Felixstowe v. London Gateway
With London Gateway receiving its first ship in November, the war of words between the port and its rivals is hotting up.
There’s a report here from the Daily Telegraph, which says that Felixstowe will be a cheaper port to use. But it was produced by the port’s owners, so we should probably add a shovel of sea salt.
As a man of Suffolk, who has seen Felixstowe rise from a small dock to the giant port it is today, London Gateway should probably look at the lessons of history, where Suffolk has a proud record of taking on invaders. Boadicea’s descendents will give London Gateway a very strong and probably dirty fight.
london Gateway makes a lot about having the land for a large logistics park by the port, but then you’ve still got to get the containers to the market and can London’s roads, the M25 and the railways cope with getting the boxes away? The Gospel Oak to Barking line may be being electrified, but will the residents of North London put up with container trains at all hours? Felixstowe is at the end of the line and electrifying the line to Peterborough and beyond, with a certain amount of double-tracking would help that port cut costs further.
We live in interesting times!
It Wasn’t A Good Trip!
The objective was simple, which was to get to Felixstowe from Liverpool Street in time for a dental appointment at 14:10. I worked out I’d leave on the 11:30 from London and then I had fifteen minutes at Ipswich to change onto the 12:58 to Felixstowe. I would arrive at 13:24, which gave me plenty of time. Coming back, I had plenty of time to catch the 15:28 after my appointment and after a change at Ipswich I’d be back in London for 17:19
But things didn’t work out as expected! The train crawled out of London and we were thirteen minutes late at Colchester, so I felt I’d miss my connection. But that was late too, so I caught it easily!
But I don’t like being late.
After my appointment, I walked back to the station and as the train appeared to be on time and it was only15:00, I walked back to the bar in Felixstowe station to see if they had a nice glass of cider.
But they didn’t so after fiddling about, I walked back to the platform and sat and read my paper for a bit.
There was then a bit of commotion and on checking the display I found that my train to Ipswich had been cancelled just a few minutes before it was due to arrive.
I thought about taking the bus into Ipswich, but then I realised I’d have to get from wherever the bus dropped me to the station.
I did think about waiting for the 16:28, but who was there any guarantee that wouldn’t be cancelled as well. After all, as I went to Felixstowe, a driver had told me one train had already been cancelled in the morning.
So I walked back to the taxi rank opposite Tesco and took one to Ipswich station for £25.
I eventually got back into London at about 17:30 and was dropped right in the middle of the rush hour.
Not one of those inconvenienced by this cancellation heard any advice from Greater Anglia.
Discussing it all with the taxi driver, who took me to Ipswich, he said it happens all the time, because they give the freight trains priority. Let’s hope that when the Bacon Factory Curve is completed, things get a bit better. However, it would help if more of the line from Ipswich to Felixstowe was double-tracked, as the Docks said they would be.
This line sets a bad precedent for the row that will happen between London Overground and the freight operators, who want to use the North London and Gospel Oak to Barking Lines to and from London Gateway. I think we’ll see one hell of a row over that conflict, especially when Class 66s thunder through all night keeping the residents awake.
Putting The Cart Before The Horse
The Standard is reporting tonight, that Lord Mandelson has changed his mind over the building of HS2. Here’s a flavour.
In an extraordinary public U-turn, he confessed the costings were “almost entirely speculative” when Gordon Brown’s Cabinet backed the idea.
Ministers wanted a “bold commitment to modernisation” after the financial crash, he said, and ignored the potential risks of what now looked like “an expensive mistake”.
But then as Gordon Brown didn’t have the financial acumen to run a whelk stall, what do you expect?
I’ve always been slightly cynical about HS2 and feel if it ever gets built, it won’t be as is now envisaged.
But one thought struck me, as I read the article and it gave rise to the title of this post.
My background is in Project Management, which is all about getting things build the right way and in the correct order. Judging by all the arguments about how Heathrow Airport will link in to HS2, it struck me as strange that we are deciding the route of HS2 before we decide if we’re going to build a new airport for London.
Look at any option, with the possible exception of a third runway at Heathrow and we’ll have to revamp the railways around London, to create links to the North.
Strangely in a few years time, when the Midland Main Line is electrified, Sheffield will have the best links to a London airport, of any northern city. I suspect they’ll be running trains from Sheffield to Brighton, which of course will stop at Gatwick.
That just shows how well politicians plan transport networks.
They haven’t really done anything to solve the North-South problems we currently have and what will happen to construction methods in the near future.
HS2 is initially planned to go from London to Birmingham, but that route has one high speed 200 kph line and a convenient slower one. As I found last week, when I went to Birmingham, it’s a good service and a lot of the problems are on their way to being solved. I wonder what amount of traffic, an upgraded and electrified Chiltern Main Line could carry, thus delaying the need for HS2 to Birmingham!
But go North from Birmingham to Manchester, Liverpool and ultimately Scotland and there is a real lack of capacity. Admittedly, Virgin’s lengthened trains and a few new ones will help, but that line will probably be the first part of the West Coast Main Line to get totally overloaded.
So perhaps we should build it from North to South as some have proposed.
A very real problem is the cess-pit at the London end of the line; Euston. It was built on the cheap in the 1960s and needs a complete rebuild. Rebuilding Euston and building HS2 at the same time, would be a recipe for disaster.
And then there’s the problem of freight capacity, which is going to get worse, as some idiot decided to build the UK’s largest container port at London Gateway, in a place which is difficult to get to by rail,as most trains will have to fight their way through London. You could argue that the proposal to run freight trains on the old Grand Central Line by a company called Central Railway, should have been built as a freight spine first.
Building this line, would probably have taken a lot of the freight off the West Coast Main Line, so giving us the extra passenger capacity we need, at least as far as Manchester and Liverpool for a few years.
As with many things in Project Management, you don’t let politicians be involved in the design or choose the order you do something!
I always remember the building of the Lewisham Extension of the Docklands Light Railway. The contractors were told it had to link various holes in the ground and cost under a certain amount. The politicians then stood back and it was delivered on time at an acceptable price. Not like the Jubilee Line Extension, which was built at a similar time and suffered endless interference from politicians.
One of my laws of project management states that the more political or board level interference in a project, the later and more costly the project will be. If however those at the top lay down a feasible specification with rigid time and cost limits, the project will more likely be delivered successfully.
A Decision Day For HS2?
HS2 is a project that I think will never be built.
I was listening to the debate on Radio 5 this morning about George Osborne’s £11. 5billion public pending cuts and one guy phoned in to question, why with the obvious need for cuts, we are going to spend £33billion on HS2.
There is so much opposition to HS2 amongst the Nimbys, that I suspect that at some time parliament will chicken out and vote the project down.
I have never heard so much opposition to a project, in my lifetime. But then the general public doesn’t want new railways, they want new roads on which to drive their gas-guzzlers.
I also think HS2 is probably going about things the wrong way, but as to what the right way is, I do not know.
But we do urgently need the following.
- More capacity on passenger trains from London to Manchester and onwards to Scotland. The case for Birmingham may be less important, especially, if services to Marylebone can be improved.
- More freight capacity through London and to the North, especially after London Gateway becomes fully operational.
- A rebuilt and more efficient Euston station.
The freight capacity cannot be increased without creating a substantial new railway.
It will be interesting to see the way that MPs vote.
Bacon Factory Curve Action
As the train to Woodbridge passed onto the East Suffolk Line, north of Ipswich station, it would appear that at last work is starting on creating the Bacon Factory or Ipswich North Curve to allow trains, and especially heavy freight ones, to pass to and from Felixstowe without reversing in Ipswich station.
Container Ships Are Getting Bigger
i always trawl the BBC’s web site in the morning to look for thought provoking articles. This one about the latest generation of container ships is fascinating. Describing the capacity of the ship it uses this paragraph.
Each will contain as much steel as eight Eiffel Towers and have a capacity equivalent to 18,000 20-foot containers (TEU).
If those containers were placed in Times Square in New York, they would rise above billboards, streetlights and some buildings.
Or, to put it another way, they would fill more than 30 trains, each a mile long and stacked two containers high. Inside those containers, you could fit 36,000 cars or 863 million tins of baked beans.
It also talks about the knock-on effects of such large ships for ports.
Ship owners also want vessels to be unloaded and loaded within 24 hours, which has various knock-on effects. More space is needed to store the containers in the harbour, and onward connections by road, rail and ship need to be strengthened to cope with the huge surge in traffic.
Felixstowe, which handles 42% of the UK’s container trade, has 58 train movements a day, but plans to double that after it opens a third rail terminal later this year.
Have we got the capacity on the railways to move that large number of boxes?
No!
The next big complaint from the public, will be the noise of freight trains rumbling through their neighbourhood at all hours of the day. The standard freight engines, the Class 66, are not the quietest of beasts.
So for a start, all of the freight routes, like Felixstowe to Nuneaton and Gospel Oak to Barking must be electrified.
But that will only be a stop-gap and we need to put in new lines to the north of the United Kingdom. At least HS2, if it is to be built will be a start.
Railways In Afghanistan
In Modern Railways this month, there is an informative article about how they are starting to build railways from scratch in that trouble country.
Apparently, they never developed a railway system, like neighbouring countries, and only now, with the need to remove vast amounts of natural resources around and out of the country, that the railways are being proposed.
It is a daunting task, made worse by the mountainous terrain and the fact that surrounding countries have a variety of different gauges.
Let’s hope the engineers succeed in their aims, as it might bring some wealth, prosperity and freedom to the country. There is a Wikipedia article, which gives more details.
A Row In Radlett
There is the mother of all battles starting in Radlett about a proposed road and rail freight depot.
Underlying all of this is the need for suitable sites for this close to the M25 to satisfy London’s freight transport needs. and of course there are few sites available.
But then London has a serious freight problem and short of forcibly moving half the population out, you will not cut the amount of freight going into the City.
So there will be pain somewhere!
The Real Arguments For HS2 Start Now!
The government has announced the route of HS2 this morning, as is detailed in this article on the BBC.
There is going to be masses of opposition.
In fact, I think that the amount of opposition is such, that the line will not get built. certainly, as I look forward at 65, I doubt I’ll ever see it.
Let’s face it, if you had a referendum, which asked if we wanted a high speed rail or more motorways, the man stuck in the jam on the M1 would vote for the roads.
HS2 also doesn’t help our biggest transport problem of the next twenty years. Or at least not directly! How do we get all the freight containers, to and from the major ports like Southampton, Felixstowe and Thames Haven? It deals with them indirectly, by making more paths available on the classic lines to the North and Scotland, especially if a few strategic freight by-passes are built and lines like Ipswich to Nuneaton are electrified.
There also seems to be a lots of opponents saying that London and the South East will be the biggest beneficiary. So perhaps we should built it from Birmingham to Scotland? Or at least that should be the first phase to open!
There is the classic opportunity here for a political party to fight an election on an anti-HS2 platform. I don’t think, any of the three major parties would do this, but who’s to say, some smaller party wouldn’t? After all, UKIP has said no to the project in this article on its web site.
