UK: Rail is ‘at the heart of our plans to renew the country’ and the government is ‘putting our money where our mouth is’, Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander told the Railway Industry Association conference on November 5. But she warned that ‘our approach will be guided by securing value for taxpayers’ by ‘only supporting projects that are fully costed and affordable’.
In particular, further electrification of the Midland Main Line ‘is not affordable right now’ she said, and so ‘we are keeping further electrification of the line under review, which I believe is the responsible thing to do’.
The 25 kV 50 Hz electrification from London St Pancras was extended as far as Wigston near Leicester earlier this year, but the government announced on July 8 that Phase 3 which would have taken the wires to Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield had been put on hold with spending to be focused elsewhere.
At the time the Department for Transport said the decision had been taken because of the costs and timescales of the project, and the imminent entry to service of new trainsets able to use both diesel and electric power. On November 10 East Midlands Railway said the first of the 33 Hitachi Rail Class 810 Aurora sets would begin carrying passengers during December.
Alexander told over 300 delegates at the RIA conference that such decisions ‘have allowed us to make commitments elsewhere, such as a record £2·2bn settlement for Transport for London, and it means we can get on with HS2, allocating over £20bn to deliver phase one’.
She stressed that ‘this isn’t a blank cheque’ for HS2, and ‘we are overseeing a fundamental reset of the HS2 project. New leadership will grip costs, restore oversight and better engage the supply chain on how we create the right commercial incentives to get HS2 back on track.’
