Great Western Coffee Shop

Weymouth-Waterloo train operator South Western Railway is set to renegotiate its franchise position after less than a year of operation.

The move could threaten improvements to services and planned investments.

A document that has been filed with the Office of Rail and Road regulator, states that SWR and Network Rail have clashed over several elements in the franchise including operational and financial implications of the scrapping of the proposed timetable changes due to be made in December which would have seen more seats and faster journeys between London Waterloo and Weymouth.

Which may be summarised as "largely due to network rail, but not entirely"

Even for network rail, upgrading the power supply along an existing route should not be that hard. There is an existing 33KV distribution network along the railway, this feeds numerous transformer/rectifier stations.

Additional transformers and rectifiers are mature technology and available from several suppliers.
If the existing 33KV network is inadequate, then replacing the cables with larger ones is a simple task. HV cable is used in vast quantities by the electricity supply industry and is readily available.

Isn't it more like largely due to the DfT?
The DfT specified the level of service they expected from the bids without checking with Network Rail if it was possible. The DfT won't give Network Rail funding for the work that would need to be done to make that level of service possible.

... one could be forgiven for assuming that the majority of the blame for this particular failure should accrue to Network Rail. Certainly – as an Office of Rail and Road (ORR) report highlighted back in March – many of the current issues on the SWML can be traced back to issues with work they have or haven’t completed.

Yet in this instance, the blame largely doesn’t lie with Network Rail and that is why this issue is worth highlighting on its own, before we dive deeper into SWR elsewhere.

The issue arose because of a failure on the part of the Department for Transport (DfT) – and to a lesser extent SWR – to realise that more power would be required at all.