This will be my penultimate post in this timeline unfortuantley-for now anyway. Starting a Masters in September and have a novel I'm working on so just trying to tie up some loose ends before hand. I will revisit the timeline though, as I've got material as far as 2010 and maybe a bit beyond. But enjoy Part 15, I will get the last part out soon.
Part 15-The Great British Train Battle
The failure to privatise British Rail did not stop the Conservative and later Labour governments from looking to implement their own new solutions on how to run the railway. Since the early 90s, proposals had floated around which included selling BR’s non-core passenger operations, such as sleeper services to the private sector.
However, among the vague privatisation proposals, the only one that had any serious weighting was for other companies to run services to compete against BR’s services, which was later enforced by the “First European Rail Package” Directive from the EU. The first company to benefit from these plans was Virgin Group, who touted a very ambitious plan that became known in the Guardian in March 1997, which would see them purchasing their own high-performance trains running from Euston to Manchester and Euston to Glasgow, curiously via Birmingham. Although it had the sleek and iconic Virgin branding to rely on, it was still prepared to go above and beyond, taking some of its airline luxury on the rail market. According to the Guardian, Virgin planned to open a series of Virgin only waiting rooms and travel centres on all stations with red carpet to be rolled onto the train when it had stopped at the station. In addition, Virgin was to print its own tickets, and featured for the first time the ability to purchase tickets online, something that British Rail was still lagging behind. In 1996, BR commissioned a report looking into the benefits of providing a web presence for passengers. The domains, www.britishrailenquries.co.uk, www.networksoutheast.co.uk and www.intercity.co.uk were registered but it would take another year until they were developed, and online ticket purchasing was a long way off. But even more ambitious, it planned to by 2010 open its own dedicated high-speed railway between London, Heathrow, Manchester and Leeds.
Richard Branson poses next to one of the mockups for his proposed high-speed train from London to Manchester and Glasgow in Birmingham-1997.
BR was furious with the proposal, after shelling out millions for Intercity 250, it was upset to find that private operators would be using its new infrastructure while taking its revenue. It planned to charge extremely high track rents for the line, but under competition rules, but under the new EU Directive-that required train operations and infrastructure holders to have separate accounts, it would mean that Intercity itself would have to undo the long and complicated Organisation for Quality initiatives and charge itself effectively to use its own infrastructure. To add further insult to injury, it would appear that GEC-Alsthom’s design spec for Virgin’s new trains (suggested to be class 390 under the TOPS numbering system) were to have the new ONIX traction system that would have been fitted in Network SouthEast’s Class 371 and Class 342 High Speed Networker family. NSE became worried that should GEC’s production line become full with Virgin units it wouldn’t have the capacity to produce the trains for Thameslink 2000. This was not a problem of course, as GEC-Alsthom could simply offload the work to one of its Continental sites. Outgoing Intercity Director Chris Green was largely sanguine about Virgin’s proposals, who had complete confidence that BR’s fares would be cheaper owing to not having any shareholders to pay to, and its Intercity 250 and Intercity 225 services would not be much slower than the plans for Virgin’s high-speed line.
The new EU Directive highlighted a flaw in BR’s Organisation to Quality plan. While NSE and Intercity owned its own track and trains, Regional Railways did not. And so, the BR Board essentially became an umbrella of Intercity and NSE and the provider of all services not profitable enough to run on a commercial basis. BR would continue to evolve in its own fashion during Blair’s first term, before Gordon Brown would begin to focus on the railways on a Treasury raid. In 1998, and internal BR memo found a simple way to get around the Directive was simply to split NSE’s and Intercity’s train and infrastructure management systems in two, however, Gordon Brown being the technocrat he was, would always have a more excruciatingly difficult plan up his sleeve.
Meanwhile, as demolition was beginning around Kings Cross for the excavations of the Kings Cross Low Level station, NSE revealed its findings based on its earlier 1997 Inner London Route Study. Analysis found that Network South East was clearly losing money within London Travelcard zones 2,3 and to a lesser extent 4 owing to the fact it’s services were either to infrequent, were spread to thinly across multiple termini as in the case of South London, or felt to unreliable to passengers. In North and South London particularly, the study found that passengers living within 20 minutes of an Underground station, would rather take the Tube to Central London than a local BR service even if it was much closer.
For the entirety of NSE’s existence, it had focused on providing better service and revenue extraction from lucrative outer suburban customers. But its inner London routes, such as the North, West and South London Lines, the “South London Lines” subsector and the Great Northern subsector was largely untouched, while the more outer suburban Thames, Kent Link, LTS had different trains and Great Eastern was being absorbed into CrossRail/.The report recommended two options; One was to make use of the existing infrastructure and remodel junction layouts to allow more frequent metro services, the second was to revisit the 1989’s route Study Crossrail proposals, this time linking the City Crossrail with Waterloo rather than London Bridge.
However, internal politics within NSE’s burgeoning organisation was to pay for its decisions. After taking the throne of chairmanship of British Rail, Chris Green payed particularly close attention to NSE’s inner suburban woes. Instead of lavishly spending out on infrastructure, Green led NSE towards yet another total rebranding exercise.
The plan would be to split Network SouthEast in two parts “Regional” and “Metro”. Both would have their own separate planning and management teams but would be joined by a greater NSE committee. Metro would absorb the South Western Lines, South London Lines, North London Lines, Waterloo and City Line, Kent Link, Crossrail and Great Northern sub sectors, plus the Chelsea to Hackney Line-if it would ever be built and would undergo a clever rebranding:
1. All British Rail “Rail Alphabet” lettering would be removed from stations and replaced with London Transport’s “Johnston” typeface in order to remove the perceived differences between LUL and BR customer service.
2. All stations were to be staffed. This was to combat crime and bring about a more general safer environment for waiting passengers-particularly at night. This would cost NSE over a staggering £5,000,000 a year.
3. Refurbish inner suburban stations to catch up with the refurbishment seen on LUL lines since the early 1990s. Each subsector would be refurbished at a time within a timeframe of two years. This would mean that by the year 2010 all of London’s inner suburban stations would be completely modernised.
4. Introducing 12 car operation on Kent Link and South Western Lines-this would be done by ordering new six car multiple units, allowing the newly built Universal Networkers on Thameslink to be displaced to Great Eastern and SWL class 455’s to be displaced on Reading services and to South London Lines.
5. In the longer term-the return of the Northern City Line back to LUL and the creation of a new Crossrail tunnel from Finsbury Park to Waterloo via Liverpool Street. This would also see the closure of the Waterloo and City Line and extra revenue could be gained by selling the class 482 units to LUL for Central Line operation.
6. The Kent Link and South London Lines sub sectors would be split in half, and the subsectors rebranded in the style of Underground lines.
The dilemma arose however, with how Thameslink would be treated in the splitting of NSE. Thameslink 2000 was finally given the go-ahead in the Summer of 1996-the first part with the Kings Cross Low-Level construction was included in the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Bill, while the works for London Bridge and Borough Market followed on in a sperate Bill. Themslink 2000 was due to be completed by 2002, with train delivery taken place by 1999. In the plan, Thameslink’s Metro services would operate among a variety of lines, but the report recommended confining Thameslink 2000s Metro services to a simple St. Albans to Dartford service-leaving all services via Elephant and Castle to terminate at Blackfriars.
Early concept designs for NSE's "Metro" brand, before it was changed to "Overground"
Splitting Thameslink into Metro and Regional would leave challenges, considering the new class 381 trains would be operated on all Thameslink routes along with the class 319s. In the event, Thameslink would be left as a “third leg” to NSE until Thameslink 2000 and Crossrail is fully in operation.
Network south East’s restructuring began in the summer of 1998, with the former South London Lines director Chris Stokes placed in charge, followed by a loyal and excited team of planers and management from London Transport. Before Metro’s launch in January 1999, it went through its first rebranded rebranding. Its name Metro was dropped as it “sounds too American.” Complained NSE’s marketing department the more “English” sounding “Overground” was adopted.
Overground blitzed the radio and television in a PR storm. But it caught the ire of a rising star in politics-Ken Livingstone. Livingstone looked at Overground and wanted to absorb it into London Transport, for fear that the railways were eventually going to be sold off, as what was happening to the London Underground and Livingstone began to grow suspicious of NSE’s more corporatist identity in the mid-1990s. The last thing he wanted was London’s rail and tube railways to be both be privatised.
London Transport was and wasn’t interested. It had more pressing matters to attend to such as completing Crossrail and the Jubilee Line extension, and modernising and maintain its existing network. Gaining NSE’s Overground would nevertheless be an interesting gambit but it couldn’t have come at the right time. Needless to say, Overground would become a major ground for battle between NSE and the Mayoralty of London until the construction of the East London Line Extension in 2006.
1998 was also an important year to Regional Railways, which finally broke into no less than five different sectors. However, it wasn’t a clean break. April 18th 1998 was fraught with chaos as many DMU diagrams were scattered across the railway when they should have been somewhere else. The newly created “Central” sector found that it had lost almost all of its class 158 diagrams which were still hanging around Centro’s depots. In the chaos that followed RR’s split, numerous unsuitable diagrams were forced out in order to cover the strange stock shortage in Central England. On a few occasions, a class 150 ran from Birmingham New Street to Great Yarmouth, and a Sunday Grimsby to Birmingham service was operated by a class 153!
However, 1998 would also prove to be a traumatic year for British industry. One of the last British industrial giants, and frequent supplier to British Rail-GEC, broke up, rebranding itself as Marconi plc. Its train building sites, including Metro-Cammell's Washwood Heath factory and the former English Electric sites at Trafford Park and Preston were sold completely to Alstom. Which was now a fully French train manufacturer. This was a frequent story in British politics-BREL was sold to ABB in 1989 and inturn to Adtranz in 1996, but BR was much more worried about having such a huge chunk of British train manufacturing in uncertain hands.
In response, British Rail had decided to try to bid to buy out GEC's share from Alstom-resurecting the Metro-Cammell name in the process. However, this gambit came to a swift end, when it was slapped down by the Treasury for fear it would be an unwelcome allusion back to the days of Labour's "Clause Four" and the national ownership of industry. GEC passed into the history books, and with that, was the final curtain for British train manufacturing.
By 1999, Virgin’s new railway looking more likely, reportingly having the backing of no less than seven private banks to fund the project. To increase its gambit, it also took the opportunity to offer to run the Regional Eurostar services which was now looking incredibly unlikely to run. Regional Eurostar class 373/2 trains had begun testing to Northern Eng land since 1997, as part of the political agreement in the late 1980s to provide through Channel services to the Regions. However, BR’s subsidiary-European Passenger Services, found that it was simply not commercially viable to operate Regional Eurostars beyond London. Not least that due to the cost of fencing off a secured area for every single station for Eurostar trains would call at to provide customs checks. The Nightstar services were also found to be unviable until the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was opened, and BR refused to operate the services without government subsidy. This came to a nadir when Virgin in 1999 offered to run the services. This would come to bite Virgin when they Many in the railway industry speculated why Virgin was becoming so predatory over British Rail-in a 1999 GMTV interview with Richard Branson explaining the course of his new high-speed line, he said:
“British Rail is old and tired. Of this millennium, not the next. It’s not an outward looking, diverse enterprise like Virgin is, but just like BA when we took them on, found it was a stuffy, organisation that had that distinct whiff of imperialism.”
Virgin would find that they too would not be able to find any commercial benefit in running the Regional Eurostars until their high speed line was opened by 2010, and Eurostar’s class 373/2 North of London sets would return to British Rail by 2000.
Meanwhile, with some better news, the first completed driving car of CrossRail’s new class 341 units was held on display at Railtex 1997 Exhibition, and was later put on display at the Lord’s Mayor Show that year. Delivery of the class 341s to Ilford depot began in early 1998, with the first production set 341001 reaching Ilford in March 1999. The trains would a traction equipment design taken primarily from the packages designed for London Transport’s 1995 Stock Northern Line trains, and were designed and constructed at GECs Trafford Park site in Manchester, while the announcements system was recorded in tandem with the recordings of the Northern Line trains by voice artist Celia Drummond. CrossRail announcements were as follows.
“This station is Tottenham Court Road. Change here for the Central and Northern Lines, this train calls all stations to Shenfield.”
In the event of semi fast services in the peaks, the announcement changes to-
“This station is Farringdon. Change here for the Circle and Hammersmith and Metropolitan Lines, and Network SouthEast Thameslink services. This train is semi-fast to Reading.”
--
In the last part, I'll explain Intercity's last electrification plans, Brown's privatisation and share some conceptual designs for NSE's Overground!
Part 15-The Great British Train Battle
The failure to privatise British Rail did not stop the Conservative and later Labour governments from looking to implement their own new solutions on how to run the railway. Since the early 90s, proposals had floated around which included selling BR’s non-core passenger operations, such as sleeper services to the private sector.
However, among the vague privatisation proposals, the only one that had any serious weighting was for other companies to run services to compete against BR’s services, which was later enforced by the “First European Rail Package” Directive from the EU. The first company to benefit from these plans was Virgin Group, who touted a very ambitious plan that became known in the Guardian in March 1997, which would see them purchasing their own high-performance trains running from Euston to Manchester and Euston to Glasgow, curiously via Birmingham. Although it had the sleek and iconic Virgin branding to rely on, it was still prepared to go above and beyond, taking some of its airline luxury on the rail market. According to the Guardian, Virgin planned to open a series of Virgin only waiting rooms and travel centres on all stations with red carpet to be rolled onto the train when it had stopped at the station. In addition, Virgin was to print its own tickets, and featured for the first time the ability to purchase tickets online, something that British Rail was still lagging behind. In 1996, BR commissioned a report looking into the benefits of providing a web presence for passengers. The domains, www.britishrailenquries.co.uk, www.networksoutheast.co.uk and www.intercity.co.uk were registered but it would take another year until they were developed, and online ticket purchasing was a long way off. But even more ambitious, it planned to by 2010 open its own dedicated high-speed railway between London, Heathrow, Manchester and Leeds.
BR was furious with the proposal, after shelling out millions for Intercity 250, it was upset to find that private operators would be using its new infrastructure while taking its revenue. It planned to charge extremely high track rents for the line, but under competition rules, but under the new EU Directive-that required train operations and infrastructure holders to have separate accounts, it would mean that Intercity itself would have to undo the long and complicated Organisation for Quality initiatives and charge itself effectively to use its own infrastructure. To add further insult to injury, it would appear that GEC-Alsthom’s design spec for Virgin’s new trains (suggested to be class 390 under the TOPS numbering system) were to have the new ONIX traction system that would have been fitted in Network SouthEast’s Class 371 and Class 342 High Speed Networker family. NSE became worried that should GEC’s production line become full with Virgin units it wouldn’t have the capacity to produce the trains for Thameslink 2000. This was not a problem of course, as GEC-Alsthom could simply offload the work to one of its Continental sites. Outgoing Intercity Director Chris Green was largely sanguine about Virgin’s proposals, who had complete confidence that BR’s fares would be cheaper owing to not having any shareholders to pay to, and its Intercity 250 and Intercity 225 services would not be much slower than the plans for Virgin’s high-speed line.
The new EU Directive highlighted a flaw in BR’s Organisation to Quality plan. While NSE and Intercity owned its own track and trains, Regional Railways did not. And so, the BR Board essentially became an umbrella of Intercity and NSE and the provider of all services not profitable enough to run on a commercial basis. BR would continue to evolve in its own fashion during Blair’s first term, before Gordon Brown would begin to focus on the railways on a Treasury raid. In 1998, and internal BR memo found a simple way to get around the Directive was simply to split NSE’s and Intercity’s train and infrastructure management systems in two, however, Gordon Brown being the technocrat he was, would always have a more excruciatingly difficult plan up his sleeve.
Meanwhile, as demolition was beginning around Kings Cross for the excavations of the Kings Cross Low Level station, NSE revealed its findings based on its earlier 1997 Inner London Route Study. Analysis found that Network South East was clearly losing money within London Travelcard zones 2,3 and to a lesser extent 4 owing to the fact it’s services were either to infrequent, were spread to thinly across multiple termini as in the case of South London, or felt to unreliable to passengers. In North and South London particularly, the study found that passengers living within 20 minutes of an Underground station, would rather take the Tube to Central London than a local BR service even if it was much closer.
For the entirety of NSE’s existence, it had focused on providing better service and revenue extraction from lucrative outer suburban customers. But its inner London routes, such as the North, West and South London Lines, the “South London Lines” subsector and the Great Northern subsector was largely untouched, while the more outer suburban Thames, Kent Link, LTS had different trains and Great Eastern was being absorbed into CrossRail/.The report recommended two options; One was to make use of the existing infrastructure and remodel junction layouts to allow more frequent metro services, the second was to revisit the 1989’s route Study Crossrail proposals, this time linking the City Crossrail with Waterloo rather than London Bridge.
However, internal politics within NSE’s burgeoning organisation was to pay for its decisions. After taking the throne of chairmanship of British Rail, Chris Green payed particularly close attention to NSE’s inner suburban woes. Instead of lavishly spending out on infrastructure, Green led NSE towards yet another total rebranding exercise.
The plan would be to split Network SouthEast in two parts “Regional” and “Metro”. Both would have their own separate planning and management teams but would be joined by a greater NSE committee. Metro would absorb the South Western Lines, South London Lines, North London Lines, Waterloo and City Line, Kent Link, Crossrail and Great Northern sub sectors, plus the Chelsea to Hackney Line-if it would ever be built and would undergo a clever rebranding:
1. All British Rail “Rail Alphabet” lettering would be removed from stations and replaced with London Transport’s “Johnston” typeface in order to remove the perceived differences between LUL and BR customer service.
2. All stations were to be staffed. This was to combat crime and bring about a more general safer environment for waiting passengers-particularly at night. This would cost NSE over a staggering £5,000,000 a year.
3. Refurbish inner suburban stations to catch up with the refurbishment seen on LUL lines since the early 1990s. Each subsector would be refurbished at a time within a timeframe of two years. This would mean that by the year 2010 all of London’s inner suburban stations would be completely modernised.
4. Introducing 12 car operation on Kent Link and South Western Lines-this would be done by ordering new six car multiple units, allowing the newly built Universal Networkers on Thameslink to be displaced to Great Eastern and SWL class 455’s to be displaced on Reading services and to South London Lines.
5. In the longer term-the return of the Northern City Line back to LUL and the creation of a new Crossrail tunnel from Finsbury Park to Waterloo via Liverpool Street. This would also see the closure of the Waterloo and City Line and extra revenue could be gained by selling the class 482 units to LUL for Central Line operation.
6. The Kent Link and South London Lines sub sectors would be split in half, and the subsectors rebranded in the style of Underground lines.
The dilemma arose however, with how Thameslink would be treated in the splitting of NSE. Thameslink 2000 was finally given the go-ahead in the Summer of 1996-the first part with the Kings Cross Low-Level construction was included in the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Bill, while the works for London Bridge and Borough Market followed on in a sperate Bill. Themslink 2000 was due to be completed by 2002, with train delivery taken place by 1999. In the plan, Thameslink’s Metro services would operate among a variety of lines, but the report recommended confining Thameslink 2000s Metro services to a simple St. Albans to Dartford service-leaving all services via Elephant and Castle to terminate at Blackfriars.
Splitting Thameslink into Metro and Regional would leave challenges, considering the new class 381 trains would be operated on all Thameslink routes along with the class 319s. In the event, Thameslink would be left as a “third leg” to NSE until Thameslink 2000 and Crossrail is fully in operation.
Network south East’s restructuring began in the summer of 1998, with the former South London Lines director Chris Stokes placed in charge, followed by a loyal and excited team of planers and management from London Transport. Before Metro’s launch in January 1999, it went through its first rebranded rebranding. Its name Metro was dropped as it “sounds too American.” Complained NSE’s marketing department the more “English” sounding “Overground” was adopted.
Overground blitzed the radio and television in a PR storm. But it caught the ire of a rising star in politics-Ken Livingstone. Livingstone looked at Overground and wanted to absorb it into London Transport, for fear that the railways were eventually going to be sold off, as what was happening to the London Underground and Livingstone began to grow suspicious of NSE’s more corporatist identity in the mid-1990s. The last thing he wanted was London’s rail and tube railways to be both be privatised.
London Transport was and wasn’t interested. It had more pressing matters to attend to such as completing Crossrail and the Jubilee Line extension, and modernising and maintain its existing network. Gaining NSE’s Overground would nevertheless be an interesting gambit but it couldn’t have come at the right time. Needless to say, Overground would become a major ground for battle between NSE and the Mayoralty of London until the construction of the East London Line Extension in 2006.
1998 was also an important year to Regional Railways, which finally broke into no less than five different sectors. However, it wasn’t a clean break. April 18th 1998 was fraught with chaos as many DMU diagrams were scattered across the railway when they should have been somewhere else. The newly created “Central” sector found that it had lost almost all of its class 158 diagrams which were still hanging around Centro’s depots. In the chaos that followed RR’s split, numerous unsuitable diagrams were forced out in order to cover the strange stock shortage in Central England. On a few occasions, a class 150 ran from Birmingham New Street to Great Yarmouth, and a Sunday Grimsby to Birmingham service was operated by a class 153!
However, 1998 would also prove to be a traumatic year for British industry. One of the last British industrial giants, and frequent supplier to British Rail-GEC, broke up, rebranding itself as Marconi plc. Its train building sites, including Metro-Cammell's Washwood Heath factory and the former English Electric sites at Trafford Park and Preston were sold completely to Alstom. Which was now a fully French train manufacturer. This was a frequent story in British politics-BREL was sold to ABB in 1989 and inturn to Adtranz in 1996, but BR was much more worried about having such a huge chunk of British train manufacturing in uncertain hands.
In response, British Rail had decided to try to bid to buy out GEC's share from Alstom-resurecting the Metro-Cammell name in the process. However, this gambit came to a swift end, when it was slapped down by the Treasury for fear it would be an unwelcome allusion back to the days of Labour's "Clause Four" and the national ownership of industry. GEC passed into the history books, and with that, was the final curtain for British train manufacturing.
By 1999, Virgin’s new railway looking more likely, reportingly having the backing of no less than seven private banks to fund the project. To increase its gambit, it also took the opportunity to offer to run the Regional Eurostar services which was now looking incredibly unlikely to run. Regional Eurostar class 373/2 trains had begun testing to Northern Eng land since 1997, as part of the political agreement in the late 1980s to provide through Channel services to the Regions. However, BR’s subsidiary-European Passenger Services, found that it was simply not commercially viable to operate Regional Eurostars beyond London. Not least that due to the cost of fencing off a secured area for every single station for Eurostar trains would call at to provide customs checks. The Nightstar services were also found to be unviable until the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was opened, and BR refused to operate the services without government subsidy. This came to a nadir when Virgin in 1999 offered to run the services. This would come to bite Virgin when they Many in the railway industry speculated why Virgin was becoming so predatory over British Rail-in a 1999 GMTV interview with Richard Branson explaining the course of his new high-speed line, he said:
“British Rail is old and tired. Of this millennium, not the next. It’s not an outward looking, diverse enterprise like Virgin is, but just like BA when we took them on, found it was a stuffy, organisation that had that distinct whiff of imperialism.”
Virgin would find that they too would not be able to find any commercial benefit in running the Regional Eurostars until their high speed line was opened by 2010, and Eurostar’s class 373/2 North of London sets would return to British Rail by 2000.
Meanwhile, with some better news, the first completed driving car of CrossRail’s new class 341 units was held on display at Railtex 1997 Exhibition, and was later put on display at the Lord’s Mayor Show that year. Delivery of the class 341s to Ilford depot began in early 1998, with the first production set 341001 reaching Ilford in March 1999. The trains would a traction equipment design taken primarily from the packages designed for London Transport’s 1995 Stock Northern Line trains, and were designed and constructed at GECs Trafford Park site in Manchester, while the announcements system was recorded in tandem with the recordings of the Northern Line trains by voice artist Celia Drummond. CrossRail announcements were as follows.
“This station is Tottenham Court Road. Change here for the Central and Northern Lines, this train calls all stations to Shenfield.”
In the event of semi fast services in the peaks, the announcement changes to-
“This station is Farringdon. Change here for the Circle and Hammersmith and Metropolitan Lines, and Network SouthEast Thameslink services. This train is semi-fast to Reading.”
--
In the last part, I'll explain Intercity's last electrification plans, Brown's privatisation and share some conceptual designs for NSE's Overground!