BRITAIN is at risk of at worst severe loss of life from a railway disaster and at best, frequent fragmentation of the system if the current deluge continues, warns a leading railway author.

'The huge collapse at Dawlish in Devon and about a dozen other landslips and collapses around the system have so far not blemished our wonderful record of years without any train passenger deaths,' says Benedict le Vay, author of top-seller Britain From The Rails: A Window Gazer's Guide.
 
'But if this goes on we will get unlucky, either with the railways or roads, river banks and dams. I truly hope to be proved wrong but we must be realistic. Trains have derailed off collapsing tracks in this country and overseas many times and it is likely to happen again here soon.'
 
What we can do, le Vay insists, is improve the resilience of the existing system and also reopen more diversionary routes. He says our investment priorities must change quickly.

'At Dawlish, for example, there were once two inland routes. One of these has both ends still open - Exeter to Okehampton and Plymouth to Bere Alston. It simply needs the middle bit through Tavistock to be reopened to get trains to avoid Dawlish when the weather is awful. How can it make sense to have state-of-the-art trains worth millions of pounds each drenched in salt water when the waves crash over there, let alone the danger of the present collapse? But for goodness sake keep this, one of the loveliest seaside routes in Europe, for when the weather is fine.'
 
He also points out that in the Thirties the Great Western Railway intended to speed up services to the West Country and built fast rail by-passes at Westbury and Frome, using government money to alleviate unemployment. 'They were about to get on with such a high-speed route behind Dawlish when the looming war put paid to that. We could once again put our young unemployed to really useful work on such projects.'
 
Le Vay also goes on to - oddly, perhaps for a lover of rail travel - call for the HS2 scheme to be abandoned so that investment can go into more resilience and alternatives.
 
'What's wrong with getting to Manchester in a couple of hours, as at present? Who really needs to get to Birmingham 20 minutes earlier? It that worth tens of billions of pounds, while other cities are regularly cut off from the network as if they were a poor Third World country? Why should the West Country endure double journey times all the time'?
 
He says we need two types of far cheaper investment. 'One is putting in flyovers and junctions where there are bottlenecks and redoubling tracks singled in the 1970s in what turns out to be an appallingly false economy. This is already under way,' he says, citing flyovers at Hitchin, Reading, Nuneaton and new curves in Ipswich and Manchester to increase capacity.
 
The other type of investment is to give more choice and flexibility. 'The nationalisation in 1948 was followed by most cities losing their choice of routes that rival companies had built. Some cities are lucky enough to still have two or more routes to London - Norwich, Portsmouth, Carlisle, Exeter (much needed this week) and Birmingham, for example. We see private enterprise, Chiltern Railways, planning to reopen a different route from London to Oxford - which would have been a godsend this week! - and more of this bold thinking has to happen. It is far, far cheaper than HS2. We also need to make bits of tracks that regularly get closed by flooding - such as Cowley Bridge, just north of Exeter, where the Barnstaple line diverges from the London Paddington one - more resilient. There is no point in repeatedly putting back the embankment that gets washed away or submerged. A reinforced concrete flyover would fix this for ever.'
 
Equally, he argues, creative and relatively cheap changes could help the system keep going in bad weather. 'This week we have seen the Bournemouth to Dorchester line and the Staines to Windsor line closed because third-rail electrification doesn't work in a few inches of water. Switch it to over-head wires on these trouble-prone stretches, we already have trains that switch over many times every day, such as Thameslink.'
 
But why isn't he delighted that HS2 looks all set to be built? 'Frankly, travelling at 250mph in a sealed metal tube is deeply unpleasant and just not necessary in such a small country. You have no idea where you are or have been - you should have time to look down on the magnificent Durham Cathedral and Castle with the river curving around them from the viaduct on the East Coast Main Line. The journey from Newcastle to Edinburgh over the Royal Border Bridge at Berwick and along the cliffs past Lindisfarne is one of life's joys. If you want to hurtle in a sealed metal tube up to Edinburgh, why not fly? Above a certain speed that is actually greener, because the air is so much denser at ground level.'
 
'This is the best country in the world for scenic railway lines - not just my judgment but an international panel voted the West Highland Line in Scotland the world's best.' What we need is for it to be safe, reliable, enjoyable, and fast enough, le Vay argues.
 
He derides the government's whole HS2 argument as 'rather infected by spin'. He says: 'Look, they costed up the time of a putative business executive and multiplied the 20 minutes saved to Birmingham to get a figure of billions saved. Supposing that businessmen or woman who was working on the train, but getting there early, actually used the time gained for phoning a lover and eating a croissant, or just getting home. Where exactly are the billions saved then? It would be billions lost!
 
'The argument also depends on the current routes being full. Well, overcrowding is ghastly, but did you know there are four operators on three routes going to Birmingham (from London Euston, Paddington, and Marylebone). The trains overall are less than half full, even on the West Coast Main Line it is only about 60 per cent. Moreover, overcrowding is an inevitable product of the way the railway was privatised - the train operating companies have to make a profit for shareholders and often to pay hefty amounts to the government as a premium for the right to run a service. Whereas British Rail would have rolled empty trains out of the sidings as relief trains when the system is busy, the incentive is for today's companies not to pay rolling stock companies millions of pounds to hire more trains, but to cram people in and still charge the full fare. That the resulting deliberate overcrowding is an argument for HS2 is a complete fallacy.' 

Benedict le Vay is author of Britain From The Rails: A Window-Gazer's Guide (Bradt, £14.99) and many other books. He is available for interview and to write articles. Please contact the Bradt office for further details: hugh.collins@bradtguides.com