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Britons groan as heat increases ire over railways

Complaining about their rail system has long been somewhat of a national pastime for Britons.

But with the recent heatwave wreaking havoc on the railways, sweaty passengers are gazing ever more jealously at their European cousins, wondering how the nation that pioneered train travel could end up with such a dilapidated network.

Widespread delays have been caused by speed restrictions imposed across much of Britain's rail network amid fears a current heatwave could buckle tracks.

About 100 unfortunate passengers were stuck in searing heat on a commuter train for nine hours last week for a journey of just 110km into London.

Experts blame decades of under-investment coupled with a botched privatisation of the then-nationalised British Rail in 1996.

This initiative put rail services into the hands of a series of different private firms, with another company, Railtrack, responsible for handing out contracts to maintain tracks, stations and other infrastructure.

After problems including a string of fatal rail crashes, Railtrack was put into receivership in 2001 with a new, non-profit firm called Network Rail obliged to pick up the pieces.

With track administration in chaos, as track temperatures soared Network Rail has had little real idea of where any dangerous sections of track might be, said rail historian Terry Gourvish, director of the Business History Unit at the London School of Economics.

"Not all the track is going to expand unsafely in the heat. Some of it will, depending on when it was put down, how it was put down and what state it's in," said Gourvish, author of a series of books on British railways.

"The difficulty is, with Network Rail inheriting this problem from Railtrack they are not sure because they have not got a full inventory of the state of the track everywhere, because it has been so fragmented."

Hot weather is hardly a new worry, noted independent rail consultant and safety expert Peter Rayner, formerly a senior British Rail manager.

"The problem has always been here and it was managed," he said. "The problem was, when the government broke the railways up into a muddle, Railtrack did away with the in-house engineering skills and hired all sort of contractors."

Another complaint among Britain's rail passengers is that even when they are running properly, trains are embarrassingly slow compared to their European counterparts.

At the end of last month, a train run by cross-Channel firm Eurostar smashed the British rail speed record, hitting 334.7km per hour on a test section of a new high-speed line linking London with the Channel Tunnel.

Although hailed as "a landmark" by Eurostar, such speeds are the norm on France's TGV rail network.

Britain's difficulty, the experts say, is that virtually all its rail lines follow routes mapped out many decades ago and contain curves which cannot be negotiated at high speed.

"The thing with the French is that they have been much more anxious to build new lines, and we haven't really got any which are completely new," said Gourvish. "We've always had a problem with this, because we prefer to build motorways and we haven't got as much room as the French."

Yet not long ago, Britain had a real chance to stay at the forefront of rail technology through the ill-fated Advanced Passenger Train, or APT.

First devised in the late 1970s, the APT used cutting-edge technology to tilt carriages as they turned corners, allowing a much higher speed to be maintained.

Despite the potential benefits, teething troubles and negative press coverage claiming that the tilting technology made passengers feel sick saw the APT make only a few commercial outings before being scrapped.

"The APT was so ahead of its time," said Gourvish. "It's a bit like Britain altogether. We are very good at inventing things but somehow we don't seem to develop these things commercially."
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