News from the East Anglian Branch of Railfuture, Edited by Martin Thorne and Jerry Alderson.
Railfuture News Snippets 368 - 30/11/2023
At the Railfuture East Anglia public meeting in Cambridge on Saturday 2nd December 2023 (starting at 14.00), there will be a guest speaker from Network Rail. Martin Seiffarth, Public Affairs Manager for the Anglia route, will be focusing his presentation on the new Cambridge South station. Flier here (includes map). Please note that on that evneing the last Great Northern train going north will be at 1805.
GTR says that barcode readers — these allow passengers to scan eTickets held on their smartphones or printed out from an email — have now been added to every single ticket gate at its managed stations. That's 1,420 readers on 710 ticket gates across 98 stations served by Gatwick Express, Great Northern, Southern and Thameslink. GTR's press release (issued on 29 November 2023) said that across Britain, the proportion of rail passengers buying barcode eTickets has more than doubled in the past four years (from 20% to 49%) while the percentage of those buying paper tickets has more than halved (from 63% to 28%).
On Thursday 16th November 2023 the Co-Op in the new building opposite Cambridge North station opened. It is the first retail outlet (other than the Costa Coffee within the station building, and the restaurant/bar at the Novotel hotel) in the Cambridge North area. The staff were giving out goody bags and a free Costa coffee from the machine in their store. No doubt it will be well used by passengers to take food onto the train. Let's hope they get a lot of customers. It may encourage Greater Anglia to finally find a tenant for the station retail area, which has been frustratingly empty since Cambridge North station opened 6.5 years ago.
The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has revealed that 390 million journeys were made by rail passengers in Great Britain in the quarter between April 1st and 30th June 2023. This is a 19 per cent increase on the number of journeys made in the same quarter the previous year. These journeys comprised 14.9 billion passenger kilometres, which is only a 10 percent increase. The rolling annual total (to 30th June 2023) was 1,447 million journeys, which is a five per cent increase on the previous 12 months. Total revenue, adjusted for inflation, was £2.75bn, up 13% (£295 million) on the previous quarter. The full set of figures from the ORR can be read on their data portal (click here). Crucially, these figures show that the railway patronage continues to recover following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Train Travel Snapshot produced by the Great British Railways Transition Team (GBRTT), using the same data as the ORR, has referred to a sustained growth of the leisure market, which accounts for more than 75% of the increase in overall rail revenue in the quarter to 30th June 2023. It has also noticed an increased use of discount railcards since the pandemic: 21% of revenue in the quarter using them, up from 16% in the same quarter in 2019. Revenue was: £1,431 leisure, £929m commuting and £197m business. More info at article on Rail Business Daily.
The Stansted Airport Transport Forum was held on Tuesday 15th November 2023. Network Rail and the train operators that service the station — Cross Country (XC) and Greater Anglia (GA) — attended. Railfuture was also represented. In their presentation GA confirmed an earlier announcement that the Stansted-Liverpool Street service will return to 4tph from December 2023. The DfT agreed to this as the GA network is back in substantial profit according to its Managing Director, James Burles. All of XC's class 170s are to be refurbished to "a high and uniform" specification with special emphasis on improved legroom. All the units will be of a standard spec. Railfuture and other stakeholoders will be asked to test the new entirely new seats to be fitted (the type of seat hasn't been selected, yet). The Stansted Airport management envisaged an increase from 27 million passengers a year to 42m pa within five years, meaning a considerable extra number of passengers using the railway to get there.
According to media reports, the Cambridge and Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA) Mayor, Dr Nik Johnson, will unveil an £80m package of 'new capital investment proposals' that includes £3m to improve Whittlesey station and £500,000 to help 'unlock' a new railway station at Alconbury Weald on the East Coast Mainline. At Whittelsey, both platforms woulds be lengthened, along with a footbidge over the tracks to link the platforms and level crossing barriers inatead of manually-operated gates. Marshall is planning to move from Newmarket Road in Cambridge the Alconbury Weald Campus by 2025.
Many of the redundant Intercity-125 HSTs (some of which had recently been in service with Cross Country and Great Western Railway) have been sold to railways in Africa and Mexico. Both the class 43 power cars and the carriages have been exported. Over the last few months they have been shipped by sea from Great Yarmouth docks, and further shippings are planned. The trains were taken by rail to the railway sidings at Great Yarmouth and then moved by road to nearby Peel Ports Great Yarmouth. See BBC news story.
The Fen Line Users Association (FLUA) has been pressing Network Rail to ensure that there are multiple lifts on each platform of the new Cambridge South station, which is in the early stages of construction. They considser lifts to be essential for many passengers going to or from Addenbrooke's Hospital (particularly elderly travellers) — this is something that Railfuture raised face-to-face with Network Rail in 2019 — and are concerned about the unreliaiblity of the lifts at Camrbdge station, which have been out of operation on numerous occaisns (see BBC news article) during 2023. For the first first two years after Cambridge North station opened, its lifts suffered outages, especially in the hot weather.
FLUA has been amassing a good collection of photographs, which includes the construction of Cambridge South station since work began at the beginning of 2023. See www.flua.org.uk/picture_library/.
On Monday 13th November 2023 the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, performed a reshuffle of his government. There is no change to the rail minister or Secretary of State at DfT, although the roads and local transport minister was replaced. Anthony Browne (MP for South Cambs, which includes half of Cambridge South station) is now under-secretary for Roads and Local Transport.
Railfuture has learned from a Network Rail source that the East-West Rail services that had been expected to terminate at Cambridge 'Central' station will run through and turn back at a new Cambridge East station (on the currently single-track line towards Newmarket). Railfuture had previously suggested a turnback at the new Waterbeach Town station in order to reduce congestion at Cambridge.
The Mid-Norfolk Railway (MNR) has announced that public trains will serve Wymondham again in summer 2024, thanks to more than £40,000 of donations through the Back on Track appeal combined with other general railway funds. In February 2023 the MNR had said that trains would not be run south of Thuxton station (where there is a passing loop) becuase an inspection had revealed deterioration on the way beams supporting the track on Crownthorpe Bridge (though fortunately the bridge itself was sound). Further good news for the MNR is that it has recently signed a contract to run a franchise of the Polar Express for the next seven years.
Eurostar (which is no longer just the name for train between London and the European mainland, but now also includes what were Thalys services) may finally have some competition. There are now three declared rivals at various stages of launching a service (from 2025 at the earliest) — Evolyn, Virgin and Heuro. Even if only one of these ever operates, it will be a signficant increase in choice for people in East Anglia. Railfuture stongly supports competition for Eurostar, which it feels has been complacent and lacked customer focus. However, the opportunity for future services will be constrained by the very limited spare capacity at St Pancras and Paris Gare du Nord stations.
On 22nd November 2023, Railfuture and other stakeholoders joined a webinar on the East Coast Digital Programme (ECDP). Then, on 27th November 2023 Great Northern ran the first train on the Moorgate branch (also known as the Northern City Line) using digital in-cab signalling under the European Train Control System (ETCS), whereby the driver is given a target speed to drive at. Trains only ran between Finsbury Park and Moorgate, since no other part of the East Coast Mainline (ECML) has the system, yet, although the section between Welwyn Garden City and Hitchin is planned for 2025. Read more here.
RAIL SERVICES
Grand Central given permission by ORR to call at Peterborough station twice a day in each direction
Keywords: [GrandCentral]
On 24 November 2023, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) announced that it had given Grand Central (the open-access inter-city operator that runs between London and Bradford/Sunderland) permission to call at Peterborough station. This will only be allowed on two up and two down services a day (Monday to Saturday): in the morning one each to Bradford and Sunderland and in the afternoon two to London. Grand Central (GC) will commence calling at Peterborough in early 2024, and will be the only open-access operator to call there. Hull Trains and Lumo are not allowed to as train oeprators are concerned about revenue abstration. Clearly the ORR does not believe it will be significant. There have been open-access operators since 2000 but this is the first time that a new station of size has been added to their routes.
Grand Central trains already slow down in the Peterborough area to allow LNER trains to pass them, so the new station calls should not affect their running time much. The new connection is good news for passengers coming from (or going to) Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich, although whether there will be many empty seats is unknown. Railfuture welcomed the news.
News: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-67544151 .
RAIL ROUTES
Network Rail rewews track at Shepreth branch junction ready for new Cambridge South station
Keywords: [CambridgeSouthStation]
At the end of November 2023, Network Rail completed over 220 metres of track renewal at Shepreth branch junction and installed new overhead line equipment and track infrastructure that will support the new CambridgeSouth station and also as a precuror to planned engineering work at Christmas 2023. Some photos of the work on X/Twitter can be seen here.
Network rail Cambridge South website page.
GUIDED BUSWAY
Fence proposed for Cambridgeshire Guided Busway to prevent further deaths of pedestrians and cyclists
The entire Cambridgeshire Guided Busway,both north and south sections, was built without any protection to separate pedestrians and cyclists from buses that would be travelling at up to 55mph, even though they were just 30cm apart. It is not necessarily that this was a cost saving decision — the busway was costed at £116 million 18 months after the public inquiry ended, and fencing would have been a small additional cost — but more a concern about the need to evacuate passengers if the bus broke down. The fence would be right next to the bus door. It never occurred to Cambridgeshire County Council — or their advisors — that a flexible type of fence could be installed, perhaps a conventional wooden fence on hinges to swing open, secured with a bolt, perhaps with a padlock. That failure cost two people their lives, and a current prosecution of the council by the Health and Safety Executive (see [Snippets 362]), with one track of the southern section of the busway closed since February 2022, 21 months ago.
In late November 2023, it was announced that the council is now looking at an "innovative" protective fence beside the path, which would not prevent buses being evacuated. The fence would be permanent fence but would have removable sections so passengers on buses could be evacuated safely. No details of the solution were provided to the media but, if approved, installation work could start in December 2023 and be completed by spring 2024, with the northbound track then being reopened after about 26 months out of use.
News: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-67553114.amp.
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Railfuture East Anglia Branch News Snippets 368 - 30/11/2023
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