The government’s statement last week on the railways was Groundhog Day. It was deja vue all over again. I have lost count of how many times Crossrail and Thameslink have been announced. The funding for Crossrail remains delayed owing to the late arrival of the incoming banknotes. Crossrail is an expensive way of increasing capacity.

The main problem with the railways is lack of capacity. On that government and opposition are now agreed.

The main reason we have so little capacity on our very extensive track network is the technology. The combination of very heavy trains with the signals they use means you can only run around 20 trains an hour on a given piece of track. At peaks times this means we are chronically short of train slots, and therefore short of trains.

Ruth Kelly last week announced that the industry is going to order more carriages, to have longer trains. They will need to build longer platforms in many cases and passengers will have to walk further to find a seat.

If she changed the regulations surrounding the industry they might be more inclined to buy the much lighter trains that are deployed on some foreign networks. This would bring a win win. Firstly, lighter trains accelerate and brake much more rapidly than our heavy trains. This would permit them to run more trains per hour on the same track with suitable modification of the signals. Secondly, it would greatly reduce the energy used by the trains, making them??more environmentally friendly.

This would be an easy way of improving train frequency and capacity. If she were bolder, she would ask them to look at the Montreal Metro trains, which run partly on rubber. The introduction of some rubber would create more friction between train and track, allowing much faster acceleration and braking, and therefore many more trains an hour. That’s bound to be too radical and would work so please Ruth have a go at the lighter trains. Our travellers are fed up with the lack of frequent services and the shortage of seats on the trains that do run at busy times.

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