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IndustryInsider
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« on: September 06, 2012, 17:22:55 » |
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I thought I^d try to start a discussion about how the LTV▸ part of the Greater Western Franchise might eventually end up during and after the several shake-ups that will settle down eventually at the end of the decade. I think the best way to do this is to list the alterations that will be taking place and to give my opinions on what the best solutions to the various issues raised will be. It is by no means an easy set of conclusions!
How it is now
The situation now is fairly simple. The LTV service is operated by a fleet of 20 2-Car Turbos, 37 3-Car Turbos (21 of which are Class 166s), 5x Class 360s used on the Heathrow Connect services, and 2x Class 150s. Those trains are backed up with a fleet of 5 Class 180s, and certain other services are operated by HSTs▸ .
Turbos exclusively (or near exclusively) cover services from Reading to Guildford/Gatwick, London to Newbury/Bedwyn, Oxford to London stoppers, Oxford to Banbury, London to Greenford, Slough to Windsor, Maidenhead to Marlow, and Twyford to Henley services. Turbos also cover many of the Oxford to London fasts as well as a few of the Cotswold Line services, backed up with Class 180s and HSTs (especially in the peak hours).
The Class 360s work the half-hourly Heathrow Connect service as well as the Terminal 4 shuttle service at the airport.
What is on the horizon
As I see it, the recent announcements of GWML▸ electrification, further electrification announced in the HLOS▸ , as well as the construction of Crossrail will radically alter the type of train and pattern of service that we will see over the coming years.
There appears to be four distinct stages due before the end of the decade;
1) The electrification of the routes from London to Oxford/Newbury ^ Scheduled for Dec 2016.
2) The electrification of the routes from Basingstoke to Reading, the Thames Valley branches, and north of Oxford to Nuneaton via Banbury ^ Scheduled for sometime between 2014-2019.
3) The replacement of Heathrow Connect service with Crossrail services from Paddington (High Level) to Heathrow at 4tph frequency ^ Scheduled for May 2018.
4) Full Crossrail implementation ^ Scheduled for Dec 2019.
All of this presents the new operator of the Greater Western Franchise with ever-moving goalposts ^ the number of electric units required between 2016 and 2019 is much more than will be required after 2019 when Crossrail takes over most of the Paddington suburban services. That presents the franchisee with a problem if it is going to obtain new stock, as it will need somewhere to go to after that!
What kind of service will be operating from December 2016?
By then the London to Oxford/Newbury route should be using electric trains. But what electric trains? When Lord Adonis announced the original electrification plan for the GWML in July 2009, he said that Class 319s transferred from the ^Thameslink^ route and given a refresh including air-conditioning would operate over the route. This is now in doubt, as with further electrification in the North West (where 319s were also going to go), as well as the extensions to the Greater Western franchise operated services, means that even with 86 4-car units ripe for a cascade, that probably won^t be enough to go round.
Will there be an order for new EMUs▸ to work over the Greater Western route? My guess is that there will be. The 319s will go up north where they will be much better received by a less demanding public and all 86 will go into use working the newly electrified routes, possibly including some of those currently worked by Transpennine DMUs▸ .
If a new order of EMUs is ordered for the Greater Western franchise, what form will it take? 4-car, 100mph units have been the norm for electric traction orders in recent decades, usually around 80 metres in length with carriages of 20m in length. That makes them 11m longer than the current 3-Car Turbo fleet, which doesn^t sound like much, but is significant in terms of platform lengths. I would imagine that they will be specified for 110mph working to make better use of the GWML^s ruling linespeeds (as Network Rail have stated is desirable). The trouble with having a fleet of 4-car units is that it is much less flexible than the current Turbo fleet of 2 and 3-car lengths. With the Turbos you can have any configuration from 2-6 carriages with a bit of mixing and matching (you could actually go up to 12 cars with the correct infrastructure). With 4-car units you either have a 4-car train, or couple two together to go to 8-cars. This leaves you with the conundrum that 4-car trains won^t be long enough to operate busy services, but 8-car trains would need expensive platform extensions, or a fleet fitted with Selective Door Operation (SDO▸ ) equipment ^ not to mention being too long outside of rush hour! For those reasons, perhaps a 5-car length train would be more suitable to the kind of services most of them will operate on?
Even with 4-car trains, you have problems at some routes currently worked by Turbos. For example, some or all platforms at places like Appleford, Culham, and Goring would need lengthening if SDO isn^t used. This is also assuming that places like Southall and West Drayton on the Crossrail route will have been lengthened by 2016, so that 8-car trains will be able to stop there. In some cases these platforms will only need a couple of metres added to them, but they will all need doing before electric trains take over.
The problem at Bourne End and Marlow is even more serious with the junction at Bourne End meaning a 2-car Turbo is the longest train that can be accommodated when going as far as Marlow. The operational platforms length could just about be extended to cope with a 3-car 20m electric train though.
Perhaps the points raised in the previous paragraphs means that some EMUs will be ordered that will be of 3-car in length? Unusual for an EMU, but certainly possible.
The service pattern will be similar to today I should imagine, but there will need to be alterations to the Turbo fleet, especially on the Paddington to Bedwyn service which will presumably become a Paddington to Newbury EMU operated service, with either a diesel Turbo shuttle service from Newbury to Bedwyn or an IEP▸ operated service running though from Paddington via Reading and Newbury serving Kintbury, Hungerford and Bedwyn (and beyond).
Also, the Paddington-Greenford service will become a West Ealing to Greenford shuttle service (presumably using two units with an increased 15 or 20-minute frequency). I^m not sure, long term, that the Greenford service staying in the hands of the Greater Western franchise is a good idea, as it will have absolutely no direct link with other Greater Western services post-Crossrail, but whoever operates it, there will be much greater scope for coping with peak passenger growth to and from Paddington as the two paths per hour currently using these 2-car DMUs, could potentially be taken over by 8-car EMU^s until replaced by 10-car Crossrail EMUs in 2019.
List of possible December 2016 options
So, here is a list of the most likely solutions:
1) Build a new build of a mix of 3 and 4-car EMUs based on the 110mph Class 350 EMU (or equivalent from another supplier).
2) Use cascaded Class 319s and reduce a few of them in length to 3-cars, or seek other cascaded stock of 3-car length (Perhaps the aging Class 313s currently in use with First Capital Connect?).
3) Use a 2-car Turbo all day on the Marlow Donkey and extend platforms at other stations to cope with 160m long electric trains (or in some cases 80m).
4) Modify Bourne End (at significant expense) so that it can handle a 4-car, 80m train and just have a fleet of 80m units.
5) Obtain a smallish fleet of new/cascaded EMUs, but continue to use a lot of Turbo units ^under the wires^ until 2019 when they will be replaced with Crossrail units.
What kind of service will be operating from December 2019?
At least things will have settled down by then with the only other (known) major change being the new western link into Heathrow Airport, due in the early 20s. Though of course other major projects in later years, such as HS2▸ along with whatever else might be dreamt up in the intervening years might mean the situation is anything but settled!
Assuming that the current plan for Crossrail remains, i.e. its western terminus being Maidenhead, then a large number of the inner-LTV services will be taken over by Crossrail. There will, however, continue to be a reasonable number of services, both diesel and electric, being operated over the LTV routes.
It is likely that the North Downs line from Reading to Gatwick, and the Kennet Line to Newbury and Bedwyn will remain largely unchanged from the service operating from 2016, though there may be a case to provide links further west from Reading to Oxford. But other routes will all see alterations:
The DMU service from Reading to Basingstoke and Oxford to Banbury could be EMU operated ^ though again, without platform extensions it would have to be a 3-Car EMU.
There will need to be some sort of shuttle service operating from Reading to Slough ^ presumably using EMUs ^ unless somebody sees sense soon and extends Crossrail to Reading. Sadly the HLOS refused to budge in this respect, saying the majority of respondents to the consolation preferred Maidenhead (mine certainly didn^t!), so we have to assume it won^t happen.
That will mean an EMU operated service from Reading to Slough. The Oxford to London stopping service which currently runs twice and hour may continue to run (using the two relief line off-peak paths promised between Maidenhead and London), but would probably have some of its stops removed, by perhaps calling after Reading at Twyford, Maidenhead, Slough, Hayes & Harlington, Ealing Broadway and Paddington ^ much as they used to in the Thames Trains days. The less stops, the harder to path though with all those Crossrail services. I don^t envy the timetable planners.
You^ll also have a Greater Western operated EMU service operating from London/Reading to Newbury, Maidenhead to Marlow (presumably), Slough to Windsor, Twyford to Henley-On-Thames. Perhaps the fleet of Heathrow Connect units would be suited to work the Thames Valley branches? Added to that, the probability that some of the Oxford to London fast trains will also be operated by EMUs, rather than the whole lot going over to IEP operation.
Peak hour through services to places like Henley and Bourne End are likely to continue, and it^s possible that new services could be provided, for example an hourly London to Swindon EMU service calling at Slough, Reading, Didcot, Wantage and Swindon would enable other IEPs to potentially have stops at Reading and/or Didcot removed.
What do I see happening until the end of the decade?
Very tricky one to answer, that. There are so many variables. We^ll all know a lot more when the winning of the franchise is announced and their plans revealed, but here are my hunches as to what service we will see.
Firstly, it doesn^t make business sense to acquire a large fleet of electric units only to see them not needed after just three years when Crossrail takes over. A smallish fleet of about 25-30 4-car units would probably enable many of the Oxford-Paddington stopping services (and a few of the fast services) and the Newbury-Paddington service to go over to electric traction. With Turbos continuing to work some of the Reading-Paddington services before being displaced in 2019 by Crossrail trains, that would mean a two phased cascade of Turbo units eventually leaving a core fleet of around 10-15 units for operating the remaining diesel services on the North Downs line as well as Bedwyn to Newbury and West Ealing to Greenford post-2019. A few of the electric units above could then be reduced to 3-car length to work Oxford-Banbury and Reading-Basingstoke services as well as the Thames Valley branch lines.
I personally don^t think we^ll see any cascaded Class 319s. The North West will swallow all of them up I think and a new fleet of EMUs will be ordered. Perhaps a smallish order with a mixture of 5/4/3 cars to attempt to tick all the boxes, with some DMUs continuing under the wires during the period between 2016-2019?
Or, if there is somewhere for the surplus electric units to be cascaded to (such as the Bristol area, or the East-West Rail route), then perhaps a larger order of EMUs could be justified, with the extra units being cascaded there after Crossrail starts to take over in May 2018 and is then fully implemented in December 2019?
An awful lot rests on the huge amount of electrification and other infrastructure improvements coming to fruition on time. If we look at recent projects, hardly anything is completed on time. Look at the original estimates for Cotswold Line Redoubling when they were at the early stages of planning ^ it was a year late. Evergreen 3 should have been up and running in less than a year from now, when in reality it hasn^t even been authorised yet. Chiltern Mainline was a few months late on the revised delivery date at the start of last year. Even certain elements of the Reading rebuild are running late when compared with the dates stated in the CP4▸ delivery plan statement of March 2009 ^ we should have seen the new platforms opening this November, not next Easter and the new maintenance depot by next February and not the end of next year.
Maybe those are fairly small slippages, but when a whole heap of unit cascades, timetable changes, staff training etc. rests on all of the jigsaw pieces of these big projects being put into place on time ^ then that worries me a little!
So, what do people on the forum think? Am I right, am I wrong, have I missed potential problems and solutions completely? We^ve touched on some of these issues already, but in looking at them as a whole wider picture is very important in my opinion.
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