Thursday 30 October 2008

For pity's sake

Telegrammed by our man in 222 Marylebone Road
In assessing the affordability of DafT's High Level Output Specification for its final Determination (published today) the Office of Rail Regulation had to take into account the cost of leasing extra vehicles.

Obviously the source of data is DafT's Laughing Stock Plan which allocates the 1156 (at the last count) additional vehicles.

ORR comments:

When DfT submitted its HLOS in July 2007, it estimated that at least 1300 new vehicles would be required to deliver the extra capacity.

In its SBP Network Rail estimated 1519.

DfT published a Rolling-Stock Plan in January 2008. This stated that “The emerging indicative number of vehicles is set out in Appendix B. The additional trains may be new vehicles or vehicles cascaded from other services.”

As Appendix B of its document combined new vehicles and cascades we did not use it as the basis for our draft determinations.

So even with all those consultants ORR is baffled too!