Thank God for HS2. The scandal of the ever-more expensive and ever-delayed rail line from London to Birmingham (and now no further) has taken the heat off another of Britain’s tortured rail projects: East West Rail, linking Oxford and Cambridge.
East-West rail has the distinction of being even older than HS2, having first been proposed in 2006. It shouldn’t have been that big a project, given that Oxford and Cambridge did once have a rail connection, which was closed in 1967. Much of the trackbed remained in place and parts of it have remained in use throughout. Yet still it is proving a little too much for Britain’s miserable infrastructure industry.
Where is the Oxford to Cambridge railway line on the 20th anniversary of its proposed reopening? Well, the stretch from Oxford to Bicester was reopened 10 years ago. The next portion, from Bicester to Bletchley has been rebuilt, with a new station at Winslow into the bargain. The trouble is, Chiltern Railways can’t start running trains along it because the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union won’t let it without a guard on board.
There is little point in committing to any new rail project in Britain
This is in spite of the fact that 40 per cent of rail services in Britain run with only a driver, with many having done so since the 1980s. It is also in spite of an extensive study by the Office of Rail and Road concluding that it is at least as safe as operation with a guard. In some ways it is safer because it eliminates miscommunication between driver and guard. Trains were supposed to start running in December but have been delayed indefinitely until the dispute has been resolved.
As for the Bletchley to Bedford section, it was never closed in the first place and so doesn’t need reopening. And Bedford to Cambridge? You can forget trying to take a train along that section before 2035 at the very earliest. The various public authorities involved haven’t agreed on a final route, let alone put so much as a spade into the ground. Since East West rail was first proposed, Cambridgeshire county council has managed to build a guided busway along the final stretch of the old line into Cambridge, necessitating a circuitous route – and tunnel – to join the Cambridge to Kings Cross line to the south. At the same time, the latest favoured route takes in Cambourne, a new town to the west of Cambridge – which would mean the rail line doing a length and absurd ‘S’ course before it finally delivers its load of tech entrepreneurs to Cambridge.
So much for the Oxford-Cambridge Supercluster, otherwise known as ‘Europe’s Silicon Valley’ – which, according to Rachel Reeves, is going to transform the UK economy. If it takes three decades to reopen a rail line which the Victorians managed to build in a handful of years (the Bedford to Cambridge section was planned and built in just three years between 1859 and 1862) it doesn’t bode well for efforts to promote the area as Europe’s pre-eminent tech hub. Indeed, the tech companies have started to get restive and, along with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, have written to the government urging it to speed up the project.
What are the chances of that? It is pretty obvious that there is little point in committing to any new rail project in Britain, or the reopening of old lines, until the RMT and the other rail unions have themselves been closed down. They are luddites who are undermining the economic case for new lines. Not only should the guards be dropped (their job became obsolete with the advent of block signalling in the 1980s, when there was no longer any need to send someone from a broken-down train to run back down the line to warn approaching trains), but drivers are pretty redundant, too. It is absurd that we have tech companies running driverless cars in San Francisco and elsewhere while we still employ drivers on trains – a form of transport that is so much easier to automate.
The Oxford to Cambridge line should have been a demonstration project for the first driverless intercity railway (there are already over 100 metro lines around the world which operate in this way), running at far less cost than existing lines. Instead, successive governments have ducked the opportunity, leaving us once again looking more Fred Flintstone than Silicon Valley.
Comments