By Ian Walmsley
Feature
Pan Up
Over 6,000 new vehicles on order. If it was Network Rail buying them, that would be ‘the most since Victorian times’, certainly the most since the Modernisation Plan in the 1960s when steam was displaced in haste. Today the driver is capacity, which can now be bought at reasonable cost. Suddenly the winning number on the carefully-audited franchise spreadsheet comes from new trains, but have we thought through the consequences? Of course not, it’s a spreadsheet.