail themselves, I think that
would be a very positive move if we were to consider integrated
transport.
Q286 Chairman: Just on the capacity
point again, how much increase in capacity could be achieved by
radically overhauling the signalling system? I see from my flat
in London planes lining up to go into Heathrow one a minute and
I can see four going in at any one moment. You cannot run trains
one minute apart, I am told, on the major Intercity lines because
it is too dangerous.
Mrs Shaw: There are ways and means.
London Underground has some extremely good operating practices
which enable them to have the shortest possible time between trains.
The signalling systems we have in place at the moment certainly
do not lend themselves to shortening up the distances between
trains quite in the same way as you might see with London Underground.
There is a technical solution which is being developed in Europe[25]
by the supply community and users at the moment called ERTMS.
I would say at this point in time ERTMS is not the panacea the
suppliers claim it to be for a number of quite simple reasons
and it is not something which is going to be solved in the very,
very short term. However, there is now an increasing level of
understanding just how we might get to the situation where the
ERTMS system would increase the level of capacity on the amount
of track which is available, but we have some significant development
at a European level to do on our train operating practice. We
have to develop a deal more cooperation between the Member States
and between the railway companies in those Member States to get
to a point where ERTMS is affordable from the point of view of
the railway undertakings as well as affordable for the infrastructure
manager. We have an unfortunate situation where the individual
Member States develop their own little bit of specification to
go with a core of ERTMS which for an international operator like
EWS, say, wanting to run across several Member States makes it
a very, very expensive signalling system. Each infrastructure
manager thinks, "I'm fine. I've got my signalling system,
it's ERTMS. I can put a big tick in the box and smile at the Commission
next time I see them." For an international operator it means
you have to get an ERTMS system for Britain, and ERTMS system
for France, for Luxembourg, Germany[26],
and so on, and in the short term until we get that ERTMS system
sorted so that it works the same way whether you are in Dover,
Dublin or Milan, then that is the point at which that capacity
increase will be realised.
Q287 Chairman: To an ordinary lay
person with a little bit of business background it sounds hellishly
bureaucratic, what you have just said. You have got a situation
where you are a train operator, you are bursting at the seams
with capacity, you have got huge demand—the level of usage
in your industry is at a 45 year high and more of them want to
do it—why on earth are you waiting for some perishing European
Commission? Why do you not say, "We've got some track here.
I can double the number of customers I take on it and double my
profits by getting a better signalling system"?
Mr Lyons: I think you are exactly
right, Chairman. In fact a lot of advances have been made, but
at present, of course, the London Underground has the advantage
that trains travel between stations relatively slowly so their
distance for stopping is not that great. On the national railways,
for example at Waterloo, you have got much longer trains, much
heavier, so the distances between trains have got to be greater.
They cannot follow nose to tail because it is positively dangerous.
One immediate advance which has been made has been the introduction
of what are called the Integrated Control Centres, and Waterloo
was one of the first ones, where the Network Rail and the train
operating staff work in the same room to the same set of priorities,
but most importantly they have now got some very clever software
which not only shows you where every single train is on the system
but a huge amount of additional information and of course because
it is in the machine you can sort out train paths much, much better
than you can doing it manually from a signal box. That is stage
one. The next stage, you are exactly right, the Holy Grail of
train operation must be what is called a moving block where each
train has its own protected area and responds to every other train
around it, making sure it does not come too close to danger. The
problem has been that we made the decision to go for a Europe-wide
standard some 15 years ago now and progress has been disappointing
and costs are clearly far too high. I think it is the duty of
all those who have the interests of railways at heart to be pressing
the Commission and the European Railway Agency to move on from
where we are now, because clearly we are not moving fast enough.
Clearly signalling is one of the most expensive elements of railway
operation and, of course, it is one of its critical points too
because clearly if it fails the system comes to a halt.
Mrs Shaw: Perhaps I can add a
little more to that. The rate of progress on ERTMS particularly
has improved significantly in the last two or three years. The
European railway industry is learning much, much better now how
to get on and create a system across Europe which we can all agree
to and work with. The establishment of the European Railway Agency
from that point of view is a very positive thing and we have a
great deal of confidence in the individuals and the structure
of the European Railway Agency to actually deliver something like
ERTMS in a much more controlled fashion which we know we can all
afford and which will technically deliver what we want it to.
Q288 Chairman: I will not pursue
it too long, but I am mystified why someone who is running a commuter
train into Waterloo from Basingstoke needs to have a Europe-wide
system. The only train which ever goes from this country to another
one is the Eurostar. The requirements for Continental countries
are fundamentally different. Who was the lunatic who signed up
for this European deal in the first place? Probably the last Conservative
Transport Secretary!
Mrs Shaw: It is quite simple.
The supply market is not Britain, it is not Germany, it is not
France, it is Europe now. We have a limited number of supply companies.
They all serve the whole of Europe, and in fact the Chinese are
very interested in ERTMS because they think that is the way they
are going to buy their signalling in the future.
Mr Lyons: Any software-based system
benefits from being an international standard. The worst thing
would be to have Britain with its own train control software,
and Germany and France on different standards, and so on and so
forth. We do not do it with mobile phones and we do not do it
with motor cars, and I do think that if we can try and get a global
standard for railway control it would be for the benefit of the
industry and it would help bring costs down.
Chairman: It appears to me that both
the mobile phone industry and the motor car industry are rather
better at responding to increases in demand.
Q289 Mr Stuart: Getting positive,
in your memo you describe an ambitious scenario to rail growth
with a number of expansions and improvements to the railway network
by 2020, all accompanied by national road pricing. Have you estimated
the carbon reductions in such a scenario and does the Department
agree with your assessment, because I think in some of the earlier
questions we were trying to tease out your assessment of the benefits
from the move?
Mr Lyons: I think on a very broad
rule of thumb, and academics will argue around and around this
thing, but in general terms if you can shift something onto rail
you should be looking at having a carbon imprint of about 10%
of the equivalent road traffic. There are going to be variations.
Comparing a lightly loaded train and a Toyota Prius, the Toyota
is going to look more attractive, but certainly a well-loaded
train or a long freight train is very efficient. It has a minimal
carbon imprint. So basically you can be into millions of tonnes
if you get this shift, but of course the driver is also the broader
sustainable development agenda. Clearly a transfer from rail brings
other benefits besides emissions; it clearly has social inclusion
issues attached to it and it certainly has economic growth and
regeneration ones as well, and it is on the latter that the case
for railway expansion is principally being made at this stage.
Q290 Mr Stuart: So the Department
and yourself basically see the contribution to the carbon issue
in particular in precisely the same way?
Mr Lyons: No, because to be open
and honest with you, at this stage there are no sustainable development
targets for rail. It is clear that any modal shift brings significant
environmental benefits with it, but they have not been the principal
drivers for looking at modal shift. So it has not been the issue
which has discussed mostly between the railway industry and the
Government at this stage.
Q291 Mr Stuart: I am very glad that
you are both here today so that this can be highlighted, because
I think the Members of this Committee will be slightly stunned
at that. David Begg, who has recently written that the success
of the Government's entire transport policy actually depends on
railways driving down their costs. How are you responding to that
particular agenda, and can you do so in a way which will also
drive down carbon emissions?
Mr Lyons: Yes, because a good
sustainable development policy is an efficient transport one as
well by definition. Of course, on costs, we are coming off that
extremely high level of costs which occurred after Hatfield 2000.
Network Rail's Business Plan is actually working well. It is actually
coming in well under budget, which is almost a matter of concern
in some quarters, but it clearly does represent a rapidly gaining
pace of efficiency. There is clearly going to be an even tougher
regime for the next Control Period (as it is called) for Network
Rail, which is 2009 onwards. That is being negotiated now, so
that is going in the right direction. We are also seeing, of course,
with most franchises being re-let, they are either having to pay
a premium—which we would argue in sustainable development
terms is a somewhat odd thing to be doing, but it clearly is because
the industry is being run much more efficiently and the operators
can clearly see where they can grow the market profitably, and
the Government benefits from that. Then finally, of course, there
is the whole set of proposals to move on the industry and to expand
capacity as economically as possible. The more you can get longer
trains running more efficiently with more passengers on board,
costs come down as well. So there is a whole package of measures
and everything looks as though costs are coming under control.
The longer term problem, though, is where do we go over the next
10, 15, 20 years?
Q292 Mr Stuart: Can I follow up on
that? You mentioned the premium in terms of the carbon emissions
debate and you have just expressed some doubts about the premium.
Do you think the current situation means that services which could
possibly be expanded, subject to capacity constraints, and with
lower prices might attract more passengers, are basically not
doing that because they are subsidising other services which would
not have the same carbon impact?
Mr Lyons: I think what we have
got to ask ourselves are some pretty fundamental questions about
how transport pricing is managed. Clearly, it has been a priority
of the Treasury and the Department for Transport to bring down
the costs of the industry, and the industry would support that,
and one of the mechanisms of that is letting out franchises so
that we get into a situation where operators will pay a premium
for the licence to operate. One could argue that that premium
being paid by passengers should see its way back onto the railway
to further enhance the business and to add overall to a positive
sustainable development outcome. At present we do not see that.
At present the premiums are seen, I think by the Treasury and
the Department for Transport, as an offset for the money they
are paying Network Rail in grant. I would like to see a much more
logical strategy where those modes of transport which are sustainable-friendly
are given real incentives to further expand and increase their
business and not, if you like, run to a reasonably tightly constrained
franchise.
Q293 David Howarth: Can I just come
back to the question of your interaction with the Department,
because what you said was extremely surprising. You go to talk
to the Department and the discussions are about economic development
and social inclusion but not about climate change and carbon.
The Department officially shares the climate change public service
agreement with other departments. Can I just ask you how the discussions
go. Is it that you try to raise the environmental advantages of
rail and they say, "We're not interested in that," or
is it that you just react to what they are interested in, so you
do not try to raise it yourself, but they never raise it with
you? In other words, have you tried to raise it with them and
been rebuffed, or is it that they never raised it?
Mr Lyons: I will answer the generic
one. Of course, we raise sustainable development. The Railway
Forum, has been talking to the Department for four or five years
about it now, as long as I can remember. I have to say that the
priorities in the rail area of the Department have been very firmly
focused on cost and performance. On the issue of environmental
impact, because it has always been perceived that rail is by far
the most environmentally beneficial of powered transport modes
this has not been seen as the priority which those involved in
rail in the Department have necessarily addressed. We have been
saying they should, because we think the pay-off would be very
significant if they did, and we were very pleased that the Secretary
of State in his talk to the National Rail Conference on 15 March
mentioned a sustainable development publically agenda for rail
for the first time. We have never seen that before and we were
grateful. I think it is because of interaction between the industry
and the Department that this has got onto the agenda as an important
issue to be addressed.
Mrs Shaw: Yes, I would say it
has made a very pleasant change. A number of the TOCs and the
owning groups have taken their environmental and sustainable development
responsibilities very seriously. If one were to check the National
Express Group or the First Group on sustainable development, you
would see that this is something they treat with a significant
degree of seriousness. It has been a very, very pleasant turnaround
to have people like Mark Lambirth and Clive Burrows take the agenda
quite as seriously as they have and they are now pressing us for
things that we can do under the sustainable development agenda
which they can build into the strategy, having had a chance to
sit back and review it in the wider transport policy.
Q294 Ms Barlow: The number of rail
passengers has gone up sharply in recent years.
Mrs Shaw: Yes[27].
Q295 Ms Barlow: How close are we,
particularly in the South East, to overloading the network? How
much scope is there for moving from car to rail and how much investment
would it take to make a really significant shift?
Mrs Shaw: Outside of the peaks,
we are nowhere near capacity. If you want to travel in the peak
hours, then we are very, very close to capacity already and in
some places we are probably in excess of capacity, theoretical
capacity I should say. We could alleviate capacity in the short-term
with a number of very small-scale investments to relieve various
pinch points, either at stations or junctions of various kinds,
and we are not talking vast amounts of investment. To make a step
change would take a significant project; something of the like
of the Kent domestic trains running on the high-speed rail link
will constitute a very significant increase in capacity for certain
parts of Kent and the Thames expansion area, but that has been
achieved at a significant cost: the building of the CTRL. The
Eurostar on CTRL itself has achieved a huge increase in capacity
and has grabbed an enormous share of the market between the three
capitals and demonstrates very nicely what a well-thought out,
well-run and well-resourced train service can do. I believe that
the integrated Kent franchise with the new trains running on the
CTRL will represent a big change in the amount of capacity, particularly
from Ashford into the north of London rather than Ashford into
the south of London. It is difficult to give you a precise indication
of just how close to capacity we are because there are particular
points where we are at capacity or over and above, but either
side of that there is some scope. So if we could do something
about those particular pinch points, then clearly more capacity
would be available. Conversely, if we were to look at a different
kind of step change we could make some trains longer. That would
require investment at junctions and stations. Double-deck has
been raised. That would be a very, very long term thing to do
and would probably require investment in new lines, I would say,
rather than developing the existing lines. One of the projects
we have had ongoing for some time has revealed just how much of
a challenge building a double-deck service would be and it would
take some significant philosophical changes in terms of operating
practice. It would require some separate platforms at stations
and that sort of thing. So in the shorter term longer trains is
probably a better bet, and we can do that on some routes already.
Q296 David Howarth: Can you just
explain that a bit further, because you see double-decker trains
in Holland and the RER in Paris is double-decker. Can you just
be a bit more precise about what the changes needed are?
Mrs Shaw: It is quite simple.
We built our railway before everybody else did and did not realise
just how much of an advantage it would be to have extra space.
It is like the difference between, say, sitting in an Austin A40
and the present BMW 5 series. It is just that much extra space
in strategic places which gives you sufficient room to actually
put all the seats at a low level and high level and still have
all the additional equipment you need for lighting, braking systems,
air conditioning, and so on. We have a project in place to make
the existing high-speed routes work with longer coaches and slightly
wider coaches which will give us a single digit increase in seat
capacity for the Intercity routes, and that seems to represent
a far better cost benefit than having to spend a lot of money
moving structures, moving tracks further apart from each other
just to get enough room for two trains to pass each other at all
points. We know that enlargement for double-deck trains would
help with high capacity container trains and in some places some
investment has taken place, such as Ipswich tunnel, on the route
through from Felixstowe to Nuneaton to allow that to happen, but
even if you do that for 9ft 6in containers, which are the highest
present boxes, you still do not create enough space for double-deck
trains[28].
Q297 Ms Barlow: To continue with
capacity, the Government is considering the possibility of national
road user charging. How much linkage is there between the Government's
policy for road and the policy for rail? Are they taking fully
into account the need to increase capacity for public transport
if they should bring this in?
Mr Lyons: The answer is that there
is no direct linkage at this point because clearly the form that
national road user charging will take is not yet entirely known.
It is quite clear that the levers you get when you have a national
road charging scheme can be pulled in all sorts of directions
and have all sorts of outcomes. At present it is quite clear that
if there were a national road user charging scheme which was to
significantly discourage motorists, particularly in built-up areas,
and encourage them to move to other forms of transport—because
the studies show that by and large people will look for other
ways of travel even though you will discourage a certain amount
of travel—public transport systems in Britain would quickly
find themselves in many cases completely overwhelmed. This brings
us to the big argument that if you are to move to a national road
charging system, how are you to introduce it, what outcomes are
you going to see, what modal shift are you going to get, and how
are you going to cope with it? We have not really got to that
debate at all yet. There is no sense of that. This is because
we lack a really overarching transport strategy which has addressed
all these issues in a way that can be successfully managed.
Q298 Mr Hurd: Just to follow up on
that point, I think the Government is in conversation with something
like 32 local authorities about setting up road charging pilot
schemes, and I think their hope is that it can be tested on an
inter-urban basis. To what degree is the rail industry involved
in those conversations and those discussions?
Mr Lyons: On the edges of it,
to be honest, at this stage because most of the local authority
road charging schemes are at a relatively early stage of development
as well. Where, of course, they are principally taking place,
or many of them, is in the Passenger Transport Executive area
and by and large already the PTs have a well-integrated view of
public transport and they can manage the business. The trouble
is, of course, that even quite a tight local scheme has significant
impacts outside its own area and this, I think, is the problem
you meet with trying to do these schemes piecemeal unless you
have got a really good overarching view of where you want to end
up, and I think at this stage, quite frankly, we have not got
it. I think the reasons are self-evident. I think there are some
major technology issues which have got to be addressed. I think
there has to be some major public policy issues which clearly
have to be addressed ranging from privacy and security to what
sorts of towns and cities we are actually trying to build, and
until that is really explored I think to some extent the railway
industry is just warning that if there is to be a major shift
to this form of road control we have got to be involved and it
has got to be done in a way whereby if change is made, public
transport does not let the system down.
Q299 Joan Walley: Could I just follow
that up and just ask what the mechanism is for you to be involved
in that strategic way in that overarching policy, because there
are whole swathes of the country where there are no PTAs and where
there is not that kind of joint mechanism at a local level which
could connect the whole thing up?
Mr Lyons: Obviously the way you
would see it the link into the railway industry would be through
DfT and the department's Rail Group there would have to be the
conduit. Clearly, the other two major players would be Network
Rail, because it has custodianship of the network but of course
in the case of London, Scotland and elsewhere would have to take
other issues into account, and of course the Association of Train
Operating Companies plus the freight operators. So there are quite
a number of people involved.
23 Footnote inserted by witness 10.05.06: The rail
industry has some research underway to identify ways in which
we can improve our use of fuel, both electric and diesel for traction
purposes. Back
24
Footnote inserted by witness 10.05.06: Schemes such as "PlusBus"
operate from a number of stations across the country to serve
destinations and extend the reach of rail to the benefit of the
passenger e.g. Peterborough to Kings Lynn, where there is a rail
connection possible, but indirectly, or Kettering to Corby which
does not have a passenger connection. Plusbus tickets are sold
as part of the rail journey by the TOCs. Back
25
Footnote inserted by witness 10.05.06: The European Commission
is strongly supportive of the development of ERTMS, but is not
directly involved in its development at a technical level. Back
26
Footnote inserted by witness 10.05.06: It should be noted that
ERTMS even before it is fully developed will be a significant
improvement over the present situation for signalling systems
for international/operators due to commonality of some components. Back
27
Footnote inserted by witness 10.05.06: 40% growth since privatisation
started. We have the fastest growing railway in Europe, and are
now second only to Germany in passenger numbers. Back
28
Footnote inserted by witness 10.05.06: The space constraints
for double-deck trains have been found to exist at the low areas,
not the upper levels. Typically, structures that would be the
most expensive to mitigate are at platform height or below. Back
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