5 Railway Projects That Shouldn't Get the Chop
The upcoming budget gives the Government an opportunity to commit to projects that will help deliver the economic growth Britain needs
In July, Chancellor Rachel Reeves cancelled the Restoring Your Railway fund, arguing that we couldn’t afford to build the projects amid a budget blackhole. The fiscal challenges were made worse when Louise Haigh, the Transport Secretary, announced that within the blackhole was £2.9 billion of unfunded transport commitments. Now the last hope for many rail projects is to pass through a standalone review.
It is right for ministers to check that infrastructure projects are delivering value for money for taxpayers. After all, some of the projects had benefit to cost ratios less than 1, indicating the benefits of the scheme were less than the costs, and others were simply unlikely to be delivered within the next five years. Yet that doesn’t mean that every project should be scrapped as there are some projects that should absolutely be saved to provide improved accessibility and kickstart economic growth. The upcoming Budget provides the Government an opportunity to commit to these projects so they can play a part in delivering the growth Britain desperately needs.
Portishead
No passenger has ridden the train from Bristol to Portishead, on the Severn Estuary, since 1964, even though the right of way and rusting track remain. Plans to reopen the 3.3 miles of track from Portishead to Pill, where there’s an existing freight railway that runs to Bristol, began in the late 2000s. Consultation took place in 2015 and Chris Grayling, then Transport Secretary announced £31m of funding for the line in April 2019. With this funding confirmed, the North Somerset Council began work on its planning application.
It would turn into a mammoth task.
In total, the planning application and all the associated documents stretch to 79,187 pages. Printed out and laid end to end, that’s 14.6 miles of paperwork, more than 4 ½ times the length of the line to be reinstated. The environmental statement alone is 17,912 pages. It then took three years for the transport secretary to approve this application. This is all to replace the existing, derelict tracks with new rails and add two stations in communities that are desperate to have a rail link.
Even though the railway has planning permission, and £32m has already been spent on the application and initial works, all of this is at risk if funding isn’t secured. The project has a high Benefit to Cost Ratio of 4.85 and would provide reliable transport for 50,000 residents straight to Bristol in 23 minutes. It would also help to alleviate Bristol’s housing shortage with the city constrained by one of Britain’s most restrictive Green Belts.
All the work getting the project shovel ready is done, DfT and the Government just need to confirm funding so that the people of Portishead can once again be connected to Britain’s railways.
Tavistock
Right now there is only one rail route to places in the South West beyond Exeter and it runs just above sea level in Dawlish. A catastrophic storm in 2014 showed how vulnerable the line is with the tracks left dangling in mid-air leaving rail services to Plymouth and Cornwall cut for two months, costing the West Country an estimated £1.2 billion. This wasn’t a one-off either, the line has since been closed because of flooding and maintenance work, cancelling all service beyond Exeter.
The South West was not always served by just one railway line. There used to be a second route that trains could take, which ran through the towns of Tavistock and Okehampton until it fell victim to the Beeching Cuts. The Restoring Your Railway fund has already re-opened the line from Exeter to Okehampton, which has been an unmitigated success. The work took only 9 months and came in at £10m under its £50m budget with 550,000 passengers using the line in its first two years, more than double expectations. Okehampton station was even named ‘Small Station of the Year’ at the National Railway Awards aka “the Railway Oscars”.
The second phase of this diversionary route is re-building the railway from Plymouth to Tavistock. It is immensely popular with locals, with over 200 people coming to a townhall Britain Remade ran this spring all voicing their support for the re-opening and over 1,700 signing our online petition. It’s easy to see why there’s this clamour to start building. The restored railway would allow 21,000 people easy and reliable access to employment and education opportunities in Plymouth rather than being dependent on the congested single carriageway A386. The railway will support 1,200 new homes in Tavistock, including 600 built right next to the proposed station location, plus regeneration of Plymouth’s dockyards.
Plans to reopen the railway have been ongoing since the 2000s, with consultation occurring in 2013. The chair of Tavyrail, the local campaign to get the project built, has argued that the railway itself could be built in just five months, but all the remaining planning hurdles will end up taking five years.
Barrow Hill line between Sheffield and Chesterfield
The Barrow Hill line already runs between Sheffield and Chesterfield through some of the UK’s most deprived communities. Yet there are no scheduled services or stations and only freight or diverted passenger trains run on the track. By national standards, residents in places like Staveley, Beighton and Barrow Hill are unlikely to own a car. In effect they’re cut off from good employment opportunities.
Building the stations and supporting infrastructure to enable a stopping service would give residents new opportunities to access job opportunities in the nearby cities. While it currently takes an hour and a half to travel from Barrow Hill to Sheffield city centre on a bus, this would be slashed to just half an hour on a train, faster than the 36 minutes by car.
A twice hourly service would relieve congestion on local roads and the A57, speeding up journey times for both motorists and train riders. With 500,000 people living within 3km of the proposed stations on the line, the impact on the local job market would be immense. More than 5,000 homes could be unlocked alongside commercial developments supported by the restoration of passenger services.
The existing line means that only minimal infrastructure interventions are necessary and Network Rail already owns the locations of most of the old stations. The base cost of the scheme is £33m to £46m and with a risk and land allowance added, the potential capital cost is between £93m and £114m. This is a very affordable way to bring back 10 miles of railway and six stations into use, making it a good candidate for re-opening in a time when the amount of money available for new projects is tight.
Reopen the Cowley Branch Line to passengers
Oxford is one of the least affordable places in the UK, with average house prices 12 times household earnings. That’s a massive problem because innovations in Oxford can (and do) have massive impacts on Britain’s economy. Not only are houses in short supply, so is the lab space necessary to discover and test new scientific and engineering solutions to limit climate change and improve people’s health.
To provide better accessibility to both new lab spaces and support building new homes, the Government should fund the plan to reopen the Cowley Branch Line to passengers. The Full Business Case is due to be completed next month and with a funding commitment, services could run to both the Oxford Science Park and Advanced Research Cluster Oxford by December 2026.
Not only would the line support easy access to these employment and innovation centres, it would also support up to 10,000 new homes being built. Network Rail estimates that more than 1 million journeys would be made on the branch line per year.
The track is already there, but it's only used for freight traffic now. If government funding is committed, two stations could be built with services taking less than 10 minutes to get to Oxford station, which is currently undergoing an upgrade to increase capacity by 50%. The services can then continue on to London.
Unblocking the Croydon bottleneck- Croydon area remodelling scheme
The area around Croydon is the busiest, most congested, and most complex part of Britain’s rail network with 30% more passengers and trains passing through each day than Euston and King’s Cross stations combined. The complex series of junctions and insufficient capacity at East Croydon can lead to cascading issues and limits the capacity of the network to the south of London.
To solve these problems, Network Rail has proposed the Croydon Area Remodelling Scheme (CARS). The programme would add two platforms at East Croydon, supporting the ongoing regeneration of the area, and build new viaducts, bridges and dive-unders to avoid trains having to wait to pass through the junction just north of the station. In two consultations run in 2018 and 2020, 90% of respondents supported the proposals. Alongside the increased resilience and punctuality of the railway, the upgrade could allow for an additional eight trains per hour in each direction. Plus CARS forms a part of the upgrades necessary to support the metroisation of commuter rail in South London, which TfL is keen to pursue.
Yet this was not funded by the last Conservative government because of a desire to redirect rail funding to the north of England as part of the failed Network North Command Paper that came in the wake of the scrapping of HS2. The Government has the opportunity to get CARS back on track by funding the project that will alleviate this bottleneck.
Building for economic growth
Despite the gloomy fiscal situation, there are infrastructure projects that would provide much needed connectivity and growth. If the new Labour Government is as committed to growth as they say they are, we shouldn’t kick good, viable projects into the weeds. The budget is a chance to show this commitment to get Britain building again.
The Labour Government also has the opportunity to make funding future projects easier by borrowing a tool from the Victorians who built our railways in the first place. The Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government should modify its 2017 guidance on the 2016 Housing and Planning Act, which limited the number of homes that could be jointly consented with a Development Consent Order to 500.
The Victorians funded many of the railways that we still rely on today by building new homes, towns, and industries alongside new tracks. We should do the same, and link up future rail projects with the building of new homes.
One prime opportunity for this would be the new East-West rail station at Tempsford, which could unlock a whole new town with easy access to Cambridge, Milton Keynes, and London on the East Coast Mainline. Giving nationally significant infrastructure projects the ability to jointly consent new homes would help capture the value uplift that new railway lines bring, while easing Britain’s housing shortage and providing vital new transport links.
By both giving funding now to railway projects that would boost connectivity and growth and reforming how future projects can be funded, the Labour Government can get Britain’s railways back on track.
Great article, thanks.
Because this is so sensible dare I even say Common Sense, these projects won’t get built..
Politicians are not sensible people.
Regarding the East Croydon CARS implementation.
Network Rail/TfL carried out a similar scheme Millwall so that trains could simultaneously run to Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Blackfriars.
The scheme had been completed by just over a year when Southeastern Railway announced the end of direct trains to Charing Cross 🤷♂️