Britain likes to pretend it has a modern railway. Most weeks, the network does its best to expose that as a polite fiction. In the space of seven days, Britain’s railways can showcase world-class engineering — and then collapse under the weight of Victorian design, extreme weather and decades of strategic neglect. We talk endlessly about transformation, but when it matters most, the system still behaves like a museum piece, and freight is left paying the price says UK Editor Simon Walton.
A modern railway should be reliable, resilient and predictable. The network in Britain is none of those things consistently. Instead, it remains a thread, stitched together from Victorian ambition, post-war compromise and modern desperation. Engineers do extraordinary work to keep it functioning, but they are fighting history as much as gravity.
Victorian marvels with Victorian limits
We like to talk reverently about Britain’s railway heritage. The great main lines, the tunnels through mountains, the sea walls clinging to cliffs. But endurance is not the same as suitability. Much of the network was never designed for the intensity, frequency and weight of modern operations. It was built for slower trains, lighter loads and far more generous recovery margins. Today’s railway runs hotter, harder and closer to capacity, with capacity systematically stripped out. When something goes wrong, there is precious little slack.
This week’s announcement of a further £400 million €464m) upgrade to the West Coast Main Line, already Europe’s busiest mixed traffic route, is welcome, but it is also revealing. The WCML is not a single coherent piece of infrastructure — it is a patchwork of Victorian routes, built for profit (often to the lowest cost), progressively electrified, widened, remodelled and digitised over more than a century. Each intervention improves matters, but none changes the fundamental truth. This is an old railway being asked to behave like a new one. It is no accident that the line runs, for long stretches, within sight of the M6 motorway, built almost a hundred years later, designed for modern demand, lavished with improvements, and a direct competitor for freight.
When resilience fails, freight pays
Dramatic waves crashing through Devonian breakwaters make dramatic headlines. Inconvenienced passengers provide the narrative. The media narrative focuses almost exclusively on their plight. “Understandably so,” said a shipping container – never. Freight feels the disruption just as sharply, and often more painfully, and never does a voice piece to camera.
A delayed or diverted freight train does not generate angry tweets. It generates late deliveries, broken production schedules, idle factories and contractual penalties. Yet the reputational damage often lands not with the infrastructure owner, but with the freight operator, the only visible link in the chain. Landslips, washouts and fires do not discriminate between passenger and freight routes. The difference is that when freight is delayed, the economic impact is largely unseen. Absorbed quietly by industry and passed on through supply chains, and making the logistics manager wary of rail for the next time.
The cost of losing redundancy
Britain has spent decades stripping redundancy out of its railway. The consequences are now unavoidable. The repeated vulnerability of the coastal route at Dawlish exposes the folly of leaving Devon and Cornwall dependent on a single, fragile artery, when an inland Dartmoor route once offered resilience. In Scotland, the loss of the Waverley Route removed an inland alternative to both the East and West Coast main lines.
This week’s Transpennine disruption through Standedge Tunnel, following a fire, has thrown a harsh light on another strategic folly. The closure of the Woodhead Route, a line purposely electrified for freight, and engineered for heavy industry. It would today provide exactly the sort of diversionary capacity the network lacks. Instead, when a key route fails, the system seizes up. Will the multi-billion-pound Transpennine Route Upgrade make up for that, or will it be a manifestation of the ‘eggs in one basket’ network with which we live.
Human cost cannot be ignored
Infrastructure failure is not just inconvenient — it can be fatal. The memories of Greyrigg (now 19 years ago) and the 2020 Carmont crash are not historical footnotes. They are warnings. Carmont, in particular, exposed the deadly interaction between extreme weather, inadequate drainage, ageing earthworks and faulty workmanship (for which Network Rail paid a huge fine). That tragedy, currently the subject of a fatal accident enquiry, underlines the human cost of a network pushed beyond its limits.
As if we needed reminding, even the modern network requires close attention and strict discipline. The disasters in Spain this month serve to awaken us to the dangers of damage to the infrastructure, old and new. In Britain, similar lessons have been mercifully fewer, but in an industry that rightly expects everyone to be safe at all times – whether worker or passenger or bystander – the onus is often placed on a network that was not built, but has been repeatedly adapted to adhere to such modern standards. Threats, and they are often climate related, are not future concerns. They are clear and present dangers, and much of Britain’s railway was not built for it.
A freight network we pretend we no longer need
There is an unspoken assumption behind much transport policy. It believes that Britain is no longer an industrial nation, and therefore no longer needs a freight-capable railway on the scale it once had. That assumption is wrong. Modern Britain still manufactures, still imports raw materials, still exports finished goods. The difference is that much of that movement now happens by road — not because it is better, but because rail is too often unreliable. This is perverse. Rail freight aligns perfectly with environmental ambitions, congestion reduction and energy efficiency. Yet every infrastructure failure pushes customers back to the motorway.
Programmes like the Transpennine Route Upgrade, the East Coast Digital Programme, and continued investment on the West Coast are essential. They will deliver capacity, safety and performance improvements. They are not enough on their own.
A modern, resilient, freight-capable railway requires strategic thinking, not just heroic engineering. It needs capacity and route availability. It needs climate resilience, and, above all, an honest reckoning with the limits of Victorian infrastructure. A week is a long time on Britain’s railway. Long enough to see progress, and long enough to see failure. Solving the deeper problem will take far longer than seven days. Until it does, Britain will continue to run a twenty-first-century economy on nineteenth-century foundations, and wonder why it is not up to the challenge.