That's not quite how poor or reduced (lack of) maintenance works. Everything degrades, yes, at slightly different rates.
At first, there is no noticeable increase in failures. This situation can go on for some time. Sometimes years.
But given the amount of infrastructure, there are bound to be some items that are close to failing, cracking or breaking. As time goes on, if nothing substantial is done, more items become close to failing.
With reduced resources, as more time is taken up dealing with failures, less and less time and resources are available for preventative maintenance, or for dealing with currently low priority jobs.
Meanwhile, the overall condition of the infrastructure continues to degrade. Hence the failure rate increases more quickly. If it gets really bad, the failure rate can escalate far faster than people expect.
Weather can of course have an effect. You will get more broken rails when you get cold (freezing) nights. Especially if it's warm durning the day. Rail also affects certain items.
By the time that the company's top management realise how bad it really is, it's often too late. A lot of "damage" has been done (meaning rather more items than expected will need to be replaced long before their otherwise nominal lifespan). To turn it around, you need to spend a lot of money. There is for example, no point in putting in brand new rail if the sleepers, ballast and formation are in a poor condition.
Compare to Railtrack reducing routine rail grinding and the resulting gauge corner cracking problems... BR has fallen into similar traps in the past as well.
That will be fun, it took a dispute for Western to get some extra section 4 time down there as it is.
Indeed.
The other elephant in the room is historical renewals, and how track renewals are managed.
A year or several back I recall a particularly tricky renewal on the GWML, specced as a full dig with membrane as it was an area prone to wetbeds.
TBH, the time allocated for the block was a bit tight, but was all that was avaliable. (Remember, these big blocks are being booked 2 years out to be affordable, under the delay regime, the closer to the event you book the more it costs).
On the day (weekend) of the race, usual thing, late last passenger trains so possession taken late. Foul weather (always slows thing down), some plant (remember this is a lowest cost operation) breaks down causing more delays.
So, in order to hand back on time, the work was de-scoped. It's not a full depth dig anymore, no membrane and everyone making the decision, including the Network Rail engineer who made the final call, knew that 5 to 10 years later this area would again have wet bed issues. But no one would risk the cost of an overrun to make sure the job was done properly, after all, how many of the decision makers would be around by the time the consequences of the invisible short cuts became evident? It was safe for hardback, just half a job guaranteeing problem recurrence a few years down the line. When Network Rail is in 5 year funding cycles (Control Periods) and the track renewals contracts are relet every 5 years, where's the incentive to do a propor job?
"Delay minutes are the currency of the railway and s**t flows downhill."
The one imperative in any possession is "hand back on time."
It's not unusual for a renewal to run late during the weekend but always hand back on time. Until the culture changes from "well done for handing back on time" to asking "so exactly how did you pull back on time, what corners were cut?" AND the malign influence of Schedule 4 and Schedule 8 is mitigated (ie until the regime is such that it incentivises handing back a 100% job late than a de-scoped job on time) then nothing will change.
This has been known about for years. Its particularly relevant where you have a formation which is prone to wetbeds and traffic that is busy enough to make getting longer all-line blocks for full digs rather challenging.
TPO
