Key stakeholders and influential figures convened for a joint discussion regarding the future of rail transportation in the North-east, focusing on the four essential elements required to unlock the region’s potential.
Organised and hosted by the Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce, the gathering was filled with engaged participants, including politicians and members of the community. Among the lineup of knowledgeable speakers presenting was Jordan Jack, the general secretary of the Campaign for North East Rail.
Mr Jack addressed the advantages of reopening stations at Cove and Newtonhill, likening them to Dyce regarding population density and industrial proximity, particularly its closeness to the ETZ.
He also highlighted the necessity of enhancing the railway link between Aberdeen and Inverness, aiming to reduce travel times to under two hours, which would be 45 minutes quicker than driving.
This improvement would allow train operators to make two round trips to Inverness within a single day, a feat currently unattainable due to existing break requirements.
Jordan’s third and fourth priorities include reopening platform 8 at Aberdeen station and reviving the Buchan line. He mentioned that carbon capture and storage freight would greatly benefit from enhancements to rail infrastructure.
Paul Finch, director of Nestrans, also delivered a presentation.
He said: “Inter city services in Scotland, this is the ScotRail services, the high-speed train services, are vital for our area because although we’ve got typically a three-hour travel time, the only choice you’ve got if you’re a businessman is to use the train.
“We really, really do need to see a plan coming forward for the replacement of those HSTs, the reliability issues, not knowing if you’re going to get a two-car or three-car train, these things are really important for our region as well, and getting those journey times down.
“Aberdeen-Central Belt; it’s not just about journey time, that investment, they’ve come up with a really good plan for capacity improvements, signal improvements, bypasses so the faster trains can get past the slower trains, track enhancements at Aberdeen and Dundee.
“It’s a great scheme. Network Rail are doing a power of work on it, it’s just the amount of money they’ve been allowed to get to do that work is constraining the rate of progress I would suggest, at least in the long term. That essentially comes down to capital allocations from the central government for the North-east.
“That opens up freight opportunities, the inter city opportunities and the local rail opportunities.”
Mr Finch went on: “We’re going to be publishing shortly the STAG appraisal work which includes the local stations at Cove and Newtonhill. We believe there’s strong cases for continuing to develop that work and we hope that our board agree with us at the end of June when we take that to them.”
“We’re very keen on seeing how the Aberdeen to Inverness route can be taken forward. I don’t think that the A96 appraisal did that corridor any sort of justice as well. I think we were quite clear of that and we’d like to continue to work with our colleagues in HITRANS to see what component rail can work along that corridor alongside targeted interventions on that road.”
Mathew Spence, director of strategy and investment with Scotland’s Railway at Network Rail, outlined several crucial elements of any current short-term investment strategy for rail.
He said: “Fleet renewal, a lot of our trains are reaching the end of their service life. A lot of the diesel trains cannot be replaced by diesel trains, so that’s what’s driving the electrification programme.
“The next key thing is accessibility. We’ve done an awful lot of work on that in the last few years because we didn’t really have a good strategy around accessibility, which is not acceptable.
“We’re really looking to investment in accessibility generally.
“Freight is a key issue. We have some very specific freight growth targets and we’re doing an awful lot of work around freight.
“Freight has really struggled, that’s the reality.
“We’re at the situation at the moment, and this is how bad it is, that it’s cheaper to run a diesel freight train rather than an electric freight train, even if the electrification was there.”
Mr. Spence indicated that the UK rail sector is financed in five-year intervals, with the funding settlement for 2024-29 amounting to £4.2 billion. He noted that his team had submitted a project proposal to Transport Scotland’s investment decision panel in April/May 2024, but it had been rejected due to financial constraints, as it was deemed “not affordable at that time.”
However, Mr. Spence expressed optimism about the potential for success through restructuring the proposal.
He said: “With the suburban fleet coming in, hopefully sooner rather than later, with the intercity replacement and the signalling alterations, you actually get – even in this first phase of the scheme – an awful lot of the benefit.
“You get better connectivity and service provision from a stopping perspective between Dundee and Aberdeen, the HST replacements will give line speed capability coupled with the signalling headways as we call it, so fantastic benefit there as well.
“You get better performance and resilience and the ability to start putting extra freight in as well.
“We can go back to our investment decision and repackage the business case and the funding, if we are successful, can be applied in different ways.”
Scott Prentice, strategy and planning director, ScotRail, outlined a series of investments and improvements in the pipeline.
He said: “Our trains are getting old. ScotRail currently has the second oldest train fleet in Britain and over the next 10 years we will need to replace two thirds of our trains.
“We’ve got 15 projects at about £13million that we’re working through this financial year and they’ll primarily improve the reliability of trains.
“ScotRail currently is training 160 drivers a year, about half of that goes to replacing retirees and the other half is to improve our spare cover ratio.
“We’re recruiting an extra 30 staff and this summer you will see a big difference in terms of the number of intercity services which have on-train hospitality.
“Our biggest issue is the knock-on impacts caused by our intercity trains not being reliable enough. When they run, people love them.
“The things we know aren’t great are that they’re not great places to work because the connectivity’s no great and seat reservations aren’t intuitive.
“We’re doing a big investigation into how to improve the timetable between Aberdeen and Inverness.”
Ed Turner, senior public affairs manager at LNER, disclosed that the company would be increasing services during the Tall Ships event in July to accommodate the expected rise in passenger numbers.
He also mentioned that LNER was seeking to collaborate with a local business in Aberdeen or Aberdeenshire to provide food for its services.
The outputs from this session will inform AGCC’s engagement with political parties ahead of next year’s Holyrood election and shape its manifesto, ensuring that the region’s rail priorities are firmly on the agenda.
