It's interesting to note the trend in rail passenger numbers. From 1950 until 1961 they were fairly static at a little over 1,000 million journeys per annum. That was on a network of Victorian infrastructure still powered by a lot of coal. There was a lot more freight using all the tracks, many of which were primarily or only used for that purpose. Journey times weren't very quick except on a few main lines.
By 1982, the lowest point, passenger numbers had collapsed and rail looked to be dying as numbers had fallen to a little over 600 million annual journeys. Rearguard attitudes prevailed. Decisions made at that times led to closures of branch lines and the simplification of layouts to cope with the perceived future demand. Reduced track capacity led to sales of railway land.
Brilliant. Car ownership continued to rise and an increasingly university educated population got used to commuting much longer distances.
Surprise, surprise, railways didn't die! By 2003 passenger numbers had recovered, against most predictions of the early 1980 period, and cracked the 1,000 million once again. Latest figures show steady growth and 1,800 million journeys should be achieved soon.
However, the upward trend has slowed down, and that's our problem. The big numbers are being carried in the London commuting belt and mainlines to London. Then commuting in and around a relatively small area to and between our crowded big cities. Even here the percentage of total journeys made by rail is relatively small.
An increase in rail passenger numbers of about 10% to 2,000 million per annum is possible by 2025 on the present network with more carriages and the modest infrastucture work currently under way. That needs platform 15/16 type schemes completing soon too.
To make significant further progress we'll need to think a lot bigger. HS2 is small scale to what will be needed to get more onto rails. Crossrail illustrates the mind boggling costs and time it will take.
However this crowded island can only move forward with hugely expensive new underground lines beneath the populations requiring services. Patching up all this decaying Victorian brickwork and signalling on tortuously restricted tracks threaded through crowded suburbs won't work to produce an effective mass transit system for the future.
This isn't new thinking. London pioneered a major underground network over 100 years ago (a system that also suffers from 21st century congestion) and the Swiss and Norwegians will tunnel anywhere, both in cities and country.
We need the will and the cash to do it. Is it what the nation wants? How much and how quickly could it be done?
It's over 40 years since the Tyneside Metro constructed the only new urban rail tracks below a British city outside London , and that's quite modest. Tramways have followed but all surface city solutions get congested somewhere.
The car has such a big advantage on flexibility of timing and route. To tempt motorists onto trains a massive increase in station car parking is needed. Where? There's no nearby land. Over and under the tracks?
HS2 won't solve the urban rail needs. We need a very large budget to shift much more traffic onto rails. Rail can take more, but cars take so much space the lobby for more road expenditures is liable to win above rail.
