I was privileged to ride on the record-breaking Eurostar from Paris to St Pancras on 4 September, travelling out the day before on the 13.41 departure from Waterloo International.
Checking my emails on arrival in Paris, I noted one from Virgin Trains saying they had been “inundated with demand for train travel from football supporters travelling to London for the England versus Israel European Championship qualifier at Wembley”.
Reservations on trains had been suspended “in the interests of public safety”, said Virgin.
The press release added a quote from Chris Gibb, managing director of Virgin West Coast: “The holding of large sporting events anywhere on the railway network presents a huge logistical challenge for the industry”.
This was just five days before the start of the Rugby World Cup in France – where the visible presence of stand-by rolling stock in the evening peak period (by comparison with what happens in this country) is astonishing.
Leaving Lille on the Eurostar at 16.35, I counted six TGVs, mostly double-deckers, sitting idle in sidings. In terms of seating capacity, these were probably equivalent to at least 10 or 12 high-speed trains in Britain or, say, one third of GNER’s entire electric fleet! Can you imagine 10 ‘Mallard’ trains being on stand-by at Peterborough or Doncaster in the late afternoon?
Arriving in Paris 55 minutes later, I lost count of the ‘classic’ and commuter train sets standing by, complete with electric locomotives, in the sidings approaching Le Landy.
And in the high-speed train depot I counted at least six more TGVs, plus two Thalys trains (for services to Brussels, Amsterdam or Cologne) and – worst of all, for a Brit like me – a 14-car Eurostar, originally built to operate continental services north of London but now repainted with TGV branding, waiting to work domestic services in Northern France.
By comparison, our government has said 1,300 new passenger coaches will be provided in the next few years to improve train capacity. But few of these will be for long-distance main-line services – essentially, just 106 vehicles, to enable Virgin’s 53 Pendo-linos to be increased from nine to 11 vehicles.
Arriva will also re-create five HSTs using previously withdrawn Mk 3 coaches, and National Express plans to bring back further Mk 3 coaches to provide additional capacity on the East Coast main line.
But none of this will come close to matching the sort of spare capacity held in reserve by our colleagues running railways in mainland Europe.
Mind you, it is not even clear how many passengers we are actually carrying on our British trains at present.
Last year I commented on the double, treble or even-more counting of passengers travelling from point A to point B via trains run by different operators.
AEA Technology, commissioned by the Office of Rail Regulation, found the average head-count inflation factor was 1.6 – so every 1,000 actual journeys were counted as 1,600. If that 60 per cent increase is deducted from the 1.1 billion journeys claimed by politicians in 2005, the actual number would reduce to 687.5 million.
In fact, I said, many journeys did not warrant double counting as they were between two locations on direct services. But what did seem certain was that the actual number of journeys in 2005 was less than 1.1 billion – and probably under a billion.
This now appears to be confirmed, but has only come to light because of information tucked away in a footnote to statistics published by the Welsh Assembly Government – based, however, on information provided by the ORR, which publishes much higher figures in its quarterly National Rail Trends.
The WAG footnote states: “For the analysis of origin-destination movements it is important that through journeys are recorded as a single entity. Therefore the definition of a journey used in this table is inconsistent with that used in National Rail Trends”.
The problem seems to be that the NRT figures are derived from the LENNON database.
“There are limitations on LEN-NON,” Catherine Cousins, rail statistics manager at the ORR, told Transit magazine, which first reported these figures. “When you buy a ticket going into London, it’s not stating a station, it’s stating any London terminus. You can then go to any station within London.
“The trouble with LENNON is you don’t know how many of those people are doing that [changing trains].
“People in the industry are realis-ing that the LENNON database, even though it’s used and valued, shouldn’t be used to count passengers. It is just a revenue and ticketing database.”
So, there we have it. The actual number of passengers seems to be considerably less than the one billion that everyone is wont to claim.
But even so, the industry still hasn’t got – nor is likely to have in future – sufficient capacity to cope with a surge in passengers when special demands, such as major sporting events, arise.
Did someone say London was staging the Olympics in 2012?