£450 MILLION FOR DIGITAL RAILWAY V2.0
In his Autumn Statement on 23 November, the Chancellor, and former Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond announced an additional £450 million from 2018-19 to 2020-21 ‘to trial digital signalling technology’. This will ‘expand capacity, and improve reliability’.
Readers may share my subsequent puzzlement on multiple counts.
First, the money was available from ‘2018-19’, but the accompanying table (Table 1) showed the first payment in 2017-18. Then, the funding for the four years totalled £535 million.
But over 2019-21, the first two years of Control Period 6, the sums did indeed add up to £450 million.
From this we can deduce that the Department for Transport has ring-fenced £450 million for digital signalling (‘command and control’ is probably a more accurate term), ahead of what will be a financially-constrained funding settlement for CP6.
Adding to the confusion was the use of the word ‘trial’. The Early Deployment Scheme (EDS) for the European Train Control System (ETCS) started controlling trains on the Cambrian line in October 2010.
Today, Siemens Class 700 trains for Thameslink have been running through the Thameslink central core under the control of Siemens prod…
