Railways: Heritage Sector

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to participate in this debate. First, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Faulkner on the dedication that he shows to the heritage sector, which is absolutely vital. I am pleased to hear that he is going to be involved in all the various committees and is actively negotiating some continuity for the heritage sector in order to preserve our industrial heritage, rather as the National Trust and English Heritage do for our old buildings and landscape. They may have to end up owning half the forests in this country if one believes the press comments at the weekend. However, I return to the subject of the railways.

The heritage railways are still part of the national railway structure. They have the potential to—and sometimes do—fulfil a very useful role in moving people around, whether for shopping or getting to school. They do so effectively and reliably, and I think we will miss something if that does not continue. When I worked in Folkestone years ago, I noticed that the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway—which, as a narrow-gauge railway, is quite long—used to run a school service, taking kids to school every morning and bringing them back in the evening, and many other railways do that. In that respect, it is interesting to compare the heritage railways with Network Rail’s branch lines. The All-Party Parliamentary Rail Group had a meeting last night with Sir Roy McNulty, who is carrying out a cost-reduction study for the Department for Transport. I told him that I hoped he was not going to start cutting Network Rail’s branch lines due to the cost. Network Rail started off a year or two ago by saying that the freight-only lines cost £100 million a year. However, it could not provide any evidence for that and we ended up with a figure of £10 million, so something was slightly wrong with the estimation.

The Network Rail branch lines and heritage lines have one thing in common. There’s a very cheap way of running light trains on them which could provide the service that I was just talking about. That is something like the Parry people mover. It is like a tram but it runs on the main line. It has been operating between Stourbridge Junction and Stourbridge Town extremely reliably—with a reliability rate of, I think, 99 per cent—since it has been going. During the recent cold weather, it operated much more reliably than the mainline trains. However, I foresee opposition to its use coming from the main railway people, the passenger operators and Network Rail. I often detect a similar reluctance on the part of some of the heritage lines to accept something like this to provide a service when they do not want to run steam trains or anything else; in other words, rather than run a daily service, they would prefer to keep the line doing nothing other than running a steam train on a Saturday.

I know that costs are involved but I hope that, as we move forward in the various debates on our railway heritage, we will try to see whether some of the issues facing not only the heritage lines but the Network Rail branch lines can be tackled, along with the problem of getting a connection between the two without spending an enormous amount of money on consultants’ fees. We should see whether we can use this wonderful piece of infrastructure that is all around the country for the benefit of those who live locally. I see it as part of the localism agenda.