Soup of the Day

Virgin Trains’ return on investment

It has been five years since the last major train accident of catastrophic proportions. In fact this accident should have been the next massive blow to the industry, but in the end there was only one fatality. It is one fatality too many, but to have a high speed train crashing in the UK at over 90 miles per hour and only one fatality is a vast improvement on railway vehicle safety.

Currently the police are concentrating their investigation on a set of points that casts a very familiar shadow on the railway maintenance operations last seen during the Potters Bar incident in 2002. On that particular day I was travelling south from Darlington on the East Coast Main Line towards London when suddenly, after passing through Stevenage, the GNER train slammed on its breaks to draw short of crashing into the train across the line at Potters Bar ten miles away. We were only four minutes away from further disaster.

The Potters Bar derailment has never officially been solved. We know that a set of points that were maintained by Jarvis was allegedly reassembled incorrectly by Jarvis sub-contracted engineers. The case has gone to court a number of times, never resulting in a definitive result. It is widely believed that Jarvis were at fault, eventually resulting in the dissolving of Railtrack into a national not-for-profit body called Network Rail. The accident also resulted in a nation wide inspection of all railway points causing months of chaos lasting long into 2004.

If it is found that Network Rail had not performed their maintenance job correctly this week, the argument Virgin Trains have been making for a number of years to maintain their own rails might gain some weight. Virgin are desperate to be in control of all of their systems, trains, tracks and signalling. Sir Richard Branson has voiced his desire to fund construction of High Speed Lines in England and Scotland on numerous occasions in the past, most recently during a bid for the East Coast Franchise that was eventually successfully defended by Sea Containers, owners of GNER. The Virgin bid included plans to create High Speed corridors based on French LGV technology, running ‘TGV’ like trains from London to Edinburgh in three hours.

Virgin’s argument asking to maintain their own tracks makes sense to me, as Virgin will have a vested iterest in ensuring their trains can run safely at speed. It may also be a sneaky way for Richard Branson to upgrade the top running speed from 125mph to originally intended 140mph. It has been proven worldwide that allowing the train operating body to maintain their own tracks provides good safety records. Where I disagree with Richard Branson is with who should run the West Coast, East Coast and all the other lines in the UK. Allowing Virgin to maintain their own tracks would segment the industry and push away from the authors desired goal of eventual nationalisation, or near nationalisation. It would be acceptable to have one national rail operator that was privately owned, but far more desirable would be the re-emergence of British Rail, responsible for trains and track. (Note: EU law now states that there has to be a seperate body responsible for track maintenance from the train operator, but they can be related, . In France, SNCF runs the trains where RFF maintains the track).

Alstom, the company who designed and built the Virgin Pendolinos, have delivered a train that has had safety features built in as standard. The cars were placed under a considerable amount of stress as they lurched from the tracks and came to rest on the bank. Older Mark IV (Used by GNER) and Mark III (Used by other InterCity services) intercity cars are less sturdy and could be classed as death traps if they left the rails. One question I would ask of Virgin, Alstom and Network Rail is why our High Speed Trains are not using an articulated architecture. TGV’s use articulated passenger cars, meaning two cars share a single bogie (wheel set), rather than each car having its own independent set of bogies. From a number of accidents in France involving TGV’s and Eurostars, in every case of derailment the articulated cars always stayed on the track balast and in line, never jack-knifing as the Pendolino did in Cumbria. It would be prudent to put some serious resources into research into articulation as it seems to work perfectly for Alstom across their other high-speed products.

It is very regrettable that the derailment in Cumbria caused a fatality, but we cannot loose sight of the fact that large scale investment in the United Kingdom’s railway network and rolling stock is finally paying dividends in the most important commodity, human life.