My Lords, this is my last amendment in this section and it is to do with timetabling. Again, we had this experience with Crossrail and the great western route. We were pressing for a long time, saying, “You’re adding extra trains on to the great western. Where will all the freight trains and the intercities go, as you’re not building any more tracks?”. I said they had to produce a timetable. The first timetable produced for the great western between Reading and London was wonderful but it had only Crossrail trains on it. They said, “That’s the timetable” and I said, “What about the other trains?”. They said, “Oh, we haven’t put them on”. I said, “If you’re running a railway, you’ve got to put every train on the timetable. Don’t be silly, go away and do it again”. After about a couple of years, they came back and said. “Here it is”.
I gave their timetable to my experts and said, “Is the freight capacity that the Government have committed to on the timetable?”. They said, “Well, you’ve got
22 freight trains a day on it and you asked for 26”. I said, “Where are the others?”. They said, “Crossrail says they are on the timetable”. They were, but for a different line that went across the great western route on a bridge, so it was completely irrelevant. I got pretty angry then and said, “Can they go the other way?”. They said, “We haven’t checked that but it’s on the timetable”. They were adamant that they had to get priority for the Crossrail trains to Reading on the slow lines. They really wanted all the other trains to go on the fast lines. I got as far as telling some Members of Parliament in Cardiff and Bristol that they were going to have one train an hour and not two, because Crossrail was going to take all the paths. Eventually, the infrastructure manager was told by the Government to do a comprehensive timetable, which is Network Rail’s job. That is what should happen.
Here, we have HS2 and the west coast main line. As I said on Tuesday, you have six tracks at Handsacre junction going into three for a bit, so there may be a traffic jam of trains. It is reasonable to have a draft timetable produced either by HS2 or Network Rail, or hopefully by both, to demonstrate how many of the trains that everybody wants to run can actually run up there. I argued against Handsacre on Tuesday but if it happens, we have to have a timetable because otherwise something will go wrong. It should be up to the regulator to decide which trains have priority and who can run them.
This is very much a probing amendment. The Minister may say that it is happening already, although I would slightly challenge that. If it is not, perhaps he could say a few words to the relevant people to make sure that it does happen quite quickly and that there is good consultation with all the operators. I beg to move.