Midlands Rail Hub – An Autumn Stocktake

June’s Comprehensive Spending Review brought positive news for the railway in the Midlands – confirmation of (much) more money to develop Midlands Rail Hub. Now the dust has settled, the children are back to school, and the supermarkets are starting to stock advent calendars, it’s a good time to reflect on what’s now committed and what we still need to do moving forward.

But first, a quick recap on the nub of the issue. Birmingham New Street is effectively full and can’t accept any additional trains. While the rebuild of the station’s concourse in the 2010s was, of course, welcomed, bringing a much-improved passenger experience, the upgrades didn’t provide any space for additional trains. While there are lots of platforms at New Street, as regular users will know, the real constraints are the station’s approaches. Most are used by a mixture of local, regional and long-distance trains, sometimes with freight trains in that mix too. This mixture makes it really, really, difficult to add more trains, certainly without making the whole railway much less reliable.

I’ve fallen into the old trap here and immediately launched into the transport problem. This is about much more than transport. Taking a step back, while the Midlands has some sectors of employment that are booming, and always will do, productivity – a measure of economic output – remains stubbornly below the national average. This isn’t just a Birmingham ‘thing,’ as the same is true across the Midlands. ‘Access to opportunity,’ although sounding a bit like jargon, is also poor in parts of the Midlands. In fact, the Midlands has over 40% of all the country’s ‘social mobility cold spots’ – these are the worst places nationally where people aren’t able to access key services, be it for healthcare, for education or for other things. We wouldn’t ever claim that rail is the silver bullet that solves all these problems, but all the research points to transport being a major enabler of better productivity and better access to opportunity. Countless case studies exist to demonstrate this, which I can’t do justice to here.

So, how does MRH overcome this? It’s remarkably simple, really. By providing two new ‘chords’ (bits of railway) at Bordesley, just east of Birmingham City Centre, we can run extra trains into Birmingham’s Moor Street Station. This brings a major uplift in capacity into the city, while helping to reduce the strain on nearby New Street. While the two chords are the big-ticket item, in terms of infrastructure, we also require extra platforms at Moor Street and Snow Hill Stations, some widening of the viaduct which passes through Digbeth, and enhancements to the railway further afield.

People might be asking what the Government funding announcement in June gets us. We now have a green light (signal?) for a large part of the scheme’s infrastructure to be designed and then delivered. In particular, the two new chords at Bordesley are committed, as are the additional platforms in Central Birmingham, with a widened Bordesley Viaduct to connect these locations. We also have committed works between Kings Norton and Barnt Green, upgrading this to a full four-track ‘electrified’ railway where faster trains can overtake slower ones. This gets us the capacity we need for the busy Cross City Line to be reinstated up to six trains per hour (currently four); an extra train per hour from Birmingham to each of Swindon, Cardiff and Worcester; and all Chiltern services running through to Snow Hill – currently some of these turn round at Moor Street during the day as there isn’t the space for them to continue through the tunnel to Snow Hill.

There’s always a ‘but’ – and the ‘but’ here is that this isn’t everything we need. The ‘full’ scheme also includes a doubling of trains from Birmingham to Leicester; more trains from Birmingham towards Derby and Nottingham (and Leeds); and additional trains from Worcester to Hereford. These aren’t currently committed, but we have a very solid business case on these elements, and we’ll be setting out our pitch to Government. What I can say though, is that by committing to the East Chord at Bordesley, the Government is already sorting out the biggest constraint (by a long way) in getting trains from the East Midlands into Birmingham. While the East Chord at Bordesley is the really big jigsaw piece, there are other smaller bits we then need to do between Water Orton (east of Birmingham) and the East Midlands, but in engineering terms, these are comparatively small beer compared to the works in Central Birmingham.

To finish with a few stats. MRH unlocks capacity for over 300 trains per day into or out of Birmingham each day, which translates to over 20 million extra seats on the railway network per annum. A quick Google search tells me that a queue of 20m people would stretch for up to 100km. Or fill an awful lot – over 200 – football stadiums. So, we’re talking big numbers, however you look at it, and a major uplift in capacity in the transport system within – and of course beyond – the Midlands.

To summarise. Serious Government backing for a large proportion of our scheme, together with a firm plan for us to pitch for funding for the remainder. More trains drive higher productivity and get people where they need to be. And a relatively simple way of doing this at a cost that we believe is affordable to Government. MRH in a nutshell.

Andy Clark is the Rail Programme Lead at Midlands Connect.