SMART

[from Helen Pidd, The Guardian, Wed 29 May 2019]

Turning Pacer trains into village halls? Send them down south instead

Plans to repurpose these rusty old trains isn’t even a bad joke. Where’s the focus on decent rail services in northern England?

It was one of those press releases so silly I had check I wasn’t about to fall for some ridiculous prank: could the department for transport (DfT) really be heralding an “exciting” new plan to offer northern towns the chance to bid for a knackered old Pacer train to turn into “a community space, cafe or new village hall”?

I refreshed my browser, checked the URL didn’t include the second level domain joke.uk, and gasped. It was real. Rail minister Andrew Jones really had said:

“Through this competition we can ensure that the Pacer can be transformed to serve a community near where it carried passengers in an entirely different way. What we need now are creative and exciting proposals from the public, alongside ideas from businesses keen to support this competition, as we say goodbye to Pacers on our railway.”

Jones, whose government has cut council budgets so dramatically that they will have lost almost 60p in the £1 for local services in the decade to 2020, was actually suggesting that community spaces shuttered as a result of his administration’s austerity drive be replaced by train carriages with toilets less modern than many at Glastonbury.

A government not so much tin-eared as deaf, blind and so out of touch with northern England that it tried to sell this insulting, laughable idea as something so thrilling that we would actually compete for rusty old trains long abandoned by Iran as too antiquated. Perhaps the civil servant who came up with it could totally see hipsters in Hackney turning them into bars serving cocktails out of old British Rail mugs with ironic names such as Pacer Colada or Screwdriver (Anyone? Train’s Broken Down). As Wigan MP Lisa Nandy put it: “If this is the ‘northern powerhouse’ they can keep it.”

As a very regular rail passenger in the north of England, I often have the extreme displeasure of travelling on Pacer trains. Famously cobbled together on the cheap, using the shell of a Leyland bus welded to a freight wagon frame, they went out of service in the south-east of England many years ago, but the government has allowed successive private rail companies to keep them rumbling on in the north. Never mind the fact that the doors jam, the roofs leak and the windows won’t close (you’ll have to keep your coat on and hood up in your new village hall).I took one with my 10-year-old stepdaughter a few weeks ago. She lives in the Midlands, where Pacers went out of fashion before she was born, and wanted to know why the bench seats had no headrests and were all facing one direction like on a bus. Why are the brakes screeching like that? (“Flange squeal” on tight corners caused by the long wheelbase and lack of ride-smoothing bogies: themselves a modern luxury invented in 1874) If you flush the toilet does it really all end up on the track? (Yes) Why aren’t there any tables? (We northerners do not deserve such opulence) Can I plug in my iPod Touch? (dream on, honeybun).

Pacers were supposed to be phased out as part of the Northern rail franchise, which is so badly run that the mayors of Greater Manchester and Liverpool city region on Wednesday called for it to be taken under government control.

The National Railway Museum in York was hoping to put a Pacer on display in its history section this year but had to postpone the exhibition after Northern admitted it still needed them in service.

Jonathan Reynolds, MP for Stalybridge and Hyde in Greater Manchester, couldn’t see his constituents bidding for a Pacer cafe or playgroup.

“I am not sure my constituents will agree that this is an ‘exciting opportunity’, unless one of them is turned into a museum dedicated to highlighting years of under-investment in northern transport,” he told the Manchester Evening News. “My personal suggestion would be to invite my fed up constituents to dismantle them piece by piece, a bit like when the Berlin Wall came down.”

There may come a time in the distant future – when a new high-speed rail line in the north from east to west has been built and it no longer takes almost three hours, one change and a fair wind to get from Liverpool to Hull – when we are ready to enjoy Pacers ironically. But not yet.

• Helen Pidd is the Guardian’s north of England editor

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/29/pacer-trains-village-halls-send-down-south

Is this all that’s left of the “Northern Powerhouse”?

The offer of a draughty village hall with a leaky roof.

[Article from the Yorkshire Post, 29th May 2019, follows.]

“Minister offers to give away Pacer trains to community groups”

It might turn into a competition no-one wants to win, but as he leant on the cab of the Pacer train standing at platform seven in Leeds, the Rail Minister was doing his best to sound optimistic.

The so-called railbuses – bus bodies welded on to a train chassis – were intended by the old British Railways to be in service for only 20 years, but nearly 40 will have passed when at the end of the year they are finally retired. However, we still might not have seen the last of them.

The Minister, the Harrogate MP Andrew Jones, was hoping that some of his constituents might be sorry enough to see them go, to want to bid for one as the prize in a competition.

“What’s second prize? Two of them?”

wondered the driver of the one on platform seven when the details were put to him.

Mr Jones, who hopes community groups will propose ideas for the onward use of three Pacer carriages for the common good, said:

“I could easily imagine them in lots of different uses. Scout huts, doesn’t really matter. I don’t want to put parameters on this.”

Admitting that the trains did not have the cachet of red telephone boxes, hundreds more of which were made available to communities earlier this month, the Minister said:

“Most people will be really rather pleased that they’re going. But I think some will have a soft spot for them.

 “The trains can’t have much value, although there’s always scrap value in metal. But if there’s a way of prolonging their service to the community, then I think we should be encouraging it.”

The trains are owned by Porterbrook, one of three large leasing companies created in 1994 as part of the privatisation of British Rail, It is making three carriages available to the competition winners, who will be chosen in the autumn.

Northern, the rail company that runs the Pacers in Yorkshire, admitted last December that it had not begun retiring its fleet, as it had promised to do.

But Mr Jones said the company had assured him that its schedule was back on track.

 “We’ve seen quite a bit of progress over the past few weeks. We’re seeing approval of the new trains that are coming into service. They have to be approved by the regulator and we’re now at the point where Northern is able to look at staff training, engineering and renewal,” he said.

Asked how passengers in prosperous south Buckinghamshire might react if a Pacer turned up for their commute to Marylebone tomorrow morning, the Minister said:

“What was appropriate several years ago – in this case several decades ago – is not appropriate any more. “I know that when you turn up at the station expecting another train and one of these turns up it can cause a problem. But we are in the middle of a renewal of some scale right across the network.”

Some previous Yorkshire Pacers were sold to Iran at the end of their regular life, but the authorities there phased them out nearly 15 years ago.

Similar options for the current fleet were “a question for Porterbrook”, Mr Jones said.

The North’s rail network was still playing “catch-up” from the effects of the “no growth” franchise that was in place from 2004-16, he added.

“Other parts of the network were seeing investment – we didn’t get any. We should have been planning for growth.

“We are now making progress having had a long period of utter stagnation.”

Mr Jones said passenger numbers had continued to grow during that time even though the capacity had not.

“It just led to congested trains and the rolling stock becoming even less fit for purpose,” he said.

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/transport/minister-offers-to-give-away-pacer-trains-to-community-groups