Professor Stuart Cole looks at the reason for the line closures on the South Wales Main Line over the last 10 days
The words ‘rail replacement buses’ when checking train times online gives one a feeling of trepidation.
However, replacing trains with buses allows infrastructure maintenance work to be carried out.
Repairs to railway infrastructure, as with road repairs, result in their being closed to traffic. Consequently there have been no trains west of Port Talbot on the South Wales Main Line (except on the Heart of Wales Line from Carmarthen) over the last ten days.
The primary reason for closure is major repairs and refurbishment of the viaduct at Landore (used by most train service to and from Swansea and west Wales stations) which had to be carried out as one continuous job. This would optimise the train free access, allowing flood relief and vegetation control, before the bird-nesting season, to be carried out in parallel.
Network Rail are invariably in a quandary on whether to opt for weekend, overnight or a longer period closure (possession in railway terminology). Weekends were a favourite period for engineering work when they were the quiet passenger demand period, but now leisure travel is the growth market.
Each option has a different financial impact.
A continuous possession reduces the cost to Network Rail (and the taxpayer as Network Rail is owned by the UK Government) because the movement of engineering staff and machinery into the location is done once for an eleven-day period with day and night working. The work is completed sooner and at less inconvenience for passengers.
At the other extreme an overnight project carried out between 10 pm and 5 am of the seven-hour blockade, typically two hours will be used setting-up but still affect late-evening train services.
Under a railway industry agreement covering planned engineering works Network Rail pays compensation to train operating companies (in south Wales these are Transport for Wales Rail, Great Western Railway and Cross Country Trains). This covers revenue loss and the cost of rail replacement bus services and restricted access to the network, for which they have paid track access charge.
Train companies’ planning teams have to reorganise hundreds of crew work shifts to ensure the availability of drivers and train managers/guards at the correct locations and these must have relevant route knowledge if there are diversions involved.
Train working diagrams have to be recalculated to ensure they don’t interfere with the rest of the railway network. Trains normally going to Carmarthen or Pembrokeshire have considerable mileage removed from their journeys while services between south Wales and for example north Wales, London, Manchester or Bristol have to fit into busy tracks in England.
More complex is the closure of the Severn Tunnel for maintenance work. Here trains make more wide-ranging timetable and route changes for example via Gloucester. Trains en route between south Wales and London have to be timed in cohesion with the everyday running of services often operated by several other train companies.
Above all, the inconvenience to passengers has to be minimised while ensuring that infrastructure standards are at the highest level.
The market has to be told well in advance particularly for those travellers making train or plane connections. Although Heart of Wales line services begin at Carmarthen not Swansea during the works period, most TfW Rail drivers will be familiar with the route.
This columnist is able to give a first-hand commentary on passenger impact having travelled last week from Llanelli to London and to Cardiff where the main inconvenience was a one-hour increase in journey time. In transport investment evaluation, the travellers journey time has a value though delay repay compensation does not apply to rail replacement increased journey time. This compensation is based on the advertised timetable and the Swansea to Port Talbot rail replacement provision worked well from personal experience last week with comfortable coaches providing the service.
Though the need to change from bus to train at Port Talbot was an inconvenience and irritating to some passengers, for this columnist it was an opportunity to review the replacement bus/rail interchange in operation.
Network Rail fortunately noticed the Wales versus England Six Nations game in Twickenham on Saturday and expects to completed the work by Thursday.
That will be a relief to rugby supporters (and Wales needs maximum support on Saturday). Network Rail would otherwise face a massive coach hire bill for moving several thousand people from West Wales to Port Talbot where track capacity limits the number of trains terminating there.
- Professor Stuart Cole CBE is Emeritus Professor of Transport (Economics and Policy), University of South Wales.