#106 — Why HS2 Needs More Carriages, with Chris Gibb

Chris Gibb spent 45 years in high-profile positions across the British railways. He knows what a successful railway operation looks like — and right now he is publicly challenging the plans for High Speed 2 (HS2). 

The issue is not the construction. It does not even impact the High Speed Rail service between London and Birmingham, what most people think HS2 is about. It is the impact of the new HS2 train fleet that continues around Birmingham on the West Coast Main Line to the North. Chris foresees a substantial reduction in capacity from today's fleet travelling up North, at times when more, not less, capacity will be needed. And he tries to do something about it before procurement decisions cement a future capacity shortfall. It is a lesson about long-term planning decisions and their consequences.

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Transcript

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My conversation today is with Chris Gibb from Great Britain. Chris is currently very publicly on a bandwagon to influence a decision which will be made by the HS2 high-speed project in the UK, but will have long-term consequences on public rail transport in the northern part of Great Britain, from Birmingham all the way up to Glasgow. I hope you find this conversation very insightful, not just if you are in Great Britain, but also in other countries. And if you do, please like and share this video and subscribe to the channel. It really helps me a lot and it also helps the wider education of the railway industry. So thank you for that. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Chris Gibb. Chris, welcome to the show. Hello, very nice to join you. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Frank. Thank you for making the time. Your headline in your LinkedIn profile is the most concise that I've ever seen. It reads railway man. Well, try the impossible challenge and summarize a career of like more than 40 years in under two minutes. Go. Yes, I can't be bothered with the long list of former this and former that. So I'm still a railwayman. I've done 45 years on the UK railway, starting off as a junior clerk, going through train crew rostering operations to being the managing director of trains in Wales, then on to Virgin, where I ran the cross country and West Coast network. And then later on to the board of Network Rail and the board of a thing called now called DFTO, which for years was known as the operator of last resort. So, yeah, 45 years pretty near pretty near done now. Man and boy and all that stuff. Fabulous career. I've really enjoyed it. When you say operator of last resort, can you explain this for people who are not from the UK like myself? Yeah. So the operator of last resort was a provision in the privatization legislation going back to 1994. And you'll recall that in the UK, about 25 franchises were let for operations of train companies. And it was always envisaged that one or two of those would, for one reason or another, have their contracts terminated. Either the companies would go into administration or they wouldn't be able to meet the obligations of their contract. So government set up an organization called the operator of last resort, which was a small group of people. For most of the time I worked for them as a as a non-executive director, there were only five people. And our job was to take over a train company literally at a moment's notice. We did it once in less than two weeks and run it on behalf of the government in order to discharge their obligation to keep the trains running in all circumstances, which was built into the 1994 legislation. With the change of government last year, the operator of last resort has now become the operator of first choice and is taking over all of the UK train companies that are run by, that are administered by the state and will shortly own all of them at some point next year. And the next step from that is for it all to transit into a thing called Great British Railways, which will be the state owned owner of all the infrastructure and most of the passenger train operations in the UK as we reverse out of mostly the private sector era back into a state owned era. So you will keep doing this all with five people? The organization now called DFT operator has grown to hundreds of people and absorbed people from quite a number of organizations. And yes, it'll grow under Great British Railways. The vision is not for it to grow a lot. The management of GBR will be done at a much more local level in business units around the UK, hopefully very focused on the passengers, freight and employees in those local areas, which vary a great deal for people that are not familiar with the UK. You've got the obviously the capital of London with an enormous metro operation around London. Then you've got long distance routes to Scotland, a four hour trip up to Edinburgh or Glasgow. And you share those routes with a lot of freight trains. The West Coast Main Line is the busiest mixed traffic railway in Europe. We've built very few dedicated high speed lines in the UK and our railways are still a very mixed traffic operation. Okay. So let's just stay for a moment with this reorganization into GBR, Great Britain Rail, which you probably know a lot about, have thought a lot about, I imagine. I think transitioning into a new organization gives a lot of opportunity, but also has a lot of risk. I mean, if you say that the organization is growing and you're absorbing people who previously worked in other organizations, I would hope that you're going for the good people or for the better people and weed out the ones that weren't that successful. But at the same time, there's also risks to pick the wrong choices. So what's your view on this, how this is going and your gut feeling, how it will evolve? Well, following my intervention on high speed too in the last couple of weeks in parliament, I'm no longer employed by what's called DFT operator. So I can give a personal perspective of where GBR will go without breaching any confidentiality from my past employment. But in the UK, we have a thing called TUPE, where people can transfer when there's a reorganization with their terms and conditions of employment into the new entity. So about 100,000 people across the UK railway will transfer into Great British Railways at some point in the next couple of years. And it will be an employer of around 100,000 people, which is a little bit less than British Rail had at the time of privatization. So you can't simply go through those 100,000 people and take all the best people. And you've also got to bear in mind that the trains have to carry on running. So you can't bring about a change in any kind of controversial way, because you've got to keep the trains running literally. But the purpose of the organization will change. Instead of companies competing with each other, Great British Railways will provide a UK wide guiding mind. But there will still be organ operations that GBR doesn't run. So for example, the Elizabeth line across London is run by Transport for London. Trains in Wales and Scotland are run by the devolved governments there. So it won't be doing everything that British Rail did. But it will be doing a very big chunk and it will provide a guiding mind. And the era of competition in most cases will cease. There will still be competition from organisations known as open access operators, which are privately owned, train companies run without any subsidy. And there are a few of those across the UK that run in competition with what will be the state owned railway. And that is overseen by the rail regulator to make sure they get a fair crack at having access to the railway and the passengers. So it won't be total GBR, but it will be mostly run by GBR. Absolutely. Okay. I remember at the time when the railway in Britain was privatised, I was still in Europe, so much closer to the action. And I actually spent a few years working for the British market. But that was after the privatisation, but living with the consequences of it. I think the motivation and incentive in the 90s to go to a privatised approach was very strong. And now there seems to be a very strong motivation to go back to a state owned organisation. Would that lead to the conclusion that the privatisation turned out to be a failure or is it just a normal cycling process as for most things in life, like ebb and flow, where things go back from centralisation to decentralisation and backwards? What's your view on that? Yeah, I've spent about half of my 45 year career in the private sector and half in the public sector at different levels in organisations. I like to think I've seen the best of some of the privatised railway. My 10 years with Virgin revolutionised those train operations, two of the least successful operations at the time of privatisation, and passenger numbers more than doubled on those services. But I think after about 30 years of operation in the private sector, the chosen model for privatisation has become exhausted. It's become a game of bidding and counter bidding and working out how to make money because of clauses in contracts that are not necessarily related to growing passenger revenue and increasing the number of passengers. But the privatised era has left a legacy of investment in new trains, huge growth in passenger numbers, hundreds of new stations. All of that has happened under the privatisation model. If you look back at passenger numbers in the UK on the National Rail Network, the low point was 1982 at the height of British Rail and it climbed a little bit after British Rail after that low point. But then it really took off after 1994 when the railway was privatised. So we've seen a massive increase in passenger numbers. But lastly, my most important observation of this period is that the railway has run very safely in the UK for the last 20 years. By any measure, we're one of the safest railways in the world. So the popular perception that somehow privatisation would make the railway unsafe in the UK has proved to be wrong. And we've had 25 years of very successful operation. And the mantra from organisations like Virgin has been, we can only be successful if we're safe. And I absolutely buy into that for any railway operation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. So even if railway maintains a better safety record than road traffic, for example, any rail accidents are much more public and much more disastrous in most cases than car accidents, even though these are smaller and happen much more often. But yeah, so I agree. The passenger trusts people like me to carry them safely on a train. Yes, okay, it takes it for granted. But whatever we do on the railway, we have to remember that if we lose the trust of passengers on grounds of safety, then they simply won't travel with us and we won't be successful. So I think in a mature privatised railway, the two go hand in hand. And we have to remember that as we go into the state sector again. Yeah, I mean, there are a number of aspects that are important to passengers. The trust in safe transport is obviously one which is very foundational. I'm with that. But it's also the availability of train services when people want to travel. And some kind of travel comfort would be nice as well, such as having a seat on a long journey. And that seems to me where you recently made some news headlines with your engagement with the parliament. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, so for some years, I've been challenging the plans for high speed to which is a new railway from London to the Midlands at the moment, with a vision for it to continue on to Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland, a network that will serve five of the UK's 10 biggest cities. So, you know, a real key artery to relieve the West Coast main line, which is very busy with both passenger and freight traffic. So this has been some 17 years in the making now. And it is being built between London and Birmingham right now. Very far, very close to where I'm speaking to you from in Warwickshire. And I don't know anything about building a new railway. I'm not a construction engineer, but I do know a bit about operating a railway. And I've been challenging the operating plans of high speed to and a couple of weeks ago, I sat in front of a parliamentary group called the All Party Parliamentary Group for Rail, which consists of members of parliament and members of the House of Lords. And I gave a speech about HS2's plans. And in a nutshell, there are currently 684 carriages operating this intercity service on the West Coast main line. And high speed 2's plans are to replace that with 432. So a big reduction in the number of carriages. I've tabled a proposal to increase the number of carriages to 948 to accommodate what I believe is growth that will happen and a successful well one railway of the kind I was part of in Virgin, where we doubled the passenger numbers. I can hear you thinking, well, how on earth could they manage with 432 carriages to replace 684? And the answer there is that I believe that government and high speed to have a strategy to have compulsory seat reservations on those trains. Now, I'm not against encouraging passengers to reserve seats, and we should make that extremely easy. You can do it on LNER five minutes before departure using their app. It's incredibly straightforward. Even after the train is underway from its origin, you can do that. But I'm not in favour of using seat reservations to suppress the demand and constrain it. This is public transport, it should not be a niche operation for a small number of passengers who book in advance. And, you know, I went through Euston station in London on Sunday evening. And the concourse was absolutely packed with people. Most of them had been at the London Marathon that day, and were dressed from the marathon either as spectators or runners. And they'd known that they were going to do that run months in advance, and they could book their seats on the trains three or four months out. There was another crowd of people at Euston station on Sunday evening, who'd been to see Chelsea play Leeds at football. And there were hundreds and hundreds of them all decked out in Leeds or Chelsea scarves and jackets and jerseys. They'd only known three weeks before that they were going to be playing football in London on that day. If High Speed Two's plans had come to fruition, all the tickets would have been sold at three weeks before, and those football fans simply would have been told that the train service was sold out. So you can't run a public service in that way, in my opinion. You need to provide more capacity, and that's where my plan for 948 carriages comes from. I'm not proposing to build any more railway, and I'm not proposing to run any more trains. I'm just proposing to make the trains longer and use the availability of all the long platforms that we have to provide enough capacity when High Speed Two opens, which will be about in 2040. But the trains are being ordered now, and decisions are being taken now that will commit that future railway to that kind of operation. Your attempt to read my mind wasn't quite successful. I was actually thinking about something else. So you said you've got an existing railway line going along the West Coast from London to Glasgow, which is West Coast Main Line, and now you're building a second piece of infrastructure between London and Birmingham, which is HS2. So what I didn't quite understand is that you said that, well, here's an existing fleet of trains, these 600-something carriages, 684, which is the existing passenger fleet running up and down the West Coast Main Line. And now HS2 is ordering carriages, I believe 432, if I read the numbers correctly, which I would think are about to travel up and down HS2. So what I didn't quite understand was your statement that the HS2 fleet would replace what's currently running on West Coast Main Line. I would have thought they supplemented. Yeah, so the HS2 will join on to the West Coast Main Line near Lichfield. So it'll provide basically an extra pair of tracks from London to Lichfield, which is in the Midlands near Birmingham. And at that point, all the trains from High Speed 2 going to the North West and Scotland will join on to the West Coast Main Line. The ones going to Birmingham will terminate in the city centre at Birmingham Curzon Street Station. So there is no more capacity on the West Coast Main Line north of Lichfield. So the High Speed 2 trains will be one for one. One new train coming off High Speed 2 will replace a train on the West Coast Main Line north of Lichfield. That will free up a lot of capacity south of Lichfield, which is the first hour and a bit out of London, where that capacity, both seat capacity and track capacity, is much needed to support building of new houses in the suburbs of London out to places like Milton Keynes and Bicester, which are 30 minutes or so from the centre of London. So that capacity will be instantly recycled and used to support house building in places like Milton Keynes. So help me out. I'm not that firm with the geography in the UK. If I look from London towards Birmingham, is Lichfield before Birmingham or behind Birmingham? Lichfield is alongside Birmingham. So as the line goes from London to Birmingham, just outside Birmingham, there'll be a junction. Trains can either go into the city centre in Birmingham or they'll carry on to Lichfield and join on to the West Coast Main Line at Lichfield. And from there, carry on up the conventional West Coast Main Line to Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland. Okay. So just to get this right, once HS2 is built, like the infrastructure is built between London and Birmingham, it will have a crossover at Lichfield going from the HS2 infrastructure to the West Coast Main Line infrastructure. And that means trains running from London on the HS2 track will be split at Lichfield, some going into Birmingham-Curzon to terminate and come back, and some going on to the West Coast Main Line to continue towards Manchester, Glasgow and what have you. So did I get this right? Yeah, you did get that right. Okay, good. And the issue that you foresaw was that the part of the trains not going on to Birmingham but going on to West Coast Main Line instead offers less passenger capacity than the trains that would get lost to accommodate those additional HS2 trains. Yeah, yeah. The trains running on the West Coast Main Line at the moment, the Pendolino train has up to 11 carriages. The trains that High Speed 2 have boarded to replace them have got eight carriages. Okay. This operational concept that I just outlined and you confirmed, this is something that will start straight away in 2040 when HS2 is due to become online? It's not yet clear from HS2 what their entry into service plan will be. I would expect it to be first, there will be a service between Birmingham-Curzon Street and Old Oak Common in the outskirts of London. That will be the first bit. The second bit will be extending those services from Old Oak Common into Euston and at the same time connecting up to the West Coast Main Line at Lichfield. There may be a couple of years gap between the two. So Birmingham to London first and then London to Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland second. Okay. And of course, it has to be remembered that when these trains were ordered some six years ago, the network was going to be much bigger. There was going to be a thing called the Y network, which would stretch from London to Leeds and London to Manchester with completely new High Speed 2 infrastructure. But over the last few years, that has been scaled back by government decisions to reduce it to just London to Birmingham. So it's not the same as it was planned back in 2020 when the rolling stock was ordered. Yes, the original plan would have been that you could, if you wanted to go to the north, that you could get at least to Manchester on the HS2 infrastructure with the next stage connecting Birmingham and Manchester. But still, if you wanted to go to Glasgow, then at some point you would have needed to go onto the existing West Coast Main Line unless you wanted to build additional infrastructure all the way up to Glasgow, which I think was never on the cards, definitely not in the original HS2 plan. One of the benefits of the original network was the length of the platforms. So the plan was originally to have London to Manchester with 400 metre platforms. And originally before that, it was intended to go to Leeds with 400 metre platforms. So 400 metre platforms obviously would accommodate a much longer train. But we're not in that now, we're back on the conventional railway. The conventional railway is limited by the platform lengths in Manchester and Glasgow, which is 286 metres. And I favour building a train fleet that will make full advantage of that 286 metres. The fleet that High Speed 2 have currently ordered is only 200 metres long. Now that's fine for London to Birmingham, where coupled up they can become 400 metre trains. And it's ideal for London to Birmingham. But it's not suitable for Manchester and Glasgow, where the trains will be shorter than the existing trains. Hence what I was saying about compulsory seat reservations to suppress and constrain demand to the available seat capacity. There's two types of capacity on a train that you can accommodate. And if you Google the West Coast Main Line, you'll read that the West Coast Main Line is full. Well, it's full of trains, but the seats are not all full. And you can still make many of those trains longer. And that creates seat capacity, which is distinctly different from train capacity. Yeah. So it's not an issue that affects HS2 services from London to Birmingham. So we can put this to one side. It would only affect train services that travel on HS2 to the north to Manchester and Glasgow that move over from HS2 at Lichfield to the West Coast Main Line. And importantly, those trains would take away slots from other existing trains that are currently running on the West Coast Main Line. To me, that doesn't make a lot of sense. And to you, it doesn't make sense either. So if there's an existing service pattern on the West Coast Main Line, which basically fills up the line entirely, what would be the point then to have trains traveling on HS2 and cutting over to West Coast Main Line in the first place? If a line is full, the line is full, right? Well, the line is full. But when HS2 opens between London and Lichfield, you divert approximately 10 trains per hour, a train every six minutes, on average, onto HS2 from the West Coast Main Line. That frees up a lot of capacity between Lichfield and London for freight trains, for passenger trains that stop at places like Milton Keynes. London has a housing crisis. Everybody acknowledges that. The plan is to build more houses in the suburbs of London. Milton Keynes is a big new city, half an hour out of Euston. Under my proposal, Milton Keynes would have a non-stop train to London every 10 minutes, and these would be big trains capable of moving up to 500, 600 people between Milton Keynes and London. You can only do that if you move the long-distance services off the West Coast Main Line onto HS2. So it's not really understood amongst UK society, but Milton Keynes is one of the biggest beneficiaries of HS2, because you clear out the long-distance fast trains, and Milton Keynes has the railway to itself at its beck and call, and you can run a very frequent high-capacity service between Milton Keynes and London, which will enormously benefit Milton Keynes. That's just one example. There are other places closer to London, like Bicester, like Hemel Hempstead. All of these are places where house building is underway and seeking to solve the housing crisis in the London area, where most of the jobs are being created. You know, the government has done great work at trying to create jobs in other cities across the UK, but London is the engine of growth in the UK. If this conversation makes you wanting to go deeper, I run what I believe is the most comprehensive portfolio of online training courses in advanced railway signalling. CBTC, ETCS, high-capacity signalling and more. You find them all at my own training platform dogfranktraining.com. That's dogfranktraining.com. And everything is right there, waiting for you. But now, back to the show. A few important takeaways here. So number one is the importance to have a look at the wider network or to consider the wider network when talking about operational concepts and the consequences from any change that you do in these operational concepts on other parts of the services. So what I'm understanding here, what the risk is, is you improve services closer to London to improve the public transport, public rail transport capacity into London. But at the same time, you are at risk of compromising the long distance travel capacity between London and say Glasgow or Manchester. Yeah, I think you can do all of that. You know, taking the existing 684 trains, which most of which will be life expired in 2040. So they're going to need to be replaced in any scenario. If you replace them with 948 carriages, you get a big increase in capacity on all routes. You get an acceleration of about 20 minutes by going by high speed to as well. So you get faster trains, longer trains, more seats, more cheap fares. What's not to like about that? Now, that isn't how high speed to was originally conceived. It was a much bigger network. But I think the railway industry in the UK and the advocates in government have lost the confidence of UK society when it comes to high speed rail. It's costing a lot more than was originally envisaged. The construction is a lot more disruptive than was originally envisaged. And it's taken longer than was originally envisaged. We've got to regain the trust of UK society. When we built London to Birmingham and got it operating and people can see the benefits, I'm confident that people will want more high speed lines in the same way as happened in other countries in Europe, such as France, where every big city wanted a TGV line. And they had a long term strategy. Yes, they have compulsory seat reservations, but their strategy has been that as demand has grown, they've moved to the next level of capacity, either with longer trains or double deck trains or by building additional tracks. They've never tried to suppress the demand or constrain it using seat reservations for that purpose. So there's a lot of potential in the UK. But first of all, we've got to convince people that high speed rail is an attractive proposition. The UK is a incredibly congested country. It's a tiny place with millions of people living here. Obviously, if you build a high speed railway anywhere in the UK, it's going to be near somebody and it's going to go through populated areas. It's going to be controversial. It's not building a railway through empty fields and open countryside, which is what the French did with the TGV network. Here you're talking about building through the suburbs of London and Birmingham and Manchester. And if it's in a tunnel, it's very expensive. If it's above ground, you're talking about noise issues. You're talking about demolishing houses, making way for the railway. So it's very controversial in the UK and people have got to understand the benefits. And we'll only do that by proving them. Yeah. Yeah. The issue of loss of trust because of poor project performance, I think it's very real, not just in the UK, but elsewhere as well. But I'm just wondering to what extent people will forget or most people will forget. I mean, you recently had a project in the UK, which was similarly unsuccessful during construction, meaning it cost a lot more than anticipated. It took much longer than anticipated. Arguably, the construction may have also been more disruptive than anticipated. I'm talking of Crossrail. But now that the end result of that, which is no longer called Crossrail, it's now called Elizabeth Line, now that this is in service and people like using it and people using it by the probably millions over time, I could imagine that most of them just forget about the woes of the construction. Could you imagine something similar happening with HS2? I mean, the parallels are pretty obvious to the point that they now got the same person in to rescue the project. And I'm pretty convinced he will over time. So HS2 will be built, will get into service. And hopefully I would be very surprised if it didn't improve a lot of things for rail transport in and out of London. So is it just a matter of time until that trust comes back simply by most people being forgetful? The Elizabeth Line is a high capacity metro service across London from the east of London to the west at Heathrow Airport and down to Reading. It operates every few minutes with very long trains, very high capacity on a one section of dedicated railway through underneath the centre of London. HS2 is very different. As a construction project, there's a lot of similarities. And I have huge respect for Mark Wilde, the chief executive of HS2, who's seeking to turn this project round and get it built to a budget and to a time scale. But the operational characteristics of it are very different to the Elizabeth Line. You're talking about long distance passenger journeys. The competition is motorways or flying to Scotland. Rail only has a 20 per cent market share from London to Scotland. I believe we can massively increase that market share with a train that would take an hour less than the current train service to Glasgow from London. So you've got to think through issues around capacity, around seat reservations, around what kind of experience travelling on these trains will be if you're travelling for between 50 minutes and three and a half, four hours. So it's a completely different operational proposition. On the Elizabeth Line, people are positively encouraged to stand. There's a lot of standing room on the Elizabeth Line and a lot of people do stand as the trains go through the peak hours in central London. The aim will not be to have standing on HS2. People will be encouraged to reserve. We need to provide enough capacity for that. So it is a very different proposition, HS2, when it comes to operating it, although the construction in the first place bears some similarities. Yeah, the parallels I drew was basically the public trust into the construction of the infrastructure. And that's really where the stories of Crossrail and HS2 seem to be quite similar. But then over time, my point was, once these railways are in service you think about an extension of the service. Like in London, for example, there was a project idea floating around for a while called Crossrail 2, which is something similar to Crossrail East-West, but being North-South. So now that the Elizabeth Line is in and people see what the benefits are, I think over time they will become less cognizant of the issues that Elizabeth Line had during construction and much more of the benefits that a line like this could bring. So it will increase, I believe, or I could imagine it will increase the public will to support something like building Crossrail 2. Now going to the other kind of railway that we talked about, HS2, I still think it's not completely off the cards to extend HS2 later on beyond Birmingham. I would at least hope so. I mean, there are many stakeholders in Manchester that are fighting tooth and nail pretty much 24-7 to reinstate the political will for an improvement of rail transport north of Birmingham, which is pretty much what you were talking about with that link via Lichfield and onto the West Coast Main Line. But the idea there is certainly to have additional infrastructure providing a relief of the West Coast Main Line, not just to Birmingham, but beyond Birmingham to at least Manchester. Yeah, but the first bit will open first. We can't get away from that. Lots of people will say, well, you know, there are lots of people in the UK rail industry who say, well, HS2 will never be a success unless it goes to Manchester. I don't subscribe to that. We've got to make it a success from day one. Phase one is being built now. It's beginning to look like a railway when you pass by the construction site. So that will come first. Running to Manchester will be years behind that, even in the most optimistic scenario. To build a 400 metre platform under the city centre in Manchester is a massive project, similar to the Crossrail project in London. And it's not even at the planning stage yet, let alone having legislative support to build it. So my point is, let's make the most of what is being built now, phase one, London to Lichfield, London to Birmingham, with these 948 carriages. Let's make the most of it, grow the market, get as many passengers on there as possible. And then the argument to build a new railway line to Manchester will be self supporting in the same way as Elizabeth line has been. But we can't be defeatist and say, well, it's going to be a failure because it doesn't go to Manchester. We have to make the most of it. And we can with longer trains, with the use of ETCS signalling on the West Coast main line, which is planned as part of the renewal of the 1970s signalling on the northern end of the West Coast main line, the trains can go faster. We've already developed and perfected tilting trains in the UK that are common across a lot of Europe now. We can make full use of that. And we can go London to Glasgow, even with phase one of high speed two, we can do that in three hours, 38 minutes, an hour quicker than today using the high speed two phase one infrastructure and the existing West Coast main line. So let's make the best of what is being built and what's there now rather than hoping for future construction. 2040, which is when you expect HS2 to open, still seems to be quite a long time away. I'm looking at lead times for rolling stock procurement and delivery seems to give several years more time before a decision needs to be made. Why do we see the urgency today to convince stakeholders that more trains need to be ordered? Is that something that still can be done later? Or do you think that there are decisions being made today that will make it very hard, if not impossible, to change that later on? Yeah, so the order for the 432 carriages was placed in 2020. So the order has already been placed. The construction is about to start. And there is a discussion going on within high speed two and government about whether to vary that order to make the trains a bit longer, 250 metres longer. They might make some of them 250, or they might make all of them 250. I don't know. That announcement is imminent. Once that decision is taken, that ties the hands of high speed two to a certain solution going forward. Obviously, if all the trains are 250 metres long, you'll never be able to run 400 metre trains between Birmingham and London. Given the billions spent on building 400 metre stations in Birmingham and London, that would be a shocking outcome if the limit of the trains was 250 metres. I want to see this as a strategy that makes the most of the existing West Coast mainline trains retiring in 2040 and has a single strategy that says, right, we'll replace them and we'll build the 432 and we'll go from a higher capacity railway from 2040 when it opens. High speed two was originally always going to have two fleets of trains, one fleet of trains that only went on the high speed lines and one fleet that went on the conventional older lines. All I'm doing is proposing to have two fleets of that kind and have a different fleet for the West Coast mainline, one that makes full use of the 286 metre platforms and can get from London to Glasgow in three hours 38 minutes using tilt capability and ETCS. But more seats on all routes is my objective. What I would think might be a good idea or seems to be a good idea is to have some kind of a modular approach. So, I mean, as you rightly said, if you have a train which is 250 metres long, making this fit a 400 metre long platform is kind of difficult, at least making it longer, unless you have a concept where you can extend the length of a train later by just putting additional carriages in. And this is something that I've seen done elsewhere. So it's absolutely possible if it's planned ahead, if the train builder basically knows that this is an option, which is also part of the contract, and they are prepared to make trains longer later on. The other thing would be a modular approach. If I can answer that, first of all, the contract is already in place and it's always expensive to vary a contract of this nature. The Pendolino fleet that operates on the West Coast mainline today started off eight carriages, became nine carriages, and most of them are now 11 carriages. And that was envisaged as part of the contract and the design of the trains. That's not part of the contract for these 432 vehicles. And going back to trust, I can't see UK government supporting extending that order to have more carriages. So that order is underway. The trains are being designed and will be built in the UK in Derby, Crewe and Newton Aycliffe in County Durham. And that order is being confirmed right now. So we are where we are. We need to make the most of those. But I don't want to fiddle around with existing contracts. There's a big contract to build a depot in Birmingham to maintain these trains. That contract is for 200 meter trains. The trains themselves are 200 meters. We should stick with that and make the most of those trains, in my view. Yes. So that would be the other idea, to have a modular approach where you can couple two 200 meter long trains into a 400 meter long train, which would basically just mean you have to order more of the 200 meter trains. And that could either be an extension of the existing contract that you have or you just create a new contract. But 200 meters is not suitable for Manchester or Glasgow to London. It's a shorter train with 100 less seats than today's trains. So I'm advocating building another order of trains to replace the Pendolinos when their life expired in 2040. And those trains would be 286 meters long. That will fit the platforms in Glasgow and Manchester. You can't extend those platforms. In Glasgow, for example, the platform comes to an abrupt end at the River Clyde and goes onto a bridge over the River Clyde. You'd have to build another bridge over the River Clyde and rebuild that part of Glasgow Central Station if you wanted a 400 meter train in Glasgow. It would be an enormous engineering undertaking. So I advocate 286 meter tilting trains for London to Glasgow and London to Manchester, where the existing platforms can accommodate them. Yeah. I mean, what you're saying, and obviously it's based on a lot of operational knowledge in the UK and probably also based on a lot of operational recognition and cloud of your operational knowledge. And it seems to be very commonsensical, even for somebody with comparably little operational knowledge like myself. So where do you see the obstacles? I would think that a proposal like this should be embraced. People may say, well, we can't afford it at this stage. That could be one possible obstacle. But where do you see potential roadblocks or obstacles to making this proposal a reality? Well, there are several things to bear in mind in that at the moment, the West Coast Main Line intercity operation earns a billion pounds a year in passenger revenue. Given this plan that I've proposed, that could easily double to two billion pounds a year in today's money. We've done that before under Virgin. We can do that again under GBR, I'm quite sure. We need to focus on growing passenger revenue as much as we do focusing about reducing costs. In terms of obstacles, one that is thrown at me regularly is since COVID, working habits are completely different. Business travel to meetings has declined. People don't commute five days a week in the UK. They work from home on Mondays and Fridays. And a lot of meetings occur on Zoom or Teams. And they don't go to London for the meetings in the way that they did. But having said that, leisure travel is booming. And leisure travel in the UK is higher now than it was before COVID. So travel patterns change. They will change. They will change in the life of high speed two. They've changed many times in the life of the 200 year old railway in the UK. And they will change again. If you have enough capacity, you can accommodate those changes in travel patterns, and you can respond to them. And we can get a return on the huge investment of building high speed two in the first place, if we carry enough passengers. If you limit the number of passengers you're going to carry in the way that high speed two are proposing, you won't get a long term return on the investment. You might cover your costs by carrying fewer passengers paying more, but it won't be a successful public transport operation like the Elizabeth line, because you're deliberately constraining the number of passengers. Lastly, I'd point out that we have this Pendolino fleet at the moment, hundreds of carriages ploughing up and down the West Coast mainline. A typical Pendolino does two return trips from London to Glasgow. That's 1600 miles a day. Those trains are going to be retiring around 2040. There's a cost of leasing and maintaining and operating those trains today. I'm proposing a replacement fleet, a smaller fleet to replace that fleet. So those costs are already being met at the moment. And I'm proposing that that cost would be transferred to a new fleet of trains in the future. I would consider all of this to be a classical task for the new GB rail to develop a patronage forecast for the West Coast mainline, north of Birmingham, and to come up with ideas how to accommodate this. If the operational plan envisages to have a significant number of trains traveling from London to Glasgow via HS2 and Lichfield, then I think your proposal should be pretty obvious. So a no brainer, maybe. Yeah. I mean, firstly, I'd say I don't believe patronage forecasts, especially 15 years in the future. I've worked with lots of patronage forecasts. I've beaten many of them, especially when the right commercial incentives have been there. I've gone way ahead of patronage forecasts. Other patronage forecasts have failed. The further into the future you go and the more variables, the more inaccurate they get. And we're still coming out of COVID behaviour in the UK and patronage is fluctuating wildly. It's growing, but the revenue hasn't returned to what it was before because we're not carrying the same amount of business travel that we had before COVID. So I really don't trust those patronage forecasts going into the future. You've got to have a leap of faith and saying we're spending billions on this new railway. What's the best outcome we can have? We need the capacity to provide for a reasonable outcome and then we need to fill that capacity and we need a good team of yield management, marketing, commercial, great frontline people to do all of that. And yes, perhaps it's a no-brainer. You know, when I speak to the frontline staff on the West Coast operation, the train managers, the drivers, the controllers, the station staff, you know, they can't understand why we would provide less capacity with high speed too than that which we have now. It's a bonkers question, isn't it? Surely we should have more capacity and we should provide for that going forward. So yes, I'm confident that my idea has gained significant support already. I had a very warm reception in parliament on it and a lot of interest from people in government. So let's see where that goes in the future. Yeah, I mean, all I can say is I would wish all the best that this proposal actually gets traction, gets done. It sounds very reasonable, it sounds very commonsensical. We can't wait for GBR, by the way. GBR will be up and running by the end of next year. By then the decisions will be taken on the train order. Those decisions will be taken in the next couple of months before GBR is fully up and running. So those decisions of the right decisions have got to be made now, which is why I went public on this. I'm obliged to do that under a set of public service principles called the Nolan principles. If I'd said nothing, I'd have been breaching those principles. I felt obliged to step forward and put my head above the parapet and lost my appointment on account of that, because I believe this was such an important issue for the UK and the UK railway in the next generation. Yeah, it's always, I know from one experience, it's always a bit hard to be the shelter in the desert. It almost doesn't matter how much right you are. If it's not convenient for some people, there may be some pushback or even some repercussions. So let me just wish you all the best for remaining on your bandwagon without falling down and hopefully convincing the right people to bring this forward and to really make the railway the best it can be, because you're absolutely right. If the current plan is just to build London to Birmingham and then think about doing something else, you will have to live with that infrastructure, London to Birmingham for a long time and making the best of it. I think it's not just a nice to have, it's an obligation that the UK rail industry has. Thank you. Thank you, Frank. Very nice to talk to you today. Yeah, likewise, and I hope it was a very insightful discussion to the listeners as well to always look at the bigger picture and to consider the consequences of the planning decisions that you make, even if those planning decisions are presumably on a relatively smaller scale. Very often you have wider implications, which in this case connecting HS2 to the West Coast mainline should be again pretty obvious and going without saying. So thank you very much for your time, Chris. Thank you everybody for listening and I see you again next time. Thank you and bye-bye. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Bye. Hi, it's Doc Frank again. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you like the content, then the best way you make sure that you don't miss out on any of the future episodes, just subscribe to the channel. 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