Readers air their views about the railway industry and Rail Professional


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Getting the priorities right The current government has, as a policy objective, a desire for a more even spread of economic growth and development throughout the UK. The cancelling of the £1bn GWML electrification scheme, with its clear benefits for south-west England and South Wales,


seems at odds with this stated aim. Even more so when one considers: n Approval to spend £18bn on Crossrail;


n Commitment to spend more than £18bn on HS2;


n Approval for more than £1bn metro extensions in Manchester and Newcastle; and


n The Greengauge 21-sponsored KPMG assessment of the economic impacts of HS2 indicate that the current HS2 scheme will have a net negative impact on the economies of Wales and south-west England! Surely this data must be


considered when the UK government is making capital investment decisions for infrastructure schemes that have an economic impact. The current UK government


policy (ie pretty much ignoring Wales and south-west England for capital investment) would exacerbate what is clearly already a pretty poor prognosis. If UK government policy (as


Sainsbury’s: Try something new


The feature on Kirit Varsarni of National Express East Anglia and his Sainsbury’s background in the August Rail Professional shows, surely, that the rail profession can learn from outsiders. It reminded me of a tale told about a transport professionals’ visit to Badgerline, just after they’d started up their minibus operation about 25 years ago. They were told that the minibus drivers had been recruited from all sorts of backgrounds. The MD took the party to a terminus and left them there to watch for an hour. As the minibuses arrived, they saw the drivers hop out and help mums with pushchairs and kids and old ladies with their shopping, save for one bus that just waited for people to get off and left them there. The group reported back to the MD. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘the


first was an ex-milkman, the other an ex-grocer’ and so on. ‘But there was one driver who was different,’ they said. ‘Ah, I thought you’d notice him,’ said the MD. ‘He was formerly a London Bus driver!’


Eric Stuart


stated) is to even out economic growth, it really can’t justify a position that sees support for Crossrail, HS2 etc and not GWML electrification. There also seems to be


confusion as regards improved access to Heathrow by rail with, again, much frenzied discussion of HS2. The regions outside London with the greatest need for better access to Heathrow are South Wales and south-west England – not the Midlands, the north and Scotland. Better access to Heathrow


from the GWML (and yes once it’s electrified) can deliver two modal shifts: firstly from car journeys to the airport down the M4 and secondly from the numerous daily flights from Cardiff and Bristol airports to/from Schipol that could now use Heathrow instead of changing at Schipol. Has anyone modelled these scenarios?


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There is clearly a need for a more holistic and truly UK- wide rail strategy that seeks to address the needs of all the major population centres in the UK. After all, the Cardiff, Bristol and Swansea City regions have a combined population of less than three million; if the wider South Wales and SW England region is included, that is over six million. That is more than Scotland


and on a par with the major northern conurbations. In the debate with regard to high speed rail on a UK north-south axis, the needs of a substantial portion of the UK population have been completely ignored.


Mark Barry M&G Barry Consulting


IEP was on wrong track Paul Clifton’s piece in Rail Professional (August 2010 issue) was excellent. The IEP project has had the tinge of decline on it for ages. The DfT seems to have gone off completely on the wrong tack in all of this – the mountain has rumbled and given forth an expensive (dead) mouse. I’m using the whole


project as part of my PhD on innovation in the rail sector and this looks like an object lesson in how not to do it.


If the IEP is the big hit in


any forthcoming cutbacks, then the case for electrification of the main lines might survive. Rumblings over cancellation of the GWML scheme (always a strange decision compared to MML) are worrying, but then again in the absence of new power generation capacity by 2015-16, this might all have some crazy logic behind it. But I find it hard to understand. Electrification of the two primary routes with infilling suggested by DBS to create a real system and not a bunch of radial lines would probably


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