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Is NR trying to snuff out steam as well as fires?

However, many are worried that the recent restrictions on weekday East Coast steam could lead to a much wider ban.

We have faced such situations before, of course. First there was BR’s total steam ban and then the ‘red routes’ restriction introduced in the Inter City era, but this one is doubly disconcerting as industry insiders fear it may be happening by stealth.

My colleague, chief correspondent Phil Marsh, who used to work for NR and, before that, Railtrack and BR, still has useful contacts within the industry and plans to air his fears in an analysis to be published shortly. The spark that has fired the flames was the series of fires on the East Coast Main Line (reported last month), which brought the evening peak to a standstill on the last busy summer Friday of the year, September 2. NR has since introduced “an indefinite ECML steam ban on weekdays”.

On behalf of The RM, Phil suggested to the NR media team that this was really ‘economic regulation’ and nothing to do with safety, and was met with the comment: “We have to look after the interest of the majority of passengers and have taken the view that this is in the best interests of the railway.”

From this statement, it would appear that the function of the Office of the Rail Regulator (ORR) to avoid abuses of NR’s monopoly in allocating train paths, is possibly being challenged. For under the principles of Open Access enshrined in the Railways Act, any bona fide operator is entitled to operate a train on main line metals, subject of course to the normal checks and restrictions. ORR’s view on the matter is pretty unambiguous: “NR has to accept bids for train paths and must try to validate them.”

A blanket ban punishes operators whose locomotives have never once caused a fire in many decades of safe operation and could even be construed as a restraint of trade if any of the promoters wanted to take the matter further.

As we closed for press, it seemed that NR might be moderating its position slightly, a spokeswoman indicating that bids were still being accepted for weekday steam on the ECML but that if the booking included “long distances on the core ECML”, the route management team would reject the application.

Amid all the furore is the fact that two East Coast Class 91 electrics also failed on September 2, contributing greatly to the chaos that some people in the industry would like you to believe was caused solely by steam. Indeed, NR’s own delay attribution staff are understood to have initially overlooked the electric failures and it wasn’t until October 12 that its York office corrected this position when a spokesperson accepted that the electrics had contributed some 15% of the delay.

East Coast is owned and run by the State and it is thought that political pressure is being put on NR to remedy the poor ECML infrastructure situation, which is having such an impact on performance.

Steam must NOT be made a scapegoat for this!

Nick Pigott
Editor