Conflicted about railways

I'm a bit conflicted about the future of railways, in the UK at least.  I should probably preface this by saying I really like railways. As I don't drive I've traditionally used trains a couple of times a week for decades, I like travelling by train (usually!) and I even used to help volunteer at local heritage railways, doing all sorts of things from helping to lay track to fixing some of their back ground IT systems.  In the last year I also volunteered to "adopt" a couple National Rail stations to make them look nicer and more inviting to passengers. So I'm definitely not an anti-train petrol head.

I'm also really interested in, and concerned about, climate change.  It's the biggest long term challenge we face as a species, and is likely to cause all sort of societal issues and changes over the coming years and decades. I've always felt railways should have a part to play in helping to tackle that, as getting people out of large, single occupancy SUV-style cars and into trains would be a very helpful way to decarbonise transport. Trains are often held up as an example of "green transport", especially if they are electrified.

But the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/21 has added a new twist.  As the virus raged around the world, many of us were told to "stay home, stay safe". I was one of the lucky ones who not only hasn't (yet) caught Covid but had a job (in IT) that meant I was already well adjusted to remote working, video conferencing, etc and so I could work from home just fine.  I have worked from home for nearly a year now, and I'm just one of thousands who have swapped the office desk for the dining room table.

Now whilst some people are itching to get back into their old offices, I, and many people in a similar situation I've spoken to, have found we've adjusted quite well to working from home. We're just as productive, video conferencing tools means we can still see and talk to our co-workers and it fits more flexibly into our lifestyles. We've found we don't need to travel to and from offices so often, if at all.

If management in general accept this change after the pandemic subsides, we hit the issue for the railways: so much of the railway infrastructure in the UK is funded for passenger trains, and many of the passenger train companies have got much of their income by catering to needs of the commuters in the morning and evening weekday peaks. We have large, very expensive projects like HS2 and Crossrail that are aiming to increase capacity in the network so that these commuter trains are less overcrowded.   Now we'll probably always need to make some longer trips,  for example for leisure or visiting relatives, and some people will still have to travel to/from work because they aren't blessed with a job you can do from your sofa. But what happens if the commuter trains never become as crowded as they once were? 

And indeed why should these peak trains be as crowded, if a relatively large percentage of traditional city centre office jobs turn out to be able to be done at home or in small town or village based facilities? But the flows may well be different, and that may be a big climate change win. But that lack of regular, day in, day out commuters is going to be a big headache for the railways and Governments that fund them. The regular, large income from a huge body of commuters funds much of the railway and helps keep ticket prices down for the people not travelling to work and "off peak".

Will major capital projects like HS2 and Crossrail turn out to be unnecessary, in much the same way as some of the "Modernisation Plan" projects from the 1950s turned to be? Will this result in the railways becoming uneconomical and societally less necessary again, as they did with the rise of the car, lorry and motorways in 1960s?  Will we get a "Beeching 2" set of cutbacks with a decade?

So I'm conflicted. On the one hand I'm volunteering to help make my local stations more attractive so that more people use the trains. I want to see new local lines and stations (re)opened so there are more opportunities to choose rail rather than cars for travelling.  On the other hand, I can see the value in fewer people using the trains and not travelling as much or as far,  but then how will the railways be funded and why? 

I don't have an answer to this, and I suspect I'm not alone. 

Will the Night Mail Return?

Back when I was a nipper, British Rail used to run a fair few trains during the wee hours of the night.  The night mails and the newspaper trains.  Back in the days of yore some of these had passenger accommodation tacked on so that you could, if you wished, get an inter-city service well after the pubs had shut (not that that was a major factor for a nipper, especially as I'm tea-total).

These train services have long since disappeared.  The newspaper trains were the first to go as production of newspapers was decentralised and so large volumes of paper didn't need to be shifted from London to the provinces.  The mail trains became dedicated services with no passenger stock added, and then the mail trains themselves passed into history, replaced by yet more lorries trundling along the motorways and trunk roads of Britain.  We've still got a rump of the old sleeper services, which I used a couple of years ago to get up to Scotland for a holiday with my girlfriend, but they're more the exception than the rule now, and may soon be no more when ScotRail's franchise is renewed in 2014.

So you're probably asking now why Jim'll is wittering on about the overnight trains of yesteryear?  Well, bear with me!

I've been considering transport energy use (for which there's another one of my long, dull, full-of-numbers blog posts brewing!) and I've just been watching Robert Llewelyn's Fully Charged episode on the National Grid control centre.  With oil prices constantly on the rise, looking at alternative transport options such as electric vehicles is a sensible thing to be doing now.

During Robert's show, the National Grid control chap said that power generation would be more efficient if the overnight "bath tub" lull in electricity demand could be "filled up".  In other words it would be more efficient to generate a bit less energy during the day, if we could use more at night to offset the daytime reduction.  In the Fully Charged show they were talking about the charging of electric vehicles over night, which the National Grid controller said might eventually consume about a gigawatt overnight, which would help fill the bath tub up slightly, but when the national peak energy use is between 40-60GW, there's quite a bit more capacity to use up.

So we obviously need to think of more things that could be run overnight using the cheaper off peak electricity.  There's plenty of options of course - dish washers, washing machines, etc in the home, lots of industrial processes could be run 24/7, and we could use cheap overnight power for hydrogen cracking or even synthesising liquid hydro-carbon fuels from air and water.

Now what about those overnight trains?  A single electric express train uses several megawatts to get up to speed and there are plans afoot to get more the UK rail network electrified (for example Loughborough's MP recently debated the electrification of the Midland Mainline in Parliament).  The rail network is also increasingly popular and thus increasingly over crowded.  Even during the day and weekend intercity services are often standing room only - its not just the peak hours services. There are more expensive infrastructure projects intended to help with that by laying extra tracks or building new lines - High Speed 2 being an example - but we need to make better use of the infrastructure we've already got as well.

So what if we tried to move some people around the country using cheap overnight power using electric rail traction?  If the tickets prices were suitably attractive there's probably quite a few people who would want to take advantage of such trains.  The current sleeper services definitely aren't cheap (though often cheaper than the train plus a hotel at the far end, plus quite convenient), but there's always folk on the bargain basement cross country road coaches, so there's probably a market there.  The ticket prices would need to cover the electricity costs (which are cheaper overnight remember), the staff to run the service and the service's share of track and station maintenance costs.  The Train Operating Companies can already sell some tickets on less popular services at knock down prices, so we might well be looking at similar prices for a "Witching Hour" overnight ticket.

If we want a modal shift in transportation in a world where oil is getting increasingly expensive maybe the rail companies should get together with the National Grid and see if there's a way they can help move people around more efficiently.  Efficient use of rail infrastructure coupled with efficient use of power generation and distribution infrastructure seems to be a good idea to me, especially if it means being able to get back from a gig in London in the wee hours!