SSRA CHAIRMAN Sir Alastair Morton announced on August 10 the first fruits of the programme to renegotiate Britain’s passenger franchises. Heads of terms have been agreed with incumbent M40 Trains as preferred operator of Chiltern Railways for up to 20 years in return for a £370m investment programme that the firm will share with Railtrack.
SSRA has also agreed with National Express Group to extend its 10-year Midland Mainline franchise by two years to 2008 in exchange for a package of improvements worth £238m. As part of the deal, £33m originally envisaged as a premium payable to government will now be invested in the franchise.
The new Chiltern franchise to be signed ’in the autumn’ envisages that traffic will double over the 20 years thanks to route extensions, infrastructure upgrading, refurbishment or replacement of the DMU fleet and acquisition of up to 209 more vehicles. Infrastructure improvements are covered in Project Evergreen which includes selected track doubling and quadrupling, resignalling for 160 km/h, and construction of two more platforms at London Marylebone. Journey times will be cut, service frequencies raised, and punctuality and reliability commitments improved, and ATP fitted to all trains.
Chiltern is to serve Stourbridge from 2001, with an hourly Kidderminster - London train from 2002. In the long term, a 29 km line costing £250m may be built from Princes Risborough to Oxford, a major interchange constructed at West Hampstead in north London, the former Great Central line reopened north of Aylesbury towards Leicester, together with the east-west link between Oxford and Bletchley. The franchise is subject to review by SSRA in 2005.
MML investment includes infrastructure works costed at £60m, construction of a £17m East Midlands Parkway station, upgrading of stations (ú22m), and acquisition by May 2006 of 28 four or five-car trains able to run at 200 km/h. Costing £135m, these may be fitted with body tilt and would replace Class 170 DMUs, which NEG would then cascade to its other franchises. Hourly London - Sheffield trains will be extended to Leeds by 2004. MML envisages replacing its IC125 High Speed Trains by 2008.
