Railways boss plans prefabricated stations

By Pete Harrison

LONDON (Reuters) - Dozens of prefabricated glass and steel stations and around 1,700 new carriages on trains running 7 days a week will shape Britain's future railways, says the chief executive of rail infrastructure company Network Rail.

The news is likely to be welcomed by passengers who make over a billion train journeys a year and have become used to overcrowded carriages, decrepit stations and closures each Sunday for maintenance.

Iain Coucher is the man tasked with overhauling and expanding the clogged system at a cost of more than 10 billion pounds over the next 7 years.

"Rail usage is at its highest level since 1946 and will soon be at its highest ever," Coucher told Reuters late on Wednesday on the eve of submitting to government Network Rail's plans for renewal and expansion to 2014.

"Lots of the stations are very tired and very old," added Coucher, who took over as CEO in July.

"We can produce a high quality, high tech station for about a million pounds, with 13 weeks for installation, so there's minimum passenger disruption. The first one's going into a station in south London, at Eastfields, in the next few weeks."

Traditionally, station renewals have cost over 4 million pounds each and led to lengthy closures, putting the system under even more stress, but Coucher plans to install around 25 of the new structures a year for the next decade.

"We're also looking at modular bridges and anything we can replicate," said Coucher, who is starting to make a name for himself through his hands-on style. "It's all about driving down the Railway's unit costs."

The focus on modularity is a new approach Coucher has brought to the job, but plans for a "seven day railway" predate his arrival as chief executive.

"At the moment, we do too much at the weekends and passengers hate it," he said. "Increasingly over the next two years, you'll see much less."

Working processes will be changed to fit into the eight- hour time slots available at night.

Network Rail has managed to cut the time taken to replace a set of railway points from 54 hours to 27 and aims to have that down to an 8-hour night shift by 2010.

But Coucher's biggest challenge will come from overhauling some of the biggest and busiest stations, such as London Bridge, Blackfriars by the River Thames and Reading Station, which forms a bottleneck on Britain's main east-west artery.

"London Bridge will be a challenge and will take meticulous planning," he said. "Blackfriars will be about building a station on a bridge, which has never been done in the UK before. People will be able to exit on either side of the Thames."

And will all of this fit within the 10 billion pounds budget the government has allocated?

"It's there or thereabouts," he added.