House of Lords - Crossrail Bill - Minutes of Evidence

Select Committee on the Crossrail Bill Minutes of Evidence

Examination of Witnesses (Questions 8100 - 8119)

8100. The next slide is Abbey Wood, which I have spoken about already, where we will be putting new tracks on the outside, here, and diverting the existing services over those tracks, and our trains will run up the middle.[14] The next one.[15] Paddington is at the other end of the line. We will be hearing from Westminster City Council in a couple of weeks' time. From there there is going to be a station underneath Eastbourne Terrace here, and we are going to a site visit there to look at that, I think, next Monday. Next please. Westbourne Park.[16] This is where the Crossrail tunnels emerge into daylight, having come across London. There is an existing batching plant, which is currently operated by Tarmac. The intention is to reprovision that batching plant but, also, to provide sidings so that it can continue to be served by rail. There is an obvious advantage in serving these kind of plants by rail. Next one.[17] This is another slide of Acton Yard. Next slide, please.[18] This is the same yard but from a bit further down. Just down here, slightly off the picture, is Ealing Broadway station. What we plan to do here is to put an underpass underneath the entry into this yard, because freight trains going into and out of this yard are very slow; they obstruct other traffic. Here is a plan of what we will be doing.[19] We will be adding the red bits there on to the layout. That means that trains coming out of the yard do not cross over Crossrail trains going towards London. The Crossrail trains going towards London go underneath an underpass, and that removes a very significant conflict and a very difficult operational problem on the Great Western Line, which exists already. The idea is to improve reliability. Next slide, please.[20] Old Oak Common I have spoken about already.

8101. The next one is Ealing Broadway station.[21] We are proposing nothing much on the track works there, merely a rebuild of the station, which is not very accessible. The next one is West Ealing station.[22] What happens here is that there is a branch which goes to Greenford, and the proposal is to discontinue the Greenford branch from going into Paddington and terminate trains in a new bay platform just here.[23] So if you are going from the Greenford branch, instead of having a through train into Paddington you would need to change onto a Crossrail train at West Ealing. The compensation for that is the frequency on the branch will be doubled; it is currently half-an-hour and it will go to a quarter of an hour.

8102. The next slide is of Hanwell Bridge sidings.[24] It is quite difficult to explain this. There is a line which goes down here, down towards Brentford, and there are a few trains every day which come up from Brentford and then pass across the mainline and go down back towards London and then they divert off up towards Greenford. There are, basically, two kinds of trains: stone trains and rubbish trains—the "bin liners" as they are called. This was the scene of the Southall crash a few years ago, and it was one of those stone trains which was crossing the line which was hit by a mainline train coming from the South West. That was a very serious accident. It is very difficult to path those trains across this network because, effectively, you have to have a free space on all four tracks, with no trains coming at all, to get across. What we are proposing to do is to provide a recess in the middle so a train only has to get across two lines. It can then be held waiting for a path across the other two lines. By doing that, again, we will increase reliability and, obviously, increase the number of trains that can be put through. The next slide is Airport Junction.[25] There is significant work to be done at Airport Junction. The next slide shows the current layout.[26] You can see that Heathrow Express trains come down the mainlines and divert on the line which goes to Heathrow, and trains coming back from Heathrow come along the Heathrow Express lines and join the mainlines. There is also another service, called Heathrow Connect.

8103. LORD YOUNG OF NORWOOD GREEN: That is what I was going to ask you about.
(Mr Berryman) Heathrow Connect serves Terminal 4. It is the Heathrow Connect service that we will be subsuming, but currently Heathrow Connect only runs two trains an hour. Their route is to come down the relief line from Paddington and then go on to what they call the "wrong road", the wrong way up this ramp. Of course, its signals go in either direction, but you know what I mean. Then they come back and join the line going into Heathrow after they have crossed over that bridge. So the reason there are only two trains an hour which run down to Heathrow Connect is because of that conflict there, because of the time taken for a train to run "wrong road" round there and the time for the next train to come out. What we are doing is to build a much more substantial junction so that those bi-directional moves are dispensed with, and that would enable us to run four trains an hour into Heathrow.[27] So it is quite a complicated bit of work and it is the biggest piece of work, by a substantial margin, on the west side of London.

8104. If I may, my Lord Chairman, you are going to replace that existing Heathrow Connect service with Crossrail?
(Mr Berryman) Yes, we are.

8105. MR ELVIN: I have managed to find the reference where I read out to the Commons Select Committee what the arrangements were with BAA and British Airways, just so the Committee knows where it is set out. It is in Volume 4 of the Select Committee's report and it is a statement I made between paragraphs 13944 and 13945. That explains the replacement of the existing services to Terminals 1 to 4 and then the agreement that Heathrow Express would then run to Terminal 5. That is all set out there. If there are any further issues arising from that we can deal with it.
(Mr Berryman) So that is the arrangement which will rule after Crossrail is finished, and it allows no conflicts for trains going into Heathrow. The next slide is West Drayton.[28] There are currently five tracks here; there are the mainlines, the relief lines and then there is a goods loop.[29] We plan to restructure this so that the loop, instead of being on the north side of the layout where it is now, is in the middle.[30] So you have the fast lines, which are undisturbed, then you would have the down relief line, then the loop and then the up relief line. The purpose of that is to allow trains in either direction to be recessed—to be parked—whilst they are overtaken. We would also be very substantially extending that loop. You may remember the issue of the Dog Kennel Bridge, which we spoke about earlier. That is all part of those same works.[31] The next one is Slough—a famous and exciting spot. It appears to have become famous as an undesirable place, but I personally cannot see anything wrong with it.

8106. BARONESS FOOKES: When you wait there 20 minutes to get another train to take six minutes, which I did on Sunday morning, it is not a happy ----
(Mr Berryman) I am sorry to hear that, my Lady. No doubt the environs of the town outside the station are much more attractive. We intend to put in a new bay platform here to allow for what we are calling a residual diesel service, which will go from here to Reading. Can we go on to slide 49, please.[32] This is Maidenhead railway bridge, which has been a source of some controversy. This is, obviously, one of Brunel's great works. It is famous for being a very flat arch with not much of a rise in it. Other engineers at the time were convinced it would fall down, but, as you can see, it did not; it is still there. We will have to put overhead electrification masts and gantries on this, and we have come up, with English Heritage, with a scheme which will allow that to be done without significantly damaging the setting. The next slide is Maidenhead station.[33] You see here the platforms. We are going to put in an additional platform here which will run on the outside there. You can see why. There is a branch which goes from Maidenhead to Bourne End and Marlow. Currently, that branch terminates in one of the five platforms at Maidenhead, but because we will be turning a lot of trains there we need an additional platform, so we will build a new platform for that Bourne End and Marlow branch just to the north here of the existing station.[34] That is a very quick run-through of the works that we are proposing to build.

8107. LORD BROOKE OF ALVERTHORPE: In which part of the programme does that piece of work get done—the Maidenhead end? Is it late or is it early?
(Mr Berryman) Actually, my Lord, the works on the surface will be quite time-consuming because of the issue of possessions and the way in which the work has to be organised. There will be work going on on the Great Western—particularly the Great Western—from a fairly early point in the programme. Exactly when Maidenhead will slot in we could not be sure yet. The intention (in fact, it is more than an intention) is this work will be done by Network Rail as part of the project, and we have an agreement with them which allows for that to be done, which is currently still in negotiation.

8108. So it is quite conceivable that you will do all that work and then they will decide to go all the way to Reading and it will all be wasted.
(Mr Berryman) Not very much will be wasted, my Lord. It is still likely that some trains will turn at Maidenhead in any event. I was going to say a few words about the structure of the industry, if that is all right. I do not know if you have this, my Lords, but we have a glossary of the terms. I would advise you not to bother to refer to it right now but if it comes up in future it should be helpful.

8109. CHAIRMAN: I note, Mr Berryman, that one thing you do not have is what is a CCM. It is a Control Change Mechanism or a Change Control Mechanism?
(Mr Berryman) My Lord, that is something which is part of the ruling from the ORR—

8110. CHAIRMAN: Yes, but it is incomprehensible to me.

8111. MR ELVIN: There is a definition of Network Change, if that helps.
(Mr Berryman) My Lord, we have people who understand these things, but I have to say I am not one of them. First of all, who is the infrastructure manager? Tracks and signals are all owned by Network Rail, who have a legal position as infrastructure manager, as set down in the various bits of railway legislation. They are regulated economically, and in other ways, by the Office of the Rail Regulator. Network Rail gets a network licence, which is issued by the Office of the Rail Regulator, to operate the trains, and that is intended to continue, as far as Crossrail is concerned, both during construction and after. The arrangements for the Heathrow branch are a bit different. It is, in effect, a private railway, but they will be unchanged too. Train Operating Companies. A number of operators run train services, as everyone will be familiar with, particularly if they have had to wait a long time for a train—the train operator somehow becomes imprinted in your memory. They are collectively known as "TOCs" (Train Operating Companies). There is a subset of these called "FOCs" (Freight Operating Companies). Each company has a licence and you have to be a licensed operator before you can bid for access rights to run on the railway. These are access rights of, typically, about five to ten years, which is the normal length of a freight contract. A stone contract, for example, would typically last a few years before being re-bid. Passenger franchises last, typically, seven years. So the access rights are granted for those periods. For very large projects (and obviously Crossrail falls into the very large category—the East London line is one as well, and Thameslink and the North London line, and there are a couple of other examples in other parts of the country) the Office of the Rail Regulator will consider applications for access rights over a longer duration. The reason for this is because the payback time for some of the very large investments that are being made is longer than seven years. If Crossrail did not have the right to operate trains for the period required to justify construction, it would make the financing of the project extremely difficult. So if a project requires a significant investment the Office of the Rail Regulator is prepared to grant longer durations for access rights. When an operator has access rights, trains have to operate in accordance with a set of rules set down by Network Rail, called the Network Code, and in accordance with the individual access agreement which that train operator has. In broad terms, this provides for them to be compensated for direct and reputational loss if their trains are delayed by another train or an infrastructure failure. Operators pay compensation to Network Rail if their trains delay somebody else. I do not know what it is like now, but a few years ago there were vast armies of clerks working out who delayed who so that the money could be passed between them. I think it has been somewhat simplified in the last few years, but that is still the case. If an operator does not use the rights that are granted—for example, if you get rights for a freight flow and then, for some reason, the freight flow stops—then the provision is for these rights to be handed back so that other users can use the capacity. That is called "Use it or lose it", which is mentioned, I think, in the document you have been perusing. Further provision for compensation applies when the railway is closed due to what we call "possessions". I am sure you will have heard of the problem with possessions over the Christmas period and, latterly, over Easter. When trains cannot operate because engineering work is taking place and these are quite an issue (and there will be an issue on this project because there is a lot of work to be done) the way the possessions are organised is through the Rules of the Route, which is part of the Network Code. A good example would be one I have referred to earlier, where the fast lines between Romford and Shenfield are closed every night after nine o'clock to allow for engineering works. So one pair of tracks remains open but the other track is closed so that any essential maintenance, and so on, can be done on that track. If a possession is required outside the terms of the Rules of the Route then a higher level of compensation is payable to the passenger training operating companies and a longer period of notice of possessions is needed to be given. For passenger trains public performance is measured by the Public Performance Measure, which is performance based on the number of trains arriving late. In a suburban passenger train five minutes is classed as late, for longer distance trains ten minutes is classed as late. So if a train arrives at Paddington from Bristol, say, nine minutes thirty seconds late it is still classed as being on time under that performance measure.

8112. CHAIRMAN: That is what the 92 per cent that the ORR is talking about applies to, is it?
(Mr Berryman) Yes, my Lord. I have to say, there is further work to do on that because it is dubious whether the PPM measure is the appropriate one for a line like Crossrail, which does not, in the normal sense, have termini in central London, but we are working with them on that. Network Rail has to produce a document called a Route Utilisation Strategy and they are gradually working their way round the country producing Route Utilisation Strategies for all of the lines. These strategies look at the trends in growth, passenger and freight, how it can be accommodated, performance issues, possibly changing passenger train specifications, and it will also look at the possibility of changes to the infrastructure. Then it is supposed to rank the benefits against the cost. Sometimes that is quite difficult to do because these documents look to many years ahead and it is not always clear exactly how things are going to develop. If there are any proposals to change the network these are proposed by Network Rail to all the interested parties, and they all have an opportunity to say their piece about them. It is called the Network Change Procedure. The Network Change Procedure is quite formal; it is set down how it must be done, what the periods of consultation are, and so on and so forth. Operators who feel that their interests are being impacted (for example, if you want to change the position of a signal and operators think that is going to reduce the frequency of trains, or something) then they have a change to appeal against that. If users suffer loss as a result of changes then they can claim back their losses, in theory at least, from Network Rail. Stations are normally owned by Network Rail and leased to the train operators. There are exceptions. The big stations in central London and some of the other big stations around the countryside are actually operated by Network Rail directly, but the station facility owner has a licence to operate the station, which includes a duty to serve other operators. If you take, as an example, Reading station, which I think is operated by Great Western, they have to allow other operators, such as Virgin and other people who use the station, equal rights of access to their own trains, and they provide the staff, and so on. If Network Rail or the operator wants to make a change there is a process for that, too, called the Station Change Process, and it is very similar to the Network Rail Network Change that we have just talked about.

8113. I am going to say a bit now about timetables, because timetables are the essence of how a railway operates. I was taught at school—I remember the history master teaching us—that the First World War, when it reached a certain point, could not be stopped because the railway timetables on the German railways was so fiendishly complicated that the movement of troops to the front could not be halted. At the time I thought that was a rather far-fetched story. Since I have been involved with railway timetables I realise it is probably rather an understatement of the reality. Timetables are produced using a lot of statistical data, as you can imagine: running times, times of trains between two points, allowances for time lost, allowances for dwell time in stations, and so on and so forth, temporary speed restrictions and permanent speed restrictions, and the minimum gap (the headway) between one train and another. These are all set down in a thing called the Rules of the Plan, which sets all these parameters out. That is prepared by Network Rail and is part of the Network Code. Each train has a slot, or path, and paths will include allowance for recovery from delays caused by engineering works or, for example, if a person in a wheelchair needs to get on to a train the station staff have to get a ramp out, and that adds a little bit of time to the journey. So there is recovery time built into the timetable for a certain number of those kinds of events to happen, or if there is engineering works and there is a temporary speed restriction which is unannounced. Sometimes running in congested areas just leads to loss of time. So the timetables have a little added into them that is known as circle time.

8114. Timetables are produced every year. Each operator submits their proposals for the next cycle, based on the rights they have. They ask for, for example, two trains an hour between station X and station Y, taking not longer than so many minutes, and so on, and Network Rail can also propose changes to improve performance of the railway, or whatever. There is an annual timetable conference, which has got to be seen to be believed. All the operators on a route—I have not been to one for about ten years but it got into a bit of a shouting match, actually, as they all competed for paths on a well-known mainline. Conflicts between operators they try to resolve there and then, and they usually succeed. A number of tools are used for timetabling. Traditionally, graphs are used. Can we have slide 14?[35] This is a grossly simplified graph of the services which would operate on the Great Western. This is in the down direction, running away from Paddington. It is drawn to scale. The stations are all listed out here and the distance between the lines on the graph is proportional to the distance between the stations. Time is plotted across the top. You can see here we have got a train, which is one of the Crossrail trains, coming out of the tunnel, first stop Ealing Broadway—it stops there—runs on to Southall (it takes about four minutes—each of these vertical lines is five minutes) and it runs through stopping at West Drayton, Ivor and Langley. That is followed by another train which is going to Heathrow. So it stops at Acton mainline, Ealing Broadway, West Ealing, Southall, Hayes and then it goes off into Heathrow. The Heathrow line is not covered on this graph because, as I said, this is a gross simplification.

8115. Then we have got what we call a residual diesel service. This is a semi-fast diesel service, which is coming out of Paddington at high level, with limited stops, stopping at Ealing Broadway, Hayes, Slough and Maidenhead. You can see the next Crossrail train which follows it directly out, at the minimum headway because it is stopping at all stations; by the time they get to Maidenhead this semi-fast train is ten minutes in front of the Crossrail train, whereas when they started this journey they were only two minutes apart. That is a tool which is used in planning. You can see how different speeds of train use up different amounts of capacity. This is in the off-peak period and there is a freight train coming down here. This freight train never stops, obviously. One of the things that people often do not realise is that because freight trains do not stop their actual speed—average speed—it is quicker than the stopping passenger train. Next slide, please. This is a graph which we prepared in another context to show the difference between Crossrail trains, if they were extended to Reading (because there is a significant body of opinion which thinks that Crossrail should extend to Reading), and the non-stop Intercity trains from Paddington making the same journey.[36] The green line is what we call the residual service. That is the diesel service that we will be providing to go with Crossrail. The Rules of the Plan sets out the headway between trains. That is the minimum gap there can be between a train. On a section of track which has a headway of five minutes, that can handle 12 trains an hour. If all the trains were stopping at exactly the same stopping pattern you could run 12 trains an hour all the way down it, but if some are going to stop more than others (some are semi-fast and some are slow) then that uses up more capacity and you cannot get as many trains on. This is very simplified. The real thing is, obviously, computerised and it is very complex because it shows trains in both directions. I did not think there was any point in showing you a slide of the output from that because it confuses me! I will say a few words about the access option, my Lord.

8116. MR ELVIN: We thought it would be helpful for you to just explain the main points coming out of the access option.
(Mr Berryman) Yes. The main points really are that we applied to the Office of the Rail Regulator for an access option which gave certain services. Generally speaking, they accepted what we put to them, at least in the peaks. In the peaks there will be ten trains per hour on the Great Western, four going to Maidenhead, two going to West Drayton and four going to Heathrow. They will supplant the existing services and that goes down to eight trains per hour in the off-peak and at weekends, and six trains per hour at the beginning and end of day. I will come back to that in a minute, if I may. In the peaks, 12 trains an hour on the Great Eastern to Shenfield, and they will fully replace the current all-stations services, and that reduces to ten trains per hour in what we call the shoulder peaks and eight trains per hour in the off-peak and six trains per hour at the beginning and end of the day. In the peaks, 12 trains an hour in the new tunnel section to Abbey Wood, which would be entirely separate, as I have explained already, from the running lines at Abbey Wood. This goes down to ten trains an hour in the shoulder peak, eight in the off-peak. Of the 24 trains entering the central tunnels from the east in a peak hour, 14 of them terminate at Paddington. So only ten go out on to destinations on the Great Western. That is because that is all there is capacity for them to do.

8117. As your Lordships know, on 14 April the ORR approved the access option, granting Crossrail access rights for 30 years, but he did not think that we had made the case fully for some of the rights we had applied for. These were basically in the off-peak, where we had applied for eight trains per hour on the Great Western, and he only gave us six. However, that does not mean that the proposed off-peak service will not run, because the ORR explained in the documents that you have seen that the granting of this option " ... does not prevent the option holder coming back to us at a later date when the position is clearer. At that time, we will take a decision on the best use of available capacity when we would expect the level of demand to be clearer."

8118. That is paragraph 57 of the decision, which I have just put on the scanner, Mr Berryman, so the Committee can see that.[37]

(Mr Berryman) The ORR also made it clear that the were rights granted with a condition on further timetable modelling, demonstrating that we can achieve the 92 per cent figure which you referred to earlier, my Lord, for more passenger operations, and we are confident that we can achieve that. The passenger and freight services to be assumed include the existing rights of other passenger operators, except for those taken away because they are replaced by Crossrail, and the existing rights of freight operators and paths representing anticipated growth of freight until 2015. The ORR also considered whether it was appropriate to require Crossrail to construct particular infrastructure improvements. As I say, we have got a lot of stuff in the Bill and the timetabling work was based on that. He concluded that it was not and said, " ... we considered whether we should link the ability to exercise the rights to the completion of specified infrastructure enhancements. We decided not to take this approach because of the general lack of knowledge of the likely final technical specification for the project. In our proposed decision, therefore, we chose to concentrate on the outputs from the project (in terms of capacity and performance) rather than the inputs", and that is a point that we very strongly endorse, that what we build should be based on the outputs of the modelling, not the inputs. In other words, if we can demonstrate that the system works with a certain piece of infrastructure built in a certain way, that is the thing that should decide whether that piece of infrastructure is built in that way or built in another way.

8119. That is paragraph 68, which I have just had put up on the screen, of the ORR's decision.[38]

(Mr Berryman) I think I might just say a few words about an extension to Reading, as it has been mentioned many times. The layout of the railways in Reading is complex, and we have actually got a photograph of this somewhere. It is a very congested space, as you know. At the time when the Bill was being prepared, that was still the case. The modernisation of the railways in the area was specified in a high-level output statement in July of last year and that is obviously subsequent to the Bill being prepared. A rebuilding of Reading is going ahead and the Secretary of State has issued a safeguarding direction which would allow the extension of Crossrail trains there at some point in the future. Whilst there are good operational benefits from going there, there are a number of issues that need to be considered. It is only 12 miles from Maidenhead to Reading, but that would require the whole area to be electrified, not just the lines we use because, for flexibility of operation, you need to be able to use any line, and it is quite a big job. Obviously there would be significant costs involved with an extension and there would be more rolling stock required and structures to be rebuilt. This is a picture of a proposed Crossrail train, kindly provided for us by a manufacturer. I wonder why they did that! Electrifying the Main Line is expensive because we have got to raise bridges and alter platforms and so on. Finally, I think the main point is that, although Reading is obviously an important centre and an important point in the network, we expect that there would be very little use of Crossrail trains going from Reading to London because, as I showed on the graph earlier, it is a much slower journey time than would be experienced on the existing high-speed train. We expect that, if Crossrail did go to Reading, it would be primarily used for commuting within the Thames Valley, people going into Reading as well as coming out of it, and we are, therefore, proposing what we call a `residual service', which will be specified by the Department for Transport as any service on the network would be, to provide a semi-fast service from Reading to major locations in the Thames Valley.

14 Crossrail Ref: P55, Aerial view of Abbey Wood (LINEWD-XR7-028) Back

15 Crossrail Ref: P55, Aerial view of Paddington Station (LINEWD-XR7-029) Back

16 Crossrail Ref: P55, Paddington New Yard/Westbourne Park-Oblique view looking east (LINEWD-XR7-030) Back

17 Crossrail Ref: P55, Acton Yard-Existing sidings layout looking east-sheet 1 of 2 (LINEWD-XR7-031) Back

18 Crossrail Ref: P55, Acton Yard-Existing sidings layout looking east-sheet 2 of 2 (LINEWD-XR7-032) Back

19 Crossrail Ref: P55, Acton Yard-Proposed arrangements (LINEWD-XR7-034) Back

20 Crossrail Ref: P55, Old Oak Common-Oblique view looking east (LINEWD-XR7-035) Back

21 Crossrail Ref: P55, Aerial view of Ealing Broadway Station (LINEWD-XR7-036) Back

22 Crossrail Ref: P55, Aerial view of West Ealing Station (LINEWD-XR7-037) Back

23 Crossrail Ref: P55, West Ealing proposed arrangements (LINEWD-XR7-039) Back

24 Crossrail Ref: P55, Hanwell Bridge-Oblique view looking east (LINEWD-XR7-040) Back

25 Crossrail Ref: P55, Aerial view of Airport Junction (LINEWD-XR7-041) Back