Economic recovery, growth and future prosperity, is being severely constrained and seriously threatened by a wholly inadequate rail network in the South East. That is the stark message emerging as sound evidence, rather than unsubstantiated opinion, increasingly makes itself known.

The last government got one thing right – demand for rail travel would increase dramatically in a decade. But either through ineptitude or simply political bias, it failed to ensure the region’s network was accordingly expanded and thereby capable of coping with today’s passenger growth. Whereas London itself has benefited from New Labour’s term of office and seen huge sums of money both spent and committed on improving rail travel in and around the capital, almost nothing has been done to the commuter network feeding in from Kent, Sussex and Surrey. Apart from a £10.4m siding at Tunbridge Wells and the premium-fare Javelin service to St Pancras (which came about as a spin-off of HS1 and subsequently scaled back due to lack of demand) there has been no radical expansion or enhancement of the ‘classic’ network as promised when Labour came to power in 1997.

As with the previous operator Connex, Southern and Southeastern are now coming in for heavy criticism and being blamed for the failures of the Department of Transport to get it right in the first place. Only recently on the Uckfield line, Southern has been obliged to put up notices at stations apologising for the recent chaos on overcrowded peak trains which have had to be rescheduled. As Southern’s Development Director, Alex Foulds, explained: “These timetable changes have been unavoidably brought about by the introduction of the East London Line services which has triggered a wholesale rescheduling of many Southern services”.

There has been a growing crisis anyway because patronage on the Uckfield Line has risen substantially and on a par with other main lines in the south. This is hardly surprising since the route runs approximately parallel between the already over-burdened Brighton and Tonbridge Main Lines. The situation is serious and made worse by the fact that the former double-track Uckfield line was partially singled in 1990 to avoid £1m in track renewals when British Rail was obliged to take a ‘maintenance holiday’ during Mrs Thatcher’s term of office. Ministers and BR officials ignored our warnings during this bleak period that they would rue the day should the route be ‘rationalised’. The result of this reckless ‘economy’ is that today’s severely constrained line is limited to a maximum of just 2 trains each way per hour, compared to 14 on the Brighton Main Line and 12 north of Tonbridge.

Although the new Turbostar trains vastly improved the quality of the journey from 2005, the DfT still refused to accept the line’s potential and anticipated low demand which resulted in an insufficient fleet. Because of increasing problems of overcrowding on the Tonbridge and Brighton main lines, we have seen railheading in the opposite direction – on to the Uckfield line – which is now experiencing extreme congestion. As Alex Foulds rightly points out: “Clearly this situation is exacerbated by the fact that we have only a limited number of diesel trains available to us”. This is not a fault of Southern – they are only contracted under their franchise to operate the fleet. A long-term daily commuter and WLC member said recently:

“I've been travelling to East Croydon on the 06:34 from Uckfield this week.  Despite it being school half term, when things are normally quieter, passengers have had to stand all the way from Eridge - yesterday and today a number of people had to stand from Crowborough. Listening to conversations around me, people are very unhappy with the new AM peak timetable, especially with worsened connections and later arrival in London of the 07:08.  I gather Southern Managers at a London Bridge ‘Meet the Manager’ session last week were inundated with complaints etc.”

Commuters using the 06:00 service now face a 1 hour 43minute journey to London Bridge – 19 minutes longer than ten years ago when Connex struggled to operate this service with the dreadful 40 year-old diesel ‘Thumper’ units. Further comparisons show no improvement in a decade despite the new (100mph-capable) fleet. For the 46 mile journey, this gives an average speed of 27mph for the 06:00 and 37mph for the 07:08. 

Journey times in the south will always be considerably slower and it is pointless making comparisons with Inter-City services north and west of London – unless we want to close hundreds of South East stations and run the trains straight through. The Southern simply isn’t that kind of railway. However, it remains a fact that journeys are becoming even slower. Perhaps surprisingly, the fastest Uckfield line services are no quicker than those in 1965. So, out of interest, we compared other routes. The fastest Eastbourne and Brighton trains now take five minutes longer than in 1965 (with most taking ten more minutes). The same is true at Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge. But spare a thought for the greatest losers – Ashford and Folkestone commuters whose services to Charing Cross and Cannon Street have been slowed dramatically since the introduction of High Speed One. Peak hour trains from Folkestone to London now take an average of 107 minutes (40 mph). It used to be 80 minutes (53mph) when Dr. Richard Beeching, chairman of BR, ceremoniously inaugurated the first electric services in June 1961, whilst even a 1954 Folkestone commuter was able to reach Cannon Street by steam train in 90 minutes. HS1’s Javelin trains take 58 minutes between Folkestone and St Pancras (averaging 72 mph) but, judging by the complaints in the media, it seems they are of little use to City commuters who gain nothing after crossing central London to work.

The worn-out excuse used by the DfT against reopening Lewes-Uckfield is the slightly longer mileage via Uckfield than via Haywards Heath, rather than considering the whole door-to-door journey. For example, if the road trip railheading to more-distant stations (just because they have more frequent services) was factored in then the results would be quite different. Similarly, not having to stand for most of the journey in a crush is a deciding factor. Proof of this is all those commuters who in recent years have deserted Tunbridge Wells in preference to Eridge where they can park and get a seat – until recently anyway. People should be allowed to make their own choices and if the Uckfield Line was restored to a main line carrying, say, 8 or even 12 trains per hour, then it would be as busy as its parallel routes into London. In the 1980s British Rail used to say they weren’t interested in doing this because it would abstract passengers from the Brighton and Tonbridge Lines!  

The emphasis on speed is a dangerous illusion and a diversion from the real issue. The DfT has nothing to offer except more overcrowding, continuingly slower services (which help the punctuality statistics) and increasingly poor commuting journeys. Network Rail says that by 2020 there will still be “lots of standing in the high peak hour” from Haywards Heath on the BML, whilst the picture is no better on the Tonbridge Main Line; the restricted Orpington-Tonbridge section being described as a “major barrier to growth” So what solutions are they offering in time for post 2020?      

We fear that politicians’ recent love affair with high speed railways is a convenient excuse to do nothing about transport. Warm words about high speed lines trip easily enough off the tongue, but no one is impressed by this. We want to know who will sort out the unglamorous day-to-day problems faced by hard-working, income tax-paying people. We have a looming crisis of lack of capacity in Southern England which hasn’t any of the headline-grabbing glory of high speed rail. New Labour’s Transport Secretary Lord Adonis invariably preferred talking about spending billions of pounds on clipping thirty minutes off a journey between London and the Midlands, rather than making the daily grind to work for thousands of commuters easier and more comfortable. On his fact-finding tour last year to Brighton, we noticed he went along the Coastway lines west to east, completely avoiding the BML. We might have been impressed had he boarded an early morning train for London and witnessed the conditions.   

Whilst New Labour soon dropped its interest in the Wealden Line once it gained office in 1997, we still await whatever plans the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition have. Slashing departmental budgets and public services is easy, but we simultaneously need a plan for growth and prosperity which demands both intelligence and vision – and needs to start now, not in five years’ time when, hopefully, our economy has recovered.

Numerous journals and transport commentators have mentioned Norman Baker’s ministerial appointment in the DfT and – given his consistent strong support for re-opening Lewes-Uckfield over more than two decades – now expect him to deliver. Even though Norman’s portfolio is not rail (which remains with Theresa Villiers) there appears expectation that the coalition government must now look seriously at this project. We believe it should go much further, because BML2, as we have shown, is a far greater and more beneficial scheme which offers substantially greater returns on investment and prosperity across the South East.

So we shouldn’t be too taken in by the hype surrounding high speed rail – it probably won’t happen anyway and certainly nowhere else in the over-crowded South East. But the thoughtful, useful development of grossly under-used and wasting assets to strengthen the existing network would win huge favour and benefit many thousands of people for generations to come. That is the real challenge.