GWML Electification

[PenrithBeacon]

It's not. Have a look at the 4 track sections of the WCML and you will see portal style gantries every bit as intrusive as the GWML ones.  

...

With respect the portal gantries over the WCML are less intrusive than those over the GWML, although there are exceptions.

 

The WCML gantry beams are made from an open 'Warren Truss' design which is inherently more 'open' than the sheet metal beams, albeit with lightening holes, of the GWML and also the vertical pylons finish flush with the top of the beams. On the GWML design the pylons continue way above the beams, un-necessarily so, to the detriment of their appearance and at considerable additional cost. The photo below shows the point.

 

I can understand the need for robust design, I would not advocate the use of the ECML design, it was a mistake, but if NR had adopted the original BR(M) design it would have saved a lot of money and had a robust design to boot.

 

This project is way over budget and timescale; NR is incompetent and should be abolished. Its infrastructure functions ought to be incorporated into the TOC's franchises.

 

 

Regards

[Reorte]

This project is way over budget and timescale; NR is incompetent and should be abolished. Its infrastructure functions ought to be incorporated into the TOC's franchises.

With changing franchises incorporating infrastructre functions will just mean that nothing long-term will ever get done.

 

re: looks, whilst I'll never like the look of any OHLE some of the newer bits elsewhere are an improvement, although we're talking double track locations so no need for gantries.

[jamie92208]

Perhaps in this era of renewables and green things we should return to an earlier design of OHLE.

Remove tounge from cheek and run for cover.

 

Jamie

 

[Zomboid]

I imagine that if the WCML gantry design would have been cheaper to deliver the required performance, that is what what would have been installed.

As for abolishing NR, maybe there's a case for that (not my personal view), but how would the electrification have gone any differently if the name above the door had been "First Great Western"?

[phil-b259]

NR is incompetent and should be abolished. Its infrastructure functions ought to be incorporated into the TOC's franchises.

I imagine that if the WCML gantry design would have been cheaper to deliver the required performance, that is what what would have been installed.

As for abolishing NR, maybe there's a case for that (not my personal view), but how would the electrification have gone any differently if the name above the door had been "First Great Western"?

Not much. I fear that not for the first time people are ignoring the facts of the matter and looking for quick fixes. While merging NR with the TOCs has some benefits, it also has considerable downsides - EU vertical separation and the views of Open Acces and FOCs to name but three.

 

After much debate on here and valuable contributions from former Railwaymen it is reasonable to conclude that the problems with the GWML project broadly speaking are thus

 

(1) A national shortage of OHLE (and to a lesser extent signalling) designers, installers and testers

(2) A de-facto policy pursued by Labour of not undertaking any electrification thus providing no incentive for Railtrack, Contractors or NR to retain large scale OHLE skills

(3) The loss of much valuable information (both on paper and in people's heads) upon privatisation as various bits got sold off bought out by others, refused to pay for document storage, went bust, etc

(4) No one body within the industry with the 'balls' so to speak to effectively say to Ministers "we cannot do all this electrification in the timeframes you have set due to points 1-3", particulatly as all parties are heavily reliant on Ministers for the industry structure (and by extension their companies) to remain intact.

(5) A over reliance on project planning software which seems to not be up to the task.

(6) Some basic but fundamental errors / assumptions made as to how long / expensive / difficult certain things (be they physical like sinking piles) or procedural (arranging road closures for bridge works) would take

(7) Strained lines of communication and the nature of the privatised industry which means the ability to react quickly and replan things quickly / redeploy resources when hold ups occur with certain tasks.

(8 ) A much greater emphasis on staff safety than was the case in BR with the net result that simply accessing the track requires far more detailed planning, processes to be gone through, equipment to be provided, etc.

 

It makes NO DIFFERANCE whose 'name' is over the door for most of these failures and as such trying to blame them ALL on NR is plain wrong and lazy tabloid style journalism of the worts order.- First group, or indeed DB would have had EXACTLY the same problems as NR because when you get down to the absolute basics a large part of the underlying reasons go back decades and have their roots in Government policy. For example you might well have the most brilliant OHLE designers in the world, but if they do not know that the embankments have been pumped full of grout decades earlier because there is nobody /no paperwork to tell them it's hardly the designers fault if the installttion methods run into problems. Yes a good designer / planner would hopefully mitigate the effects as quickly as possible but they cannot be held responsible for producing a initial bad design / installation plan if they were not provided with the correct information at the outset.

Edited December 19, 2015 by phil-b259

[The Stationmaster]

That's rather subjective, something doesn't have to stand out a lot to change the whole feel of a place. It's not helped that some people appear to regard that as utterly unimportant and start sneering at anyone with different values.

Bound to be subjective in some respects but not so in others - it all depends on your viewpoint (not point of view) when you see it or spend time looking at it.  In many respects while it is stark and jarring is no more so on my sensibilities than the appalling lineside jungle which has increasingly blighted the GWML and the rest of our rail network over the past decade and more - if I had my way I'd clear fell the lot of it.  Simple fact is that from some viewpoints the new ohle is not particularly visually obtrusive with the exception of the tall masts - but they in turn aren't that much different from those used elsewhere in recent times.

With respect the portal gantries over the WCML are less intrusive than those over the GWML, although there are exceptions.

 

The WCML gantry beams are made from an open 'Warren Truss' design which is inherently more 'open' than the sheet metal beams, albeit with lightening holes, of the GWML and also the vertical pylons finish flush with the top of the beams. On the GWML design the pylons continue way above the beams, un-necessarily so, to the detriment of their appearance and at considerable additional cost. The photo below shows the point.

 

I can understand the need for robust design, I would not advocate the use of the ECML design, it was a mistake, but if NR had adopted the original BR(M) design it would have saved a lot of money and had a robust design to boot.

 

This project is way over budget and timescale; NR is incompetent and should be abolished. Its infrastructure functions ought to be incorporated into the TOC's franchises.

 

66 at Headstone.jpg

 

Regards

 

The interesting thing being that some of the structures in the vicinity of Reading are very similar to the design used on the WSML and on other schemes.

 

Incidentally some of the gantry structures used on the original LMR Mk1 25kv electrification works (the Styal Loop) use considerably deeper girders, albeit of trussed pattern, than those being used on the GWML but the design was simplified to reduce costs once the main LMR scheme got underway.  I'm not sure if it still applies since recent updating but at one stage the Styal Loop catenary was some of the 'stiffest' in use anywhere on BR and would in fact have been the only BR catenary capable of operating without modification (of either catenary or train) with a Eurostar running at 125 mph or faster (not that you could go that fast on the Styal Loop of course).  

 

What the latest design seems to do is get back to the technical capability of the earlier LMR/BR design.

[RJS1977]

.  I'm not sure if it still applies since recent updating but at one stage the Styal Loop catenary was some of the 'stiffest' in use anywhere on BR and would in fact have been the only BR catenary capable of operating without modification (of either catenary or train) with a Eurostar running at 125 mph or faster (not that you could go that fast on the Styal Loop of course).  

 

What the latest design seems to do is get back to the technical capability of the earlier LMR/BR design.

 

Interesting to read as the Styal Loop was my local line for the first 20 years of my life - but I'm not sure about the "Eurostar at 125mph" bit - as GNER hired in a Eurostar set for a while, presumably the ECML can handle one at 125mph - or was its speed limited?

[jamie92208]

Reading the above posts it seems that early experience on the Styal loop line lead to lighter weight structures being used on the remaining LMR lines.  I have just been reading a book about the LBSCR suburban electrification and exactly the same thing happened there with the second scheme (I think it was the route to Crystal Palace) using lighter  structures than the initial South London line scheme.   I presume that the engineers who did the Styal loop drew on the experience of the relatively recently completed Woodhead route, albeit that that used much heavier cabling, and also the experimental structures erected at Scale Hall between Lancaster and Morecambe in 1955.  

 

The Weaver Junction/Glasgow scheme of 1974 used lighter weight structures but doesn't seem to have the same fragility as the ECML.  I know that they used the man who had maintained the Lancaster/Morecambe/Heysham overhead to advise on the design of the Weaver Junction/Glasgow structures and their placement.  It looks almost certain that it is the lack of experienced design engineers combined with deep local knowledge that has been one of the main causes of the problems on the GWML.  This shows yet again the folly of short term thinking that leads to a lack of corporate memory

 

Jamie

Edited December 19, 2015 by jamie92208

[The Stationmaster]

Interesting to read as the Styal Loop was my local line for the first 20 years of my life - but I'm not sure about the "Eurostar at 125mph" bit - as GNER hired in a Eurostar set for a while, presumably the ECML can handle one at 125mph - or was its speed limited?

If a Eurostar had run on the ECML at 125 mph it would have brought down a considerable amount of contact and catenary wire, and possibly some headspans before it could be stopped.  The tests found the ECML overhead did some very awkward things as a fast moving train went by with the contact wire moving vertically up & down through at least 6 inches following the passage of the leading pantograph.  If the second pan had encountered that sort of movement in the contact wire it would have de-wired and mayhem would have resulted.

 

Hence major redesign of the 'BR pantograph' on Regional Eurostars plus the need to restrict their speed even after the redesign.  Some SNCf engineers didn't believe the data when it was presented to them in connection with the redesign and they were amazed that the ECML ohle couldn't stand the uplift forces the pans were producing - it simply wasn't stiff enough to resist.

[david.hill64]

Hence major redesign of the 'BR pantograph' on Regional Eurostars plus the need to restrict their speed even after the redesign.  Some SNCf engineers didn't believe the data when it was presented to them in connection with the redesign and they were amazed that the ECML ohle couldn't stand the uplift forces the pans were producing - it simply wasn't stiff enough to resist.

 

Agreed: Brecknell Willis pans have aerofoils to reduce the uplift that occurs as speed increases. The standard UIC approach had been to accept that this force increase happens and design the OHLE accordingly.

 

BR had world leading dynamics engineers who were able to design cost-effective solutions. Agreed that the lightweight OHLE isn't as robust as other designs but it enabled East Coast electrification to be done quickly and at a cheap price. Just look at Roger Ford's recent analyses. 

 

At the wheel-rail interface it was correctly concluded that it was cheaper to have larger tolerances on track geometry and design vehicle suspensions accordingly. When the mark 4 coach came along - with its simple requirement that ride at 140mph should be no worse than that of an HST at 125mph, the SIG engineers could not believe how well HSTs rode on 'BR Normal' track. That was never really resolved and not helped by the trains always running below design speed. UIC wagons regularly bounced off the West Coast main line where BR wagons coped OK on track that was in BR tolerance.

 

Unfortunately the BR approach cannot work any longer and there is an argument that it was short sighted.

[Arun Sharma]

David - Probably being thick here but the meanings of "UIC" and "SIG" currently escape me - Clarification please?

[jamie92208]

David - Probably being thick here but the meanings of "UIC" and "SIG" currently escape me - Clarification please?

UIC is the International Union of Railways (Chemin de fer) which sets standards in Europe.

SIG is the swiss engineering company that built the bogies for the Mark4 stock on the ECML.

 

By the way I couldn't agree more about the good riding of the Mk3 coaches, though I believe that some of that is due to the superb lightweight bodyshell which has a different natural resonant frequency to the Mk4 which is much stiffer.

 

Jamie

[PenrithBeacon]

...

This shows yet again the folly of short term thinking that leads to a lack of corporate memory

 

Jamie

Corporate memory comes from writing stuff down in manuals not simply relying on somebody remembering. That somebody can fall under a bus, can be promoted to post and a location where he is effectively unavailable or may retire. Relying on gurus is all very 1960s but it isn't the way a modern business can run. I suspect that the government, when it decided to electrify the GMWL, actually thought that NR did have the records

 

I don't know whether BR did record what they did (and why) and RT or NR threw it all away, but I do hope, as a taxpayer, that NR do recording (what, where, why and when) for the future.

 

Regards

[black and decker boy]

 

 

By the way I couldn't agree more about the good riding of the Mk3 coaches, though I believe that some of that is due to the superb lightweight bodyshell which has a different natural resonant frequency to the Mk4 which is much stiffer.

 

Jamie

From what I remember from Roger Fords scribblings, it is the opposite. The steel bodied MK3 is a lot stiffer than the aluminium Mk4 hence the difference. Apparently, the SIG bogie trialled under the MK3 was most excellent so it surprised BR when the MK4 was so bad.

[Captain Kernow]

Corporate memory comes from writing stuff down in manuals not simply relying on somebody remembering. That somebody can fall under a bus, can be promoted to post and a location where he is effectively unavailable or may retire. Relying on gurus is all very 1960s but it isn't the way a modern business can run. I suspect that the government, when it decided to electrify the GMWL, actually thought that NR did have the records

 

I don't know whether BR did record what they did (and why) and RT or NR threw it all away, but I do hope, as a taxpayer, that NR do recording (what, where, why and when) for the future.

 

Regards

From what I can recall personally of the time, but more importantly from the postings of some on here with more involvement (and probably better memories as well), most, if not all, of any 'throwing out of records' took place fairly on in the days of Railtrack.

[The Stationmaster]

Corporate memory comes from writing stuff down in manuals not simply relying on somebody remembering. That somebody can fall under a bus, can be promoted to post and a location where he is effectively unavailable or may retire. Relying on gurus is all very 1960s but it isn't the way a modern business can run. I suspect that the government, when it decided to electrify the GMWL, actually thought that NR did have the records

 

I don't know whether BR did record what they did (and why) and RT or NR threw it all away, but I do hope, as a taxpayer, that NR do recording (what, where, why and when) for the future.

 

Regards

The records - if they still existed - were privatised as they went with the various engineering (civil and S&T) privatisations while what remained in Railtrack hands was often 'trimmed' in order to save storage costs.  Early this century when I was working for a signal engineering company I carried out a major assessment of all signals on the former WR potentially subject to  'ding-ding and away' SPADS in order to produce mitigation recommendations.  I was able to do the vast majority of the work from records held by the company I was working for and had little need to look at stuff held by NR (who in fact had far fewer of the necessary drawings in any case) - and the people I was working for had built their own archive of drawings with much acquired from earlier contract work.

 

And in one very technical area (circuit drawings) they had more than anyone else in the country and had become the official custodians of that particular design standard - NR had nothing except for anything held locally by Techs.

 

The WR (and maybe other Regions) had comprehensive track condition records for every inch of running line on the Region - they all went to the private companies who took over, along with a lot of other records, and within 18 months a lot of it was being dumped as 'not needed and too expensive to store'.

[Northroader]

The records of track maintenance kept by BR were scrapped by Railtrack after handover. One of my acquaintances likened it to "year zero" under Pol Pot. The result, as we all know, was Hatfield.

Edited December 22, 2015 by Northroader

[Peter Kazmierczak]

Were none of these lost records offered to the NRM?

 

Or were they considered as being of a commercially sensitive nature and thus binned?

[phil-b259]

Roger Fords latest preview is online and is well worth a read, particularly the bits relating to all those reports the Government has comissioned in the past few months, one of which is particularly scathing of the ORRs failure to stop NR and the DfT promising they could do things when they couldn't

However, never fear because we are now going to have yet more Government reports to tell us why the ORR got it wrong, or as Roger puts it:-

"But while ORR is under fire, don’t forget that HS1 Chief Executive Nicola Show is leading another review for DfT, this time on the future structure and financing of NR. On top of all this, a separate DfT ‘project’ (not a ‘Review’ note) was launched on 10 December. This will ‘fundamentally consider’ the roles and responsibilities of ORR ‘to ensure they remain appropriate.

Now these two reviews are going to drag in a lot of people who could do without this distraction from their day job of running the railway and you have to question their value. While Nicola assures me that she will determine structure first, then funding, we all know that the government’s real expectation is that her Review will find a way to get NR’s debt off the Treasury’s books.

Which means that the ‘ORR Project’, is meaningless until the ownership of NR is determined. If NR remains part of the Government, the economic role of ORR is simply protecting the interests of passenger and freight operators, adjudicating on paths etc"

Why does the phrase "rearranging deckchairs" spring to mind.

He is also pretty unimpressed with the IEP

"It is eight years since procurement started, since when DfT has spent over £30 million on consultancy. The GWR trains will cost roughly twice as much as a Pendolino to lease. For that you might expect to get – to combine two phrases normally banned from this column – a world class passenger experience and certainly a step up from the Mk 3 coach interiors on Great Western.

As we say, the Class 800 will do the job, but with an austere ambience for an age of austerity which is down to DfT, not Hitachi. It is unlikely that DfT will allow any change to the GWR interiors until the replacement franchise in 2019. Whether Virgin will be able to create the ‘wow!’ factor on the East Coast Main Line remains to be seen."


http://live.ezezine.com/ezine/archives/759/759-2015.12.21.04.00.archive.txt

Edited December 21, 2015 by phil-b259

[Herbert Nigel]

From personal experience, within weeks of the creation of Railtrack, the entire records section of the previous Divisional Civil Engineer's office in which I worked had new locks on the doors, keys held by Railtrack and ourselves, as "contractors," denied access. Within a few more weeks a group of people describing themselves as "Railtrack assessors" ( none of whom we'd ever seen before or since) moved in. At the same time large rubbish skips appeared in the car park to the rear and rapidly filled, being removed and replaced with empties on a daily basis! A couple of van loads were removed, allegedly containing documents which "may" be of interest to the NRM and a couple more to Railtrack (we eventually persuaded one of these strangers to conversation - this was what she told us). The rest? Well they were bog standard scrap skips that were filled and removed. A colleague and I were warned off for trying to check them for material of interest as all documents were "property of Railtrack".

Sad but true.

[Arun Sharma]

What Herbert Nigel writes makes sense if one looks at Railtrack as being set up to be essentially a collector of track access receipts from TOCs [which would then have been passed to the Govt. and/or shareholders]. On that basis, any one with any engineering background could well have been made effectively redundant as all the actual engineering was being done by almost self-supervising sub-contractors - presuming that BR's engineers had gone to work for these folk. One might imagine that some of these track engineering companies would have found senior experienced BR staff rather more expensive than their more junior colleagues and perhaps may not have chosen their personnel as wisely as they could have done. It follows that retaining anything but currently "live" engineering documentation would have seemed pointless to the financiers who effectively ran Railtrack. The results of removing senior "hands-on" engineers from the Railtrack supervisory system very possibly contributed to infrastructure failings and incidents.

Edited December 21, 2015 by ted675

[Siberian Snooper]

Been down that road when the dockyard was privatised, skip loads of specialist tooling and difficult to get stores scrapped, because of the space it took up, until the pidgeons came home to roost and contract dates were being missed. It all seems to be part and parcel of the privatisation process.

[jjb1970]

Corporate knowledge is a slippery thing and many otherwise very competent companies drop colossal klangers when it comes to retention of corporate knowledge. Part of it is loss of experience, no matter how well things are recorded in writing an awful lot of the real corporate knowledge tends to stay firmly in the minds of people who have learned a lot of hard lessons in real time. And even when records are not disposed of, to be of value people have to both know they exist and know where to find them and sadly too often neither of those conditions are met. A few years ago when I was involved in a new build power plant project I happened to find out accidentally that a series of videos had been made of engineers being interviewed about learning experiences from the last generation of new power plant construction. I did some digging and found quite a few people who said "oh, those were really good, everybody should watch them but I haven't seen them for ages" and nobody in the company was ever able to get hold of them for me. So after a really great initiative it came to nought as they were lost, and I'm guessing part of the reason they were lost was because the people who would have appreciated them were not made aware of their existence.

[Captain Kernow]

From personal experience, within weeks of the creation of Railtrack, the entire records section of the previous Divisional Civil Engineer's office in which I worked had new locks on the doors, keys held by Railtrack and ourselves, as "contractors," denied access. Within a few more weeks a group of people describing themselves as "Railtrack assessors" ( none of whom we'd ever seen before or since) moved in. At the same time large rubbish skips appeared in the car park to the rear and rapidly filled, being removed and replaced with empties on a daily basis! A couple of van loads were removed, allegedly containing documents which "may" be of interest to the NRM and a couple more to Railtrack (we eventually persuaded one of these strangers to conversation - this was what she told us). The rest? Well they were bog standard scrap skips that were filled and removed. A colleague and I were warned off for trying to check them for material of interest as all documents were "property of Railtrack".

Sad but true.

Utterly criminal in my view.

 

I quickly formed the view in the early days of Railtrack that those with any degree of real 'power' didn't think that 'working the detail' was sexy enough for them. Not 'cool' enough for them, so they ignored it accordingly. I was always happy to be unfashionable, even in those dark, far off days, which we are well rid of.

[Zomboid]

Utterly criminal in my view.

 

I quickly formed the view in the early days of Railtrack that those with any degree of real 'power' didn't think that 'working the detail' was sexy enough for them. Not 'cool' enough for them, so they ignored it accordingly. I was always happy to be unfashionable, even in those dark, far off days, which we are well rid of.

I wouldn't defend the binning of records, but I can see why the decision was taken - Railtrack wasn't supposed to have that kind of capability, it was intended to be essentially an uninformed client (much like how most of us have only a rudimentary understanding of how our cars/ computers/ OLED TVs actually work, beyond the controls).

I don't need the writing schematic for my TV, if it breaks I'll either get a new one or call in someone who understands it and can fix it.

Of course with hindsight it's hard to imagine a worse idea than Railtrack, but I can see how the mistake was made..