Railways: Investment

Lord Bishop of Chester Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, my noble friend makes several important points. I shall just touch on some of the more important ones. He talked about the future of the HST 125 trains, the possibility of refurbishing them and the possible undesirable effects of those trains staying in the market. There are uses for that rolling stock in the future. One difficulty about that rolling stock is that its operating costs would be higher, while there might be a reliability question. The noble Lord knows how damaging breakdowns are on the system.

The noble Lord talked about the redoubling of the Swindon to Kemble line. That is a good scheme but it is not in CP4. I am making absolutely no commitment, but it could be a CP5 issue. He also talked about the time saving that arises from electrification. He needs to remember that that route is much more intensively used but that electric trains will give greater acceleration, so there will be a big benefit. However, we will keep the timetabling issues under review and make sure that we are not losing any benefits that we could gain.

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, the Statement is couched almost entirely in terms of the impact on passenger traffic on the railways. Can the Minister comment on the Government’s policy for increasing the use of the railways for freight and on what the relevance of the Statement might be to that?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, we are very keen to move as much freight as possible on to the railway system. The Thameslink project is not relevant to freight but the High Speed 2 project is, because the west coast main line will run out of capacity and, if we do not build High Speed 2, we will not be able to put more freight on to the west coast main line.