Last month, October 2019, Serco, the operator of the Caledonian Sleeper service, finally managed to get their new fleet of carriages into service. As part of the franchise, they committed to replacing the BR-built Mk3s with a fleet of 75 new carriages from a builder in Spain – the first new carriages for the UK in thirty years! There are five different variations providing a mixture of sleeping cabins, seats and dining facilities. Six nights a week, there are two departures from London Euston, each comprising 16 carriages. The lowland service splits at Carstairs with 8 carriages going respectively to Glasgow and Edinburgh. The highland service splits at Edinburgh into portions for Fort William, Inverness and Aberdeen. Southbound services do the same in reverse. So that requires 64 carriages on any given night, leaving 11 spare vehicles.
Motive power for these trains are a fleet of seven electric class 92 locomotives. These were built by BR in the nineties for hauling freight to European destinations and are highly complex machines, running on every voltage known to man. For services further north, on the non-electrified lines of the Highlands, a fleet of six class 73 locos have been refurbished and re-engined for the job. These are electro-diesel locomotives built between 1962 and 1967 for use on the Southern Region. Brand new carriages, ancient locomotives! Not that we want to criticise the 73s. Of the 49 built only 10 have been dismantled with the rest remaining in various forms of service.
I said 'finally'. These carriages were scheduled to enter service in Spring 2018. Failure after failure and problems in testing meant that the lowland carriages didn't enter service until Spring 2019. Even then the problems continued with booking errors, key cards denying access to cabins, showers and toilets not working, no food, cold coffee and so on. Too few crew members coping with too many problems became so stressed that in July they voted for strike action due to 'intolerable' and 'appalling' working conditions.
More worrying is the fact that the brakes do not always work! A part of the requirement for a restful nocturnal journey is the assurance that the train will stop at the appropriate places, ensuring safe arrival. On June the brakes on a northbound service were applied so severely that the wheels locked up, creating 'flat' tyres. This means that the wheels are no longer round and thus destroying any idea of a peaceful night's sleep. So the sleepers, now wide awake, were decanted onto Stafford station and bussed to Glasgow. There were no further services for a few days whilst the stock was repaired. On the 1st August, the Edinburgh portion failed to stop at Edinburgh. The brakes failed to deploy and the train missed the station by a third of a mile. A quick-thinking 'train manager' (new-speak for 'guard') realised that something was amiss and saved the night. Imagine if that had happened at Glasgow Central. That would have been interesting. Caledonian passengers delivered directly to the offices and shops of Gordon Street, St Vincent Street, George Street, Regent Street, Sauchiehall Street... On the 8th of August, after a successful coupling of the two halves at Carstairs, the southbound service was delayed for an hour at Carlisle. Passengers were subsequently hauled from their beds at Preston when the service was cancelled and told to make their own way to London at their own expense, as other train operators were refusing to accept CS tickets. To be fair, Network Rail-caused problems added to the misery that night, but it is nevertheless symptomatic of an industry in crisis. Can you imagine chairing a business meeting having spent the entire night, not in a cosy bed, but stuck on a bus?
A few days ago, on Thursday morning, an overhead cable snapped somewhere between Preston and Lancaster. The immediate aftermath of that was predictably chaotic. Trains requiring juice from above simply stopped. How does one remove an electric-powered train when there is no electricity and the operators have no diesel alternatives and every operator's new fleet is incompatible with everyone else's? But that was in the morning – and for the rest of the day – passengers stranded for up to eight hours and being granted permission to relieve nature lineside! That night, all four sleeper services were cancelled. In the days of BR, they would have been diverted around the obstruction. A diesel loco would have been attached at Carlisle and the train sent down the Settle and Carlisle line, rejoining its usual route further south (and vice-versa). The timings are usually slack enough that passengers would have been blissfully unaware of the additional miles. But BR could do that. They owned the whole network, all the locomotives and all the rolling stock. Serco doesn't. They have use of a small fleet of GBRf-owned electric locomotives and when the power cuts out, so do their services.
What has gone wrong? That's a huge question beyond the scope of a small article and lightweight such as this. But this is what occurs to me. British railways have been churning out carriages by the thousands for two hundred years, give or take a few. A carriage is a relatively simple vehicle. It is a metal box with windows and doors. It has wheels with brakes. It needs internal lighting and heating (usually powered by the loco), seats and beds, showers... Think of the millions of caravans that can be seen clogging the roads every summer. Apart from size, there is little difference by the way of functionality. These are huge caravans on eight wheels. How can it be so hard to get it right – at two million quid each? Built in Spain, tested in Czechia and limping around Britain.
It seems that with the privatisation of BR and its subsequent fragmentation into a myriad pieces, that two centuries of experience, knowledge and natural evolution really has been thrown away. With every new project, they really are reinventing wheels.
And Serco? Who are they? They run prisons, facilities, hospitals, housing. Very, very badly, according to the RMT union. That qualifies them to run trains where passengers are clearly undistinguished from felons, victims, patients and tenants and charged up to £470 in each direction for the privilege. Single travellers can no longer share a cabin (and therefore the cost) with a stranger. They have to have a cabin to themselves. I remember when berths were available from £19 each way. There weren't many available and you had to be very quick and be prepared to travel on unpopular evenings, but at least they were an affordable and appealing option. Alas all a thing of the past. Everything is now classed as luxury cos luxury sells!
Finally, how has this all been financed? This is where it gets rather murky. Of the £150m it seems that £60m has come from the Scottish Government and £50m from the British Government. The remaining £40m or so? Well, it seems that the carriage fleet is owned by Beacon Rail, a Luxembourg-based rail leasing company. This in turn is owned by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, a subsidiary of a global mega-bank. These carriages are likely to have a life-span of 30 to 40 years. The travelling public will, no doubt, pay for them over and over again.
But at least sleeper services still run and someone's money has been invested to ensure this for a few more years. That's the positive side. There is something marvellously romantic about boarding a train in the capital and waking up to snow-clad mountains, red deer and a large breakfast of kedgeree and porrage. The first sleeper service was introduced by North British Railway in 1873, swiftly followed by their fierce competitor Caledonian Railway. That's nearly 150 years of practice. If only they could remember what to do. I wonder what will happen to the old mk3 stock, which is still incredibly pleasurable to travel – unlike the diabolical and ubiquitous DMU's that infest the network? The Scottish Government has suggested a Glasgow to Thurso/Wick service. More likely, they will end up variously in scrap yards and in preservation.
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