If it’s more a concession than a franchise why wouldn’t it work? Obviously it relies on a decent spec from DfT/NR.......
I don’t understand why a civils/electrification/trainbuilder/finance JV wouldnt be quite keen on a juicy long term contract.
what’s the problem - it gets rid of a lot of urban diesel miles, and if you present it as two schemes on same line it is London and Birmingham metro routes, not a competitor for HS2.
First Group looked at funding electrification from ECML to Hull for their Hull Trains operation and couldn't make the finances work, we all did a lot of work on the financial aspects and it just couldn't be made to work. The borrowing costs were simply too high for a project of that nature and the risk was quite significant (perhaps more so than on some other projects with both financial and technical risk to grapple with). It all drifted into a Government project subject to Hull Trains paying a substantial contribution and it was then abandoned.
I also think you're being spectacularly naive if you think anything handed out in the next five years will be describable as "juicy long term contract" - and as we found out with the NW project, it doesn't take much going wrong for all of your cost forecasts to go out of the window, so with the wafer thin margins that are going to be on offer, out of necessity, there won't be much flesh to absorb any significant time and/or cost overruns with a project to electrify the Chiltern Route.
You also forget that Chiltern was owned by John Laing for much of its early life and they did the design-build-finance route on all of the Evergreen upgrades on the Chiltern Route, upto part way through Evergreen 3 which went very sour and needed NR intervention to resolve, admittedly in part due to trying to resolve the conflict between what Chiltern needed and what East West Rail wanted, but that's going to be typical of an electrification scheme. What will suit Chiltern in terms of structures, feeders and such, certainly won't suit freight or other passenger users of the routes.
I also wish you the very best of luck working out how to get your new electric stock working on the shared LUL track - that alone promises to be almost as significant an issue as getting the Crossrail Class 345 stock running, given the different signalling systems. Oh, and of course, Chiltern needs signalling works to get it ready for 25kV too - big bill for that coming up on the horizon.
And I don't see how you can say investment in another London to Birmingham route is not going to be politically difficult when you've got HS2 ongoing.
As I've said, there are easier early routes than the Chiltern to focus on first of all - some have significant route mileage largely or totally cleared, ready for little more than masts and wiring to complete them, others have files and folders with all the survey work done and the what needs done when plans ready to go. They'll have to go first in any case because of the sequencing of clearance and installation works.
