West Coast progress?

A Virgin Pendolino at Crewe on Saturday 5 April 2008

The West Coast Main Line through Milton Keynes is in disarray yet again this evening. Hardly a week goes by without some incident or a complete blockade over a weekend. Back in March there was the serious incident of two containers being lost from a freight train near Cheddington. Worryingly the fact that the containers were missing was not discovered until the train had reached Rugby! One can only imagine of the serious consequences if this had happened during the evening peak rather than in the early hours of the morning.

Today's disruption is apparently due to signalling problems in the Bletchley area, which is resulting in a much reduced service - two London Midland all-stations services between Euston and Bletchley with a third train an hour running to Northampton while Virgin West Coast is reduced to running one train an hour between Euston and the North. The National Rail site also says that the Bletchley to Bedford branch has been suspended, although London Midland indicates that trains are terminating at and starting from Fenny Stratford. Alternative routes suggested by National Rail include Paddington to Reading for CrossCountry and stations to Brimingham and the North, St Pancras to Leicester for stations to Birmingham or St Pancras to Sheffield for Transpennine services to Manchester! None of those seems a particularly attractive option.

This disruption comes after the WCML through Milton Keynes was closed over the weekend - only on Saturday was a reduced train service operating as far north from Euston as Bletchley, with no trains at all yesterday or Sunday.

A few weeks ago while on my way back from Birmingham New Street services were again disrupted due to signalling problems at Bletchley and at the beginning of April the wires were down at Rugby, again throwing the West Coast timetable into disarray. The most severe delay I witnessed on this occasion was a Glasgow-bound Pendolino, 4 hours late from New Street!

None of this really is good enough. Of course it is expected that things will go wrong from time to time but the number and scale of disruptions recently seems to be a cause for concern. Interestingly these recent spate of incidents all seem to have occurred in or near where engineering works are taking place.

Already I understand that Virgin has pushed back its proposed Very High Frequency (VHF) timetable from December 2008 to May 2009 due to concerns that engineering work will not be completed at Rugby on time. Whether this timetable will prove robust remains to be seen and one can only wonder at the chaos that would ensue if a similar incident occurred as that today at Bletchley when VHF is running. As I understand it the turnarounds will be cut to as a little as 20 minutes, which seems optimistic even assuming everything is running on time! Also, Virgin are short of one Pendolino set, following the write-off of 390033 City of Glasgow following the crash at Grayrigg last February. I've read in the railway press that Virgin want to keep on standby the Class 90-hauled Mk3 set, presumably to cover for a non-available Pendolino.

Work at Milton Keynes seems to be progressing well. My walk home takes me across the WCML to the south of Milton Keynes Central and I noticed this evening that sleepers and rails were being laid on the alignment of the new fast line, which will form a new down fast while the existing down fast will become a reversible loop. Despite these changes it seems unlikely that Milton Keynes will see any additional Pendolino's stopping as the new loop will allow stopping services to be platformed while fast services can proceed unimpeded through the new Platform 6. On the slow lines side, the bay, which is currently Platform 1 will become a through reversible slow, while the current Platform 2 will become the terminating line with a new bay and Platform 2a. This is being provided for the possible extension of Bedford to Bletchley services to Milton Keynes and the possible restoration of through services to Oxford via Bletchley and Bicester. The works at Milton Keynes are due for completion before the end of 2008, with I believe commissioning of the new track and signalling to take place over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Further works are envisaged in the Bletchley area but these are not critical to Virgin's VHF service and will not be completed until August 2010.

In summary it seems that it could be at least 2 years before the major engineering phase of the WCML is completed in the Milton Keynes area and only then might we see a return to a normal level of service seven days a week. One thing which I am particularly hopeful for is the restoration of early Sunday morning services as currently the first southbound train is the ex-0930 from Bletchley. I seem to remember when I first moved to Milton Keynes there was a much better Sunday service than currently, although I don't have a timetable from the period to prove it! Of course, that was before the major phase of works on the West Coast got into full swing.