Examination of Witnesses (Questions 14140
- 14159)
14140. Can I just come back on that and ask
you to explain why you have bothered to put in your response to
my Petition that "a western Heathrow rail link may ultimately
be beneficial" when you have actually just said that the
numbers do not justify it, but also at the same time you have
done no work on the Reading figures whatsoever?
(Mr Berryman) Well, we have
done a lot of work on the typical business usage, not specifically
related to Reading, I will admit. What happens in the future,
what our children or their successors do, I do not know, but the
patterns of travel may change, the availability of rail travel
may change and there may be all kinds of things which will happen,
and that may change the equation over a long period of time, but
looking at now, we just do not see a justification for this.
14141. Martin Salter: I do not see any
point, Chair, in continuing this exchange; I have made my point.
Examined by The Committee
14142. Mr Binley: I would like to explore
this cost element of the work. It did worry me last week that
I thought the costs presented were really rather crude and we
have had an answer today that the difference could be in the region
of 12 and 25% on the 360. I would like to explore the signalling
bit of the work because, as I understand it, that cost was included
in the 360.
(Mr Berryman) No, sir. The
cost of immunisation is included. That is the cost of the additional
works that are needed when you electrify a railway. A diesel-operated
railway or even a steam-operated railway, for that matter, does
not need the same level of insulation between the power source
and the electrical current which are used in the signalling, so
there are very substantial costs when you electrify a railway
involving the immunisation of the signalling for track services.
14143. Well, there is some further cost saving
there on the 360?
(Mr Berryman) No, sir, I
am saying that—
14144. So there is no cost saving at all?
(Mr Berryman) The 360 million
includes the cost of immunisation of the signalling. It does not
include the cost of the signalling.
14145. I see. Just to clear my own mind again,
that 360 does not include the amount that Network Rail would contribute
to the refurbishment of Reading Station?
(Mr Berryman) It includes
the works which would be needed to accommodate Crossrail, that
is to say, the additional platforms to allow the Crossrail trains
to turn round. What it does not include is the major works which
are required to sort out the notorious Reading bottleneck which
you have heard a certain amount about.
14146. Mr Binley: I recognise that this
is outside our remit, but we are going to debate this matter again
in the House of Commons and I really do think that I would like
to see a proper cost analysis only on an A4 sheet of paper, but
I am a businessman and I love to see P and L.
14147. Mr Elvin: Sir, I was just going
to stand up and offer that. We will put you together a proper
breakdown so that you can see, and use it for the purposes of
internal discussion and other purposes, exactly how this is put
together. If we also explain on that sheet what matters are not
included as well, that might be helpful.
14148. Mr Binley: Yes, thank you.
14149. Sir Peter Soulsby: Mr Berryman,
Mr Elvin has just promised us some more information there, and
you have talked about the net additional cost of going to Reading,
but can I return you to the big question in front of us about
the benefits of going to Reading. There is obviously an incredible
gulf between the Promoter's view of the potential benefits and
the Petitioners' views, which we have heard again today and on
previous occasions. Frankly, what is it they do not understand?
(Mr Berryman) I do not know,
I really do not know. We have already heard from this Petitioner's
evidence that he himself does not use the slow-line or the relief-line
services to get into town and he uses the Intercity expresses,
and I think he would probably be a fairly typical user of the
line from Reading. The services on the relief lines from Reading
are relatively slow and relatively unattractive and what Crossrail
would be doing would be replicating those trains with electric
trains rather than diesel and there would possibly be some very
minor improvements, so I am extremely unclear as to what the people
of Reading think they would be getting out of Crossrail if Crossrail
went there. It looks nice on the map. You join the lines on the
map and it looks like it makes a pattern, but I cannot actually
see how much use it would be.
14150. We have been hearing a consistent message
from all the Members of Parliament and all the local authorities
in the area and that consistent message is that if Crossrail were
to be extended to Reading, it would bring very considerable benefits.
We are hearing something very different now. Can you explain this
gulf of understanding?
(Mr Berryman) Well, I just
do not know what the benefits are. I can see that there would
be some benefits to the residents of Twyford, but as far as Reading
itself is concerned, I am absolutely at a loss to see what the
benefits are.
14151. Kelvin Hopkins: We have touched
on this in previous sessions, but bringing a service to Reading
which was fast or semi-fast, like the RER in Paris where in the
central part it stops at every station and in the outer part it
stops only at the main stations, would Crossrail not provide a
good commuter service between Slough, Maidenhead, Twyford and
Reading and points in London as well? If it was clearly stopping
at every station between Reading and London, it would be a slow
service and it would be of very little interest to commuters,
but if it was a fast or semi-fast service outside of London and
a stopping service inside of London, would that not be more attractive?
(Mr Berryman) It would if
you could do it, but the problem is that trains cannot overtake
on what is effectively a two-track railway. You need to recognise
the fact that the main lines are fully occupied by the long-distance
train services going through Reading and on to south Wales and
south-west England, so we have only got the relief lines available
to us. Basically, if trains cannot overtake, the timetable and
the number of stops fixes the speed of the fastest train, so if
you imagine a stopping train sets off and it is followed after
some distance by a semi-fast train, the semi-fast train will run
down a stopping train fairly quickly, so the timetable planning
has to take into account the way in which those trains are tracked,
and it is those trains which fix the speed, if you like, the overall
speed, and it is the frequency of the stopping patterns which
affects the number of trains that can be provided. Now, in different
circumstances, for example, you and I both know the Midland mainline
and that the commuter services, what used to be called the Thameslink
services, actually have the availability of all four lines during
the peak because the main lines are much less intensively used
than the main lines are on the Great Western. You have got to
imagine how Thameslink would operate if there was a constant stream
of Midland mainline trains coming down those main lines and how
difficult it would be to provide the existing links on fast and
semi-fast services.
14152. Sir Peter Soulsby: I wonder, Mr
Berryman, if you can then explain why those same arguments do
not apply to going as far as Maidenhead? Why go to Maidenhead?
Why not just stop at Ealing Broadway?
(Mr Berryman) This is explained
in the information papers, but there are really basically four
destinations, possible termination points we looked at. There
is Ealing Broadway, Slough, Maidenhead and Reading. If you go
to one of the other ones, like Ealing Broadway or Slough, you
still have got to service all the stations beyond the point at
which the Crossrail services stop, so you have to provide more
or less of a commuter service, another commuter service. Now,
the problem then becomes finding capacity for those commuter trains
which go beyond the limits of electrification and the electric
trains which are bringing them up out of the tunnels. It is a
question of finding the balance. If we were only to go as far
as Ealing Broadway, we would have to extend the Crossrail lines,
the dedicated lines, all the way to Ealing Broadway, and there
are some extremely severe, technical problems in doing that. In
order to make it work nicely, you would need to have cross-platform
interchange at Ealing Broadway and Ealing Broadway is a very difficult
site and not somewhere which is amenable to that sort of construction.
The same applies if you go to Slough. You would still have to
put additional traffic capacity in somewhere in inner London to
allow for those trains which are coming from beyond Slough as
well as for the electric trains which Crossrail will be putting
on. When we get to Maidenhead, we identified that as the first
place where we would not need to provide additional track work
coming further into London and the first place where the Crossrail
trains would start to pick up substantial numbers of passengers
because, as I have said, going to Reading does not give us any
more passengers.
14153. Mrs James: I just want to go back
a step because we have talked about Crossrail being one of the
largest projects and I made the point yesterday when Mr Weston
gave evidence about the fast and slow lines, which you called
the `relief' and the `main'. To us, they are just the fast and
the slow because it is quite simple, you are either going slow
or you are going fast, there is no two ways about it.
(Mr Berryman) That is absolutely
right. That is a much better distinction.
14154. Past experience has shown that the capacity
on those lines, given any blockage, given any problems at all,
it is the services from the West that suffer. At the drop of a
hat, those are the services which will be displaced, and I will
give you an example of that. When there was the Paddington rail
disaster, and we understand why, the services to south Wales and
the West were reduced by 10% going into Paddington and there was
absolute chaos. It seems strange to me, and I am afraid I am being
a little bit partisan here, but it seems strange to me that on
the back of the largest project we are going to see, and I have
worked in the rail industry, we cannot address some of the wider
issues, and Reading is an issue. For us who travel through Reading
on a daily or a weekly basis, we know there are problems there
and we also know how busy that railway station is, so it just
does not make sense to me when you talk about it that there is
not the interest or there is not the demand because I see that
demand on a daily basis, so I am a little bit taken aback by that.
(Mr Berryman) There is a
very strong demand for commuting from Reading, but that commuting
takes place on the high-speed trains. There is not much demand
for the kind of trains which will be on offer from Crossrail which
would be the existing slow-line trains replicated by us. The point
about Reading needing redevelopment, I could not agree more, that
Crossrail, even if we went to Reading, would not be able to sort
out all of the problems of Reading and it is much more to do with
what happens at the various junctions in Reading. I know there
are some schemes, some of them very elaborate, which have been
proposed to solve that problem, but certainly it would be well
beyond the remit of what Crossrail is there to do. All we would
be doing if we went to Reading is providing some platforms for
our trains to turn round, and also the trains coming from the
Oxford direction, they would also have to turn round because they
could not get through to London. On the question of allocation
of paths, this will be in the hands of Network Rail. They will
be responsible for regulating the service and making the decision
as to which trains get priority, exactly as they are now. You
will appreciate of course that when it is operating as a two-track
railway, some thinning out of the service has to take place, but
that would only happen in the case of emergency or when part of
the line is out of action. That is exactly as it is now. There
is nothing that we could do about that as part of this scheme.
It is something that requires much more strategic intervention.
14155. But I think personally the point needs
to be registered.
(Mr Berryman) I think the
point is well made and we are aware of this issue, but it is well
beyond the remit of what Crossrail could do.
14156. Sir Peter Soulsby: Mr Berryman,
I am sure you will remind me that it is somewhere in one of these
many information packs behind me, but can you just humour me by
reminding the Committee about the benefits of Crossrail to the
stations between Maidenhead and Ealing Broadway? What is intended
will be the increase in frequency and journey times for commuters
at those intermediate stations?
(Mr Berryman) I do not have
the figures ready at my fingertips, but basically what we are
looking to have is a four-trains-an-hour service between Maidenhead
and London going into the Crossrail tunnels. From West Drayton
inwards, there would be an additional two trains an hour and from
Hayes and Harlington inwards, there would be an additional four
trains an hour, so when you get to Hayes and Harlington, there
would be a total of 10 trains an hour going into the Crossrail
tunnels. Also there will be two semi-fast services which start
at Reading, call at Twyford, Maidenhead, Slough, Hayes and Harlington,
Ealing Broadway and then into Paddington high level, so they will
get quite an increase in service certainly from Hayes and Harlington
and Southall, I think more or less the same service as they get
now from Ealing Broadway, but with much bigger trains. Quite a
lot of the trains on the relief lines, the slow lines of the Great
Western are very small, two-, three- and four-coach trains, the
trains using the relief lines. All our trains would be ten-coach
trains, so the overcrowding problems which currently exist on
those inner suburban services would be eliminated.
14157. Martin Salter: Chairman, Mr Berryman
said that I do not opt to use the slow lines, and he is absolutely
right, but I do use the slow lines, not by choice, because the
amount of time the existing HST service has to go on the slow
line and on the relief line, it beggars belief that Crossrail
is not going to disrupt that. Mr Berryman actually said in response
to a question, I think from Sir Peter, that there will be some
thinning out of service. I do not know what he means by some thinning
out of service in the context of a system at stress point at the
moment. In answer to Sir Peter's question about why do the people
in Reading, why do the businesses in Reading, why do the MPs and
why do the councils of Reading actually want Crossrail to come
to Reading, Mr Berryman said rather glibly, "I don't know".
Well, what has changed, Chairman, since 1992 when Reading was
already in Crossrail's own case? Has Reading got smaller? Have
we got fewer businesses? Have we got fewer people? Have we got
fewer people travelling? I am sorry, but that is really not sufficient.
14158. The last point I want to make is in respect
of Brian's probing on this cost issue which really is not resolved
yet. I cannot see how Mr Berryman can state what is in or what
is out of the Reading Station refurbishment plan just announced
by Network Rail this week as part of their priorities when in
fact it has not even been assessed by the DfT as part of the Government's
process.
14159. Chairman: Mr Elvin, before Mr
Berryman steps down, do you want to ask him any other questions
and are there any questions that you want to put to him in relation
to one or two points that Mr Wilson raised or will you be dealing
with that in the summing-up?
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