LMS Route: Rugby to Wolverhampton
LMS Route: Rugby to Leamington
LMS Route: Rugby to Tamworth
LMS Route: Rugby to Leicester
LMS Route: Rugby to Market Harborough

Rugby Station: lnwrrm3174

An unidentified ex-LMS 8F 2-8-0 locomotive is seen in the process of making up an engineers train in connection with the electrification of the West Coast line. The work is being carried out in Hillmorton sidings which was to the south of Rugby on the down side of the line from Kilsby Tunnel. The famous Rugby Masts can be seen in the background. Below is part of a pamphlet produced by the Britiah Transport Commission.

Your New Railway

London Midland Electrification
April 1966

Two Shillings and Sixpence

Introductory Message from Mr H. C. Johnson General Manager, London Midland Region

When the decision was taken to electrify the 412 route miles of main line between Manchester, Liverpool and London, by way of Crewe, Stoke, Birmingham and Tamworth, this 24 per cent slice of the then national network fetched in a tenth of the entire system's passenger and freight earnings and a sixth of its parcels traffic. The justification for this A175 million electrification scheme was as simple as that. Steam was going out and diesel was coming in. If any one route in the country had a sufficient density of traffic to make modern, high-speed railway electrification economic, the London-Birmingham-South Lancashire route was it. In practice, of course, it was more scientific than that. Calculation showed that electrification would pay, and pay well, especially after one had taken into account the fact that many millions of pounds would have had to be spent anyway on rolling stock replacement, renewal of associated depots, track improvement, and modern signalling to make the route fit for today's needs, whether the motive power was steam, diesel or electric.

Of course, there was never any question of replacing steam traction with steam traction on this or any other line. The steam engine was expensive to run, its availability was poor, it needed a lot of servicing, and it used a lot of manpower. The only choice was between diesel and electric traction. Both offer a form of locomotion that is modern, fast and clean. Both are expected to achieve a high standard of reliability, have good acceleration, a uniform standard of performance, and since they require much less servicing and maintenance, they both offer the chance of very high utilization rates. As well as providing a better service to customers, they give the railways much lower train-mile costs. Between diesel and electric traction there was not a very great deal to choose financially. Electrification required over- head conductor wires and clearance that had to be provided under the route's six-hundred-and-forty-nine bridges and in twenty-seven tunnels. A dozen feeder stations had to be provided for the electric power supply, fifty-eight track section cabins, and a hundred-and-nine relay rooms. The opportunity was also taken at the same time to remodel, reconstruct, or refurbish eighty-nine stations, including the main terminus at Euston. All this, too, was bound to disrupt train operations over the line during the years the work was in hand. On the other hand, complete diesel working on this route would run up a bigger bill for rolling stock and would not yield such large overall benefits. On balance, it was reckoned that although electrification would cost more to install, its extra profitability, from cost savings and a slightly higher revenue, would amply justify the additional outlay.

Subsequent events - changes in costs, railway charges, and traffic patterns - have not altered this prospect of economic viability. Indeed in several important respects they have considerably enhanced them. Electrification becomes more advantageous, and cheaper in terms of overall unit costs, the denser the traffic. Moreover, once the basic engineering work on track, structures, power supply, and signalling has been done, traffic capacity of the line can be raised for a proportionately lower additional capital outlay than with diesel traction. Thus the outline plan for the development of railway trunk routes*, can envisage concentrating all traffic between London and Glasgow, London and South Lancashire, and between London and Birmingham on the West Coast route. It should not be forgotten too that the first five Freightliner services, selected to cater for the heaviest flows of merchandise freight traffic, run on this route, between London, Liver- pool, Manchester, and Glasgow. These services will be attracting back to rail a good deal of traffic lost to the roads over the years or never carried by rail before, and south of Liverpool, Crewe, and Manchester these trains will now be hauled by fast electric locomotives.

here are other, less quantifiable, ways in which the economics of electrification have been enhanced by the passage of time. It requires a greater capital outlay than dieselization to set going but incurs a smaller wage bill to run. The capital will soon have all been spent, but the wage bill has to be paid year after year. It is therefore a better hedge against inflation than a diesel system, especially as the railways intend to become a more highly-paid, highly-specialized industry operated by a smaller staff. It is also better to have one's eggs in more than one basket: the London Midland electrification scheme pre- serves a wider element of competition among the railways' suppliers, both in equipment and in fuel. And one should not ignore the advantages to manufacturers of main-line electric rolling stock of a home market on which they can base their exporting efforts in a period when so many railway systems in Europe and elsewhere are electrifying. Choosing between electrification and dieselization was only the first task. A choice had also to be made of the type of electrification. At the time - the mid-1950s - there were two principal railway electrification systems in operation in Britain. Both were direct current systems; one at various low voltages with power collection by third rail and the other at 1,500 volts with power collection by overhead conductor wire. The capital cost of the third rail system is lower but its running costs are higher, particularly on routes carrying heavy freight traffic. An electrified third rail makes track maintenance and working in the yards more tricky for the railway staff, moreover, and it is less reliable during severe winter weather.

But experimental work by French Railways had revealed the considerable advantages to be gained by adopting a new system altogether - the 25-kilovolt alternating-current 50- cycles system with overhead collection. A special investigation of this system by the railways' electrical engineers, with the London Midland scheme specifically in mind, showed that the capital costs of the 25 kV, ac system would be about 5 per cent lower than for the 1,500 V, dc system, and that running costs would be about 8 per cent lower. Fewer sub- stations would be needed alongside the track to feed the power supply in and the overhead equipment of a 25 kY system would be much lighter, and therefore much cheaper. Moreover, there appeared to be much greater room for technological development of an ac system, and trends in electrification overseas pointed to a considerable export potential for ac traction equipment and locomotives. Great strides have been made, for instance, in miniaturization of signalling equipment thanks to the electronics industry, and in reducing the cumbersome size of parts of the overhead equipment by drawing upon new materials. Once the choice of system had been made and the decision to go ahead was given, the real headaches then began. Never before in Britain has a new railway been built on top of an existing one carrying so much traffic at a time when that traffic still had to be moved. The planning and organizational problems were huge. Just consider what all this involved. Nearly 1,500 miles of track had to be provided with electric power, clearance had to be provided for the overhead equipment at, as already mentioned, nearly 700 bridges and tunnels, which meant inviting all the local authorities who had the intention of some day widening the bridges involved to consider dovetailing this work, and the associated road schemes, in with the railways' construction programme. In the design of overhead equipment provision had also to be made for future road schemes - such as new motorways - and for future overhead property development.

Deliveries of all the supplies and equipment needed for this colossal task had to be programmed to arrive in the right quantities, at the right time, to the right place, over a period of seven years along 412 miles of route. Thus room had to be found in a timetable that was already suffering from a substantial reduction in capacity due to the construction work for a very large number of works trains bringing men, equipment and supplies without exacerbating the diversion of traffic to other lines and inconvenience to the public. A good deal of the disruption to existing services could be confined to the weekends, when commercial traffic is much lower, but service diversions and timetables changes had to be worked out well in advance. All this made the London Midland electrification scheme pretty well unique as a construction project. There have been bigger civil engineering jobs over an even longer number of years but none as large as this has had to be undertaken with- out ceasing production. It was rather like keeping an old dam going while building a new one on precisely the same spot. Or putting up a new car factory around the existing assembly line. The special nature of railway working meant other peculiar features, too. For instance, the detailed planning of work and the organization of the labour force had to allow for the safety of the hundreds of men that might be working on the track at any one time - a necessity that also meant drawing a large number of experienced look-out men from a skilled labour force. A sound administration organization had to be developed to provide for simultaneous consideration of traffic and constructional problems, for detailed forward planning to take place at the same time as day-to-day control of current projects, for departmental needs to be brought together, and to provide efficient and prompt communications between head- quarters and the field.

It had to be sufficiently flexible to allow for labour difficulties and delays in material supplies. Good use was made of the latest planning aids - such as network techniques. Major advances in mechanization helped considerably, too; for the boring of foundations for the overhead line equip- ment, for instance. Special concrete trains and special troughing trains were developed, to give speedier installation of overhead equipment and shorter track occupation times. Techniques were evolved to deal with bridge raising - jacking up bridge superstructures, casting concrete arches over the old arches which were then blown from underneath and dragged on to old railway wagons, and the extensive use of pre- and post-stressed concrete units. The whole scheme, originally scheduled for completion in the early 1970s will now be in full operation by early 1967. Commercial services between Crewe and Manchester began as far back as five years ago and between Crewe and Liverpool nearly four years ago. A year later, in January 1963, these were extended southwards to Stafford and farther south to Rugby in November, 1964. By mid-July 1965, three-quarters of the track over the whole route had been energized. In September freight working was extended as far south as Willesden. Full services from Euston in new timings are planned to begin in April 1966. Twelve months later will see the completion of the Birmingham section, between Stafford and Rugby by way of Coventry and Wolverhampton, and of the Stoke section, giving a more direct route to Manchester by way of Macclesfield.

April of this year sees an entirely new pattern of high- speed, regular interval, passenger services from Euston. The impact upon freight working will be even greater, for electric working forms part of a wider revolution now taking place on this side of the railways' business. Traffic is being concentrated in full train loads, rather than wagon loads, and moved at high uniform speeds along the nation's main trade arteries. In this way, the railways can exploit their inherent advantages over road transport and, by providing fast, reliable, bulk transport they can best serve the needs of the nation. It is in this context of a modernized, efficient, and eventually profitable railway system, that the London Midland electrification scheme comes fully into its own.

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