Swansea isn't the end of the line

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A promise by a politician is rarely worth the paper on which it often isn’t even written, and there is no reason why a promise to electrify a railway should be any different.  Breaking the promise to electrify the line to Swansea will not exactly enhance the reputation of those who’ve done it, but in all fairness, they are currently hard at work breaking much bigger promises than that one.

I’d give them almost full marks for inventiveness in selling this as an advantage because we won’t have the disruption of all the engineering works in carrying out the upgrade, but I do wonder where that line of argument will lead.  It could easily become an argument for not doing a lot of other things.  There is, after all, quite a lot of disruption involved in building hospitals, schools, roads …

They are right in arguing that it will give us better more modern rolling stock with more seats more rapidly than waiting for electrification all the way to Swansea with electric-only trains, and they’re also right in arguing that it won’t make any difference to journey times between Cardiff and Swansea because the restriction there is the track, not the source of power or the rolling stock.  That does, though, rather gloss over the fact that the new trains will be heavier, more expensive to buy and run, and less environmentally friendly than the all-electric ones we could have had if the project had gone ahead.  I’m not particularly convinced either about some of the arguments put forward about this being a huge blow to the image of Swansea in trying to attract investment.  I would have thought that the quality and reliability of the transportation would be more important than the source of power.

There is another advantage (in the sense of it being an ill-wind which has none) to the decision taken yesterday which few seem to have even realised let alone commented on, and that is its impact on those of us who live even further west of Swansea (although I entirely understand that people in London might not be fully aware of our existence).  That advantage is that bi-modal trains don’t have to terminate their journey at Swansea; like the existing aged beasts they will be perfectly capable of travelling past the end of what seems to be regarded as civilised Wales and out into the sticks where some of us insist on residing. 

One of my concerns from the outset has been that the electrification project would take away the few through trains which we currently enjoy.  As a short term expedient that might have been something up with which we might have had to put, but the problem with the electrification project has long been that it has been seen as a single one-off project rather than part of a longer term vision to electrify the whole network.  We still need that longer term vision of an all-electric railway; all that’s really changed is that the section of line from Cardiff to Swansea has been added to that part of the network for which that vision is required.  I hope that those who so far seem to be mostly interested in making political capital out of the decision will also take that on board and not restrict their arguments to one short stretch of line.