News from the East Anglian Branch of Railfuture, Edited by Martin Thorne and Jerry Alderson.
Railfuture News Snippets 362 - 31/05/2023
The Department for Transport (DfT) published its post-COVID national rail passenger figures on Wednesday 10th May 2023. These showed a record post-COVID high daily average of 98.3% for the month of April 2023, during which 14 of the 30 days registered between 101% and 106%, and only four days saw less than 90% (88%) on the first four days of the month.
The press release from Railfuture's campaign against the abolition of the TravelCard add-on was picked up by Rail Business Daily on 19th May 2023. Read it here.
Greater Anglia (GA) has revealed thay Cambridge station's waiting rooms on platofrms 1 and 4 have been refurbished at a cost of £190,000. They have new seating, flooring, information screens and CCTV. They also have space to charge laptops and mobile phones. According to Greater Anglia, the aim was to deliver more comfortable waiting rooms and better facilities for our customers to improve their experience of travelling by rail.
The Mid-Norfolk Railway offered free train travel to people living in Dereham, Yaxham, Garvestone and Thuxton on 'Dereham Day', which was celebrated on Saturday 13th May 2023. See Dereham Times article.
The 31st May 2023 marked the 30th anniversary of the last passenger train (a charter, in fact) called at the old Winslow station, which is being rebuilt for East West Rail and is expected topen in late 2024 or early 2025. The link between Calvert and Bletchley was mothballed in September 1993.
The narrow-gauge Bure Valley Railway in Norfolk has invested in a brand new zero-emission electric locomotive, according to a RailAdvent article.
GUIDED BUSWAY
Intelligent Speed Assistance installed on guided busway following a series of accidents
Railways around the world have a range of systems to prevent as driver from travelling too fast on certain parts of the route. The former Cambridge to St Ives railway line has been operating guided buses since 2011 but has never had any such a faciity (and neither has any of the handful of guided buses across the world). Now new digital speed control technology — known as Intelligent Speed Assistance — was rolled out in April 2023 on the 16-mile-long Cambridshire Guided Busway, following a series of accidents on the system, some caused by drivers
The speed control technology, which was developed by Volvo Bus and Stagecoach East over 18 months, is designed to automatically reduce bus speed as vehicles enter numerous and different speed safety zones along the route to reduce the risk of accidents. It limits engine power, preventing the vehicle from accelerating past the current speed limit. An investigation by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire in February 2023 showed that buses were regularly speeding on the stretch of busway between Cambridge railway station and Addenbrooke's Hospital, in which two people have died in crashes in the last five years. A safety audit, released in June 2022, lowered the speed limit from 56mph (90km/h) to 30mph (48km/h) on the southern section of the busway.
News: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-65531968.
Cambridgeshire County Council criminally prosecuted over busway deaths
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has announced its intention to criminally prosecute Cambridgeshire County Council under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 following the deaths of three people and the serious injury of a teenager in collisions on the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway between 2015 and 2021. A court hearing will be arranged for a future date.
Jennifer Taylor, 81, was hit by a bus as she crossed the route with her husband John at Fen Drayton in November 2015, following Christmas shopping. Another pedestrian, Kathleen Pitts, 52, was struck on the section between Cambridge railway station and Long Road in October 2021 - the same stretch that 52-year-old cyclist Steve Moir was killed on in 2018. An inquest into Ms Pitts' death remains ongoing. The seriously injured teenage cyclist collided with a bus in the section parallel to Kings Hedges Road, Cambridge, on 9th November 2021.
At the public inquiry for the Cambridgheshire Guided 'Busway, which was to become the world's longest system, the then longest one, in Adelaide, was cited as the model. However, as the www.youtube.com/watch?v=clwrZ6SakrI video shows, the Australian system has continuous fencing, keeping pedestrians and cyclists safe from guided buses.
News: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-65575645
https://www.cambsnews.co.uk/news/council-faces-criminal-prosecution-over-3-deaths-on-the-guided-busway/10401/.
Cambridgeshire County Council has spent £25m on litigation with BAM Nuttall over busway defects
CambsNews Online has discovered through monitoring public records since 2020, that Cambridgeshire County Council has recorded £25m under the heading 'guided bus legal costs' in payment data that it is obliged by law to reveal monthly. The council had previously acknowleded more than £10m on litigation costs.However, it says the £25m shown "is not representative of the costs related to the busway dispute"; for example, it includes VAT that the council is able to claim back. The council also claims that the legal disputes resulted in a "constructive settlement" in favour of the council (it resolved a £33m claim in 2014), and by implication sees the legal costs as money well spent.
In 2022 CambsNews revealed that the county council used £1.9m set aside "for Covid pressures" been forced to find an extra legal fees associated with its High Court battle with BAM Nuttall, which built the 16-mile guided busway. The council is now preparing for a separate legal battle over alleged construction defects. No court date has been set yet, but it is expected to be in summer 2023. BAM Nuttall believes that allegations of defects on the guided busway (the council says "the guideway sections have extensive defects requiring it to be almost entirely redesigned, dismantled and reconstructed at an assessed cost of around £87,000,000") are "poorly and inadequately explained" and the council has "substantially failed to plead its extensive allegations of defective design with any proper particularity."
According to CambsNews, since its opening in 2011, the guided busway has seen 33 million passenger journeys, which is less than three million a year. It is unclear show this figure is arrived at, as the council has alway counted journeys on a bus fitted with a guidewheel rather than journeys that actually involved travelling on the busway, so all of their figures are inflated. The third-year target was 3.6 million which was just reached. Obviously, COVID-19 reduced the number of journeys in 2020 and 2021.
Details of this are included in the CambsNews article by John Elworthy in the 'criminal prosecution' section above.
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Railfuture East Anglia Branch News Snippets 362 - 31/05/2023
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