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| Croydon Tramlink - The Interview | | ||
Croydon Tramlink is the first street-running tramway and light rail system in the Greater London conurbation in the modern era. It is a project which has attracted the highest private sector contribution so far and, with a three line network from day one will provide a very significant improvement to the area's public transport infrastructure. Tramtrack Croydon Limited has been keeping a fairly low profile whilst they've got on with the job of building this major new system - now, with opening only seven months away they've given their first major interview to Bob Tarr, LRTA Secretary General covering all the main aspects of project.
 Bob Dorey |  Peter Hendy |
The Overhead Line Equipment (continued):
Jim Snowdon, Technical Manager, TCL (commenting on a photo of a particular situation in Croydon where a large H-section girder mast has been placed immediately adjacent to a 1960s/1970s office building): There’s a good reason they can’t be strung from the building - the front of the building is not structural, this is a problem with many buildings in Croydon - by the look of this one, it’s a concrete frame building and the outside wall is just a panel, a curtain wall.
RJT: One of the places that was held up as an example to Croydon was Nantes, in France. Here are some pictures of the overhead in Nantes showing a very unobtrusive overhead. Now, on the face of it, your overhead, even on single track sections, is not going to be anything like as unobtrusive .
Jim Snowdon: Looking at the pictures you’ve chosen, it depends on what the pole is. The photo you’ve shown me, that is a position where the original plan was that the pole would go up immediately against the side of the building where it would have been less obtrusive but it had to come out further because there is a basement - poles and basements don’t go so it’s had to come out further. It’s a big pole because the overhead line geometry through there requires the use of pull-offs, to avoid the need for lots of poles. Thus the pole is highly loaded and has to be of large section.
RJT: Some of those masts - the ones with eight bolts - are massive aren’t they?
Jim Snowdon: There are some very big masts in certain critical places.
RJT: They might come in handy sometime to help avoid the adjoining buildings from falling over? Jim Snowdon: Almost - but there’s an element in this that we don’t want to repeat a Manchester... RJT: But this is what you seem to be doing? Jim Snowdon: I’m not sure that this is so, there’s some quite big poles but not the many poles at the quite close spacing that Manchester had. RJT: In some places there do seem to be a lot. For instance, just by the alms-houses, on the face of it there are four fairly massive poles, masts close together...
Jim Snowdon: Not all ours!
RJT: Yes, I’ve heard about this, I gather that two of them are poles which traditionally carry the Christmas lights - so there’s now four of similar size and height, so how, in terms of sensible planning can this possibly have happened?
Jim Snowdon: What you don’t see is that of those four, two come out. The Christmas light poles have yet to be taken out by Croydon Council
RJT: In terms of good PR, why didn’t those come out before you put in your two new ones, because the impression that people get is that there’s going to be four poles there?
Peter Hendy: But you do have to wait until it’s finished don’t you, and personally I would like to reserve judgement on the height and the size of the poles until the overhead is strung from them. There’s a really practical issue in all this. The system has to be built and opened to be fair to our contractors and also the designers. Croydon were there all the way through and the Borough themselves have I think sometimes found that they’ve had to accept a compromise because they wanted the scheme as a whole. That’s why we are so supportive of them, because Croydon Council has rightly identified that this scheme means a huge amount to them in terms of economic development. During the process of the signing of the concession agreement the government asked them for a number of items of support, some financial and some physical, and they’ve had to accept a number of design changes which ideally they wouldn’t have liked but they’ve done it all in favour of the scheme as a whole which they think is beneficial. That’s the wider context to it.
RJT: O.K. - that’s a fair point to make.
Jim Snowdon: You did compare the Nantes picture with Tamworth Road - I think in all fairness, that is a big pole, it’s an anchor pole and as such it has a lot of strain on it. We don’t like using in-street the method we use elsewhere, i.e. stay ropes, for obvious reasons, but the next poles which go all the way up Tamworth Road are quite a bit smaller and not a lot different in proportion, though I dare say in section, to the Nantes poles - I can’t see whether the Nantes poles in the photo are an ‘H’ beam or a round one but they are of similar general proportions.
RJT: So are you saying that you think the overall effect when the overhead is strung is not going to be dissimilar? Jim Snowdon: No, it shouldn’t be.
Peter Hendy: Being slightly cynical, if someone would like to provide us or the contractors or somebody with the sorts of budgets or finance which are available in Northern European cities for civic beauty then there’s a lot more that you could do, but it’s worth emphasising that we were lucky to get this scheme to go at all and when it came down to it London Transport were faced with even the best value consortia being some considerable way away from the total amount of public funding that was believed to be available, and we were lucky to get there I think.
RJT: That’s a scene that I recognise!
Bob Dorey: In the process, I’m sure, some public benefit gets squeezed out but I’m not convinced that’s wrong in the sense that the kind of specifications that don’t have any regard for cost are not good value for money anyway.
Grassed Track:
RJT: I gather there was an area where it was intended to have grassed tracks - grass between the tracks - and that for various reasons that is not happening. What were those reasons?
Jim Snowdon: Indeed it isn’t - and the reason was essentially stray currents. That nice elegant lawned track you get in Europe with grass right up to the rail edges is just not acceptable in terms of potential stray currents. RJT: Who’s it not acceptable to? Jim Snowdon: The utilities, the gas and the water RJT: Why is it acceptable on the continent and not here? Jim Snowdon: Bear in mind that in a lot of continental cities, the utility undertaking is the same as the municipal authority. RJT: So they’re told to agree? Jim Snowdon: Yes. They’re all in the same corporate camp. The other, of course, is that we are new. We are coming back, whereas they are running tramway systems that have been there for a hundred and more years and they’ve learned to live with it.
RJT: It just makes the point that it’s much more difficult to come back from scratch than to grow an existing system...
Jim Snowdon: It’s quite oblivious, of course, to the fact that the railway in Croydon has been generating stray currents for six decades... RJT: And huge amounts no doubt? Jim Snowdon: I rather expect so, but we are a change and people pick that up.
Peter Hendy: It’s a more general point, but if you’re convinced, as the promoters and Croydon were that the system on the whole is a good thing and you are introducing it new into an environment where the utilities are powerful and privatised and already there then you have to accept some of what they want even if you don’t like it much.
RJT: This is another instance where a compromise has had to be made to ward off claims no doubt and the thing which has had to be sacrificed is the environmental dimension?
Peter Hendy: Well, it’s the aesthetic rather than the environmental. I don’t think there have been any environmental compromises, but you could argue there have been some aesthetic ones.
Jim Snowdon: Nonetheless, if you look down the road where the lawned track would have been, it’s not reverted to ballasted track, it’s laid in block-work, it will be landscaped, it’s the next best thing. Bob Dorey: And easier to cross in the winter...
Peter Hendy: As we were saying, the wider environmental benefits of such a scheme are very big and whilst personally I rather like the rustic look of grassed track - it looks nice - this scheme’s good for the general environment of Croydon.
Leaf fall in Addington Hills:
RJT: I gather that through the Addington Hills area there are lots of trees and significant inclines and interesting possibilities of what happens in the autumn with leaf fall. Is that an issue for which you’ve got special arrangements?
Jim Snowdon: It is an issue we are aware of. I don’t believe there are that many of the ‘wrong sort of trees’ but there are some. The strength of our operation is in the tram. It’s a well equipped vehicle in terms of slip-slide performance but like all street trams it has track brakes - we are not in the position of heavy rail trains locking all their wheels up and sliding when they apply their brakes with heavy leaf fall on the rails - we still have effective braking even if the wheels have slid, so we are confident we can stop and we think going is less of a problem. Peter Hendy: You can’t win on this. There is one school of thought that you should chop down every tree within half a mile of the track, and on that subject, as the operator I tend to prefer that approach, but there is a compromise here between the aesthetics and ease of operation and we think we’ve got the right balance here with Croydon Council.
Use of grooved rail:
RJT: In some places you seem to have done interesting things in terms of whether or not you’ve used grooved rail - for instance just by East Croydon station?
Jim Snowdon: There’s a depth limitation there on the slab on both bridges - the railway bridge is of great age, the other is over the underpass bridge - the flat bottom rail wins about 30 mm. of depth compared to normal Ri60 grooved rail. The sort of shallow depth grooved rail we could have used would have ended up as a tiny amount in the whole system, which would cause a spares problem later, so it is easier to adapt to the circumstances a rail that we already use elsewhere as our standard out-of-town rail.
Skid-resistance:
RJT: One final technical point. In places you seem to have applied some sort of finish to the polymer (Edilon) surround - anti-skid or something is it? Is this just experimental or are you going to be doing it in a widespread sort of way?
Jim Snowdon: You’re spotting the difference between pedestrian area track, where it’s in block work, and that’s polymer right to the surface and street track, where that’s not polymer right to the top. It’s the same technique that Manchester used in their repairs, it’s a bitumen compound to the top and yes it is loaded with stone and surface grit for skid resistance.
RJT: This is to avoid the Sheffield situation? Jim Snowdon: Partly, as well as some of the problems with early polymer installations.
Vehicles:
RJT: You’ve got a well-proven vehicle in the Bombardier Cologne tram, which is obviously very sensible. Peter Hendy: We hope so!
RJT: How many modifications are having to be made to them so that the Railway Inspectorate will allow them to operate here?
Bob Dorey: I wouldn’t like to try and count up modifications - there are changes we wanted anyway.
Peter Hendy: It’s not the Cologne car in every respect - but based on it. The biggest issue we have to face is the application of the final Disability Accessibility Regulations as compared to the draft that was available at the time the car was designed. With some modifications the cars will stand up in that respect - you obviously can’t design something in every respect to satisfy regulations which are not in existence at the time the design takes place, but we aren’t talking about substantial modifications - we think they’re a good design.
Bob Dorey: Because of the capacity needs, our car is longer (than Cologne) so it’s been stretched a bit. We changed some of the seating arrangements where, in areas intended for wheelchairs and push chairs, we’ve now got ‘bum-perches’ instead of tip-up seats because we think that they’ll work better and to some extent the cab had to be re-orientated because of concerns about sight-lines for drivers here with kerbs being on the other side when we’re operating on-street - there were all these kinds of things, but there was a very strong prejudice against changing anything - the onus of proof was on those who wanted something different and I think it’s a great success.
RJT: One of the things that perplexes me a bit is the extent to which, each time there is a new system, the Railway Inspectorate seems to slightly rewrite the rules, or if not rewrite, certainly develop the rules and that information doesn’t seem to be available to people almost to the final stage, until the test running...
Peter Hendy: I’m not sure I completely agree with you because the Inspectorate has been actively encouraging the operators of the current and future U.K. schemes to talk to each other on a regular basis and we participate in that and have learnt quite a lot from it. Part of the difficulty is that light rail almost, but not quite, expired in this country. By contrast, if you look at the main-line railways Railtrack’s standards have evolved from what was there in BR’s days and give quite clear guidance on a whole number of things which in the light rail field have had to be invented afresh. I’m not sure it is right to criticise the Inspectorate because they are developing their knowledge to suit the fact they are now inspecting the fourth or fifth British system, they’re keen to get the safest and best systems and so are we. My view, coming at it from the perspective of a big transport group and not as a previous light rail operator is that there isn’t any shortage of co-operation and communication between the operators but we do have to bear in mind that the thing is continually developing. We’re lucky to have an established car - I think that’s another subject completely, which is there has been a profusion of tram/light rail vehicle designs - and I’ve heard spirited lectures on that from various people - but we’ve got an established design and that’s why we are relatively comfortable.
Bob Dorey: There are so many different cars, you wonder why anyone has to choose a completely new one...
Peter Hendy: What we have done is to adopt a proven vehicle which we think was the right thing to do, encouraged by LT’s concession agreement which did very clearly guide potential consortia on the road of using a proven vehicle.
Capacity:
RJT: So the estimate of 20m might prove to be a fairly modest estimate? Peter Hendy We hope so! RJT: There’s been a tendency, because of government restrictions on funding, to build systems with almost the minimum capacity and then wait and see what happens and, for instance in Manchester, they have experienced a peak loading problem of some magnitude as a result. What happens here if you find quite quickly that you are filled to capacity at peak times? What happens, for instance, about extra vehicles?
Bob Dorey: First of all the system is designed, and has had to be designed under the concession agreement to handle a 33% increase in demand without, I think the term is, ‘significant disruption to the existing system’. In other words, the power supply and the basic infrastructure has to be capable of handling it, the depot has to be big enough to handle a 33% increase in the number of vehicles, from the 24 initial number. So how that increase in capacity is to be achieved is for us to propose and in theory one could do it by lengthening the vehicles. In practice we don’t believe that lengthening is going to be a sensible solution because in downtown areas longer vehicles would probably cause too much delay at crossings. RJT: How long are the vehicles? Bob Dorey: 30 metres.
Peter Hendy: We won’t get even growth over the system and this is one of the challenges that the operator and the concession company are going to have to tackle together. When we have learnt where growth is happening we will have to look at the timetables, look at the frequencies and we are confident that there is the capacity in the system to do that, but it is very difficult to predict where in the system it will be. Equally, there are some constraints because parts of the system are single track.
RJT: Initially you will be running 3 services on the system, I believe? Peter Hendy: Yes, but the initial service pattern depicted in our literature will be capable of modification if circumstances warrant it - both service patterns and levels. We believe that what we are proposing initially is the most elegant way of meeting demand and if demand proves to be different from that you can do different things, though there are some physical constraints as well - the loop round Croydon town centre for instance.
Financing:
RJT: Croydon has got the reputation of having the best private sector contribution so far in the U.K. - which probably means in the World - and I believe the overall cost is about £200m, is that right? And about £125m from the public sector?
Bob Dorey: Within the £125m of public grant that’s been agreed LT have had to manage all the utility diversions directly themselves and their own costs of managing that as well as the payments to the utilities have come out of the £125m. So far as the work which we are responsible for is concerned, which is everything else, the project costs about £185m, roughly half of which is private money. So you’ll get by deduction that we are raising a lot more than £75m. It hasn’t gone up since we started - it’s not a shifting base at all.
RJT: So the public sector contribution of £125m covers LT’s costs as well, especially the public utility diversions? Bob Dorey: That’s right - something under £100m comes through to us as capital grant and we’ve virtually matched that with private sector money.
RJT: And all of that has come through your consortium’s resources? Bob Dorey: Yes, and a large part of that is debt finance, through leases or borrowing. The trams are leased, the track is leased - some quite innovative financing arrangements - and there’s also bank debt and shareholder’s equity.
Concession period:
RJT: You’ve got an unusually long concession period? The longest by far so far, isn’t it?
Bob Dorey: Yes, 99 years. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link was longer as originally proposed, but not, I believe, in the revised deal.
RJT: I’m interested in how it came to be so long - I thought that the private sector wasn’t interested in anything longer than 25 to 30 years and anything longer doesn’t reflect in the net present value?
Bob Dorey: Beyond about 30 years it probably doesn’t. The origins of the 99 years were when I chaired the project development group, which was a combination of public and private sectors which developed this project to the point where the competition started. As part of that process, we were saying to LT and government what we thought was the right way to handle it including the length of the concession and we came to the view that government shouldn’t be seeking to limit the length of this concession in any way, what it should be offering to the market was a business not a limited period concession - that if you have a concession limited to 25 or 30 years, roughly the life of the major replaceable equipment, you had real concerns about how you are going to specify the condition in which things are going to be handed over and a real possibility that in the closing years of that concession that the concessionaire would just run things down and so why bother with this artificial limit at all? I personally argued with Steven Norris, who was then the Minister, the only limit should be the length of the lease we get from Railtrack and as that’s limited to 199 years we should make the concession 199, or 198 years, if you wish, and it finished up being 99 years. There were concerns even then that that was so long that European competition rules might possibly be breached. So 99 years was on the basis of saying, here’s a business, why should government want it back? what it wants is a successfully operating tramway system and it doesn’t want the problems associated with a cut-off date.
Peter Hendy: The closing periods of these fixed terms are clearly very difficult to manage - the railway industry is just about to discover what we’ve known in the London tendered bus industry is a problem - in the last period of a fixed term franchise it is in nobody’s interest to do anything and I think one of the good things about 99 years is that at least it stops the hiatus at the point at which the equipment wears out after 30 years which has been the cause of so much difficulty. In replacement terms it is very clear that the concession company has the duty to carry on and the impetus and interest to do so. I think it’s a great strength. I’m not convinced that limiting these concession periods is overall in the public interest though clearly it is believed by various parties that it is good in competitive terms.
Replacement of vehicles and original equipment:
RJT: It seems very sensible to me. It does bring some interesting implications - what happens when these first LRVs need replacing. Whose responsibility is it to buy new vehicles to replace them?
Bob Dorey: That’s absolutely clear - it’s the concession company’s responsibility to buy them.
RJT: And anything else as well? Bob Dorey: Yes, track or whatever - because we are there long term.
Maintenance:
RJT: Who will actually maintain the system?
Bob Dorey: The operating company will, on behalf of TCL, manage the maintenance of the system. They will then manage the interface between all the maintenance and operational needs.
Peter Hendy: Bob was very careful to say that we are going to manage the maintenance, how it is done depends on who is selected to do it. The cars will be maintained by Bombardier, who will be subcontractors to the operator for their maintenance.
Bob Dorey: TCL will award the infrastructure maintenance contract, to be managed by Tram Operations Limited, the operator.
RJT: TCL is clearly in it for the long term. This seems to be in contrast to earlier schemes where the constructors in the consortium seemed really to be interested in the building phase, but not the long term operation, and were openly in it because that was the rules of the game?
Bob Dorey: Yes that’s so. We have a number of shareholders that you might assume want a long term interest.
Performance controls:
RJT: What happens if you fail to operate the system according to the performance criteria you’ve signed up to?
Bob Dorey: Without going into all the details, there’s a point at which we would start to lose some of our Travelcard revenue and there is a point beyond this which, if we were in default, the system could be taken away from us.
Peter Hendy: Long before then TCL would sack the operator presumably!
Bob Dorey: Yes, and the banks would have stepped in and so on - there’s a whole series of mechanisms.
Peter Hendy: No-one here is aiming to under-perform!
Bob Dorey: We will live off the revenue and it really is in our interests to perform - we need to generate passenger satisfaction and the revenue which flows from it.
Developments and extensions:
RJT: Is there any prospect of Croydon Tramlink developing further?
Bob Dorey: Yes. We already know that the Triangle Partnership, which is a group of the London boroughs and involving London Transport, concerned with Crystal Palace regeneration have awarded a small contract to Ove Arup to do a pre-feasibility study for extending Croydon Tramlink to Crystal Palace - that’s at a very early stage, but a concept they want to look at. We also know that the London Borough of Merton has already gone through that process in relation to what they call ‘Merton Tramlink’ and we think of as the ‘Merton Loop’ - what chances of success that has I wouldn’t like to say at this stage. LT identified in their intermediate modes study for Outer London more than one possible way of getting to Sutton. Some people within Croydon Council would like to see us extending southwards towards, if not to, Purley. So I would say that extension is a real possibility and within all that I think there could really be some good value for money extensions.
RJT: And once you’ve got the core system operating it’s probably easier to get extensions to it?
Bob Dorey: You probably get better value for money in doing so rather than starting from scratch in most places, I would say. So I am hopeful - I really do see the prospect.
Profit:
RJT: A cheeky question - when do you expect it to be in profit?
Bob Dorey: I’d like a definition of profit! Peter Hendy: Both the equity and debt is predicated on a timetable of repayment. There’s no operating subsidy, but it’s laughable to suggest that there’s a profit in year one - what you’re doing is starting on a lengthy programme of debt repayment. Bob Dorey: We expect an operating surplus, certainly in the first full year of operation but we have to service our debts so a clear profit after financing charges will be a number of years down the track.
RJT: Those members of the LRTA who will be coming to its AGM on 23 October will be very interested to know what the prospects are of them being able to ride on Croydon Tramlink?
Peter Hendy: If any part of it is open by then, of course that will be possible. If not then obviously the Railway Inspectorate will be concerned about how and for what reason anybody rides on a system they haven’t yet authorised and whilst it doesn’t rule out doing anything it probably will rule out travelling by tram.
Bob Dorey: Unfortunately, your AGM is just ten days or so before we plan to open and we are likely to be working like the clappers to achieve that - if we are not as hospitable as we would normally want to be, that’ll be the reason!
Bob Tarr,
Secretary General, LRTA
This article was previously published in
Modern Railways
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