Four consortia are about to hear if their proposals to run London Underground have been successful after 17 months of intensive bid preparation. Control of three huge infrastructure companies is at stake managing some £7bn ($9.8bn) of new investment in LU’s railways.

The "best and final offers" were submitted by the consortia in mid-November. LU’s decision on the two deep-level Tube companies, Infraco JNP and Infraco BCV, and probably also on the subsurface railways’ Infraco SSL, will be revealed in January.

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On 1 April the successful consortia will each take on about 2000 engineering staff from LU’s shadow companies, plus a 30 year lease for maintenance of a cluster of the capital’s rail lines – unless a political backlash against the plan following the Hatfield mainline train crash, scuppers the entire process.

The declared intention of the British government in March 1998 was that the LU public/private partnership will free up capital spending and facilitate wholesale modernisation of the network’s civil, mechanical, electrical and rail infrastructure. These radical improvements will inevitably require a substantial amount of tunnelling work on enlarging stations, improving interchanges, adding escalators and rebuilding running tunnels to increase train capacity through some of the most complex line intersections.

Three basic criteria are being used to judge the bids:

  • Capability: what spending on new assets can offer in the way of performance, such as capacity of rolling stock or a new station interchange tunnel.
  • Availability: how does proposed new works interfere with the capacity of the railway to carry passengers? ie out of hours construction or wholesale closure of a line.
  • Ambience: is the upgraded infrastructure safe and clean?

    • The consortia say that very high targets and standards are being set by LU. For the first six months the infracos will have to be within +/-5% of the operating standards recently achieved by LU management. The 5% allows for normal variations. Performance less than 95% will be severely penalised. After six months the targets will be revised – upwards. Meanwhile LU itself will continue to set the timetables, operate the trains, staff the stations and collect the fares.

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    London’s underground railway network is a vast and intricate system. A large proportion of the 408 route km is constructed below the surface, nearly 100km of it in subsurface covered way and about 150km bored as deep level Tube tunnels.

    The subsurface lines were built primarily between the 1860s and 1880s. New deep level, small diameter Tube lines in the central area followed in a construction scrummage of rival promotions, insolvencies and takeovers between about 1890 and 1910. Consolidation, improvement and extension of this privately owned network continued after the First World War.

    Then came what now appears to be a golden age of coordinated public investment and design with consolidation of the railways in 1933 under the London Passenger Transport Board. But some major projects were interrupted by the Second World War and did not open until the late 1940s.

    Only three major new schemes have followed: the 1960s Victoria Line, 1970s Piccadilly Heathrow extension and 1970s-1990s Jubilee Line. Starved of cash in recent years, the network is groaning under increasing passenger loads and recent improvements have been cosmetic rather than radical upgrades.

    Precisely what radical improvement might be made under different, privatised, managements after April is at the heart of the bidding process for the three service contracts. Rivalry between the bidders and political sensitivity is such that LU is being exceptionally tight-lipped about what can be wrought from the new financing and management arrangements.

    "It’s a hefty piece of very heavily programmed work," summarised one bidder whose teams have been crawling all over LU’s tunnelled infrastructure for months.

    Users of the Underground would be delighted by relatively small and short term investments such as a massive effort put into getting all of the Tube’s fatigue cracked escalators back in service.

    Though tunnellers will have to wait a few weeks yet to see the firm details of what is on the shopping list for them, the project possibilities are:

  • Fresh thinking to improve capacity and possibly introduce new through running on the Circle Line could result in some massive underground works at the "corners" of the route.
  • On the Northern Line, stations such as Clapham North and Clapham Common still have narrow island platforms which are completely at odds with modern ideas on safety. New station tunnels are needed.
  • Euston Square station on the Circle Line is a typical legacy of inter-railway company rivalry in the 1860s. The Great Western Railway was obliged by Parliament to have a station at Euston on its newfangled underground link to the City but wanted to make it as inconvenient as possible for customers of the London & North Western Railway. It has been that way ever since.



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