ECML Electrification Chief Don Heath Dies at 86, Leaving a £0.7 Billion Legacy

The man who delivered the East Coast Main Line electrification for £0.7 billion at today's prices — roughly £0.5 million per single track kilometre — has died at the age of 86. Donald "Don" Heath OBE, who died in August, ran the seven-year programme that brought the first electric train between London King's Cross and Edinburgh in 1991, just eight weeks late and only 4.4% over its authorised budget.

For a generation of railway managers, Heath's record on the ECML remains the benchmark against which every subsequent British electrification scheme has been measured. Few have matched it. None has bettered it on cost.

What did the ECML programme actually cover?

Heath's responsibilities went far beyond the wires. The authorised electrification budget was £174 million, sitting alongside a £132 million rolling stock procurement. That fleet order comprised 31 Class 91 and 21 Class 90 electric locomotives, 282 Mark 4 coaches and four Class 317 EMUs.

He also controlled complex resignalling schemes at York, costed at £16 million, and Newcastle, at £27 million. The combined authorised cost of electrification and rolling stock was £306.3 million at 1983 prices. The programme ran seven years from authorisation to the first King's Cross–Edinburgh electric service in 1991.

Heath set out how the project was controlled in a 2017 Rail Engineer article, 'Electrification as it used to be'. He acknowledged that conditions four decades ago were easier. Traffic levels were far lower, allowing headspans to be installed during a daytime four-track line blockage. There was also no requirement for Environmental Statements.

What happened when his advice was ignored?

The sharpest lesson came later. When Heath was asked to advise the Great Western Electrification Programme (GWEP), he found the senior project team unwilling to listen. He said no one wanted to hear him, because the team did not consider his British Rail experience relevant.

The consequence was stark. GWEP was delivered three years late at almost three times its original estimate, after a large part of the programme was cut back. Its electrification cost £3.1 million per single track kilometre at 2026 prices — more than six times the ECML figure.

That failure has done lasting political damage. Despite good work since to reduce electrification costs, GWEP's legacy is that many in Government consider electrification the wrong technology, or believe the industry cannot deliver it at an affordable price.

What was his wider career?

Heath's first project management role at British Rail was the Picc-Vic rail tunnel under Manchester — a scheme that was 'shovel ready' when the Government refused spending approval in the 1970s. He then project-managed West Coast Main Line improvements to allow the ill-fated Advanced Passenger Train to run at 140mph.

After the ECML, he became BR's lead on what was then known as Crossrail. He specified and costed the project, which the Treasury judged unaffordable. But Heath safeguarded that work, and it became the basis of the scheme approved 15 years later — by Andy Burnham, then chief secretary to the Treasury — which opened as the Elizabeth Line.

In 2025, Heath and his former colleague John Buxton published 'Lines of Power: The Electrification of British Railways'. The book formed the basis of Rail Engineer's Railway 200 history of electrification in Issue 217 (November–December 2025), itself in part a story of postponed and cancelled projects like some of those in Heath's own career.

What did he do outside the main line?

Heath was a railway enthusiast in the literal sense. Until 2010 he volunteered as a driver, guard or signalman on the Talyllyn Railway. He served as president of the Retired Railway Officers' Society in 2008 and chaired the Robert Stephenson Trust when it celebrated the bicentenary of Stephenson's locomotive works at Newcastle in 2023.

His legacy is the electrified ECML, still carrying the traffic Britain's most intensively used intercity route generates today. There were, and remain, lessons in how that project was delivered — and in what happens when those lessons are set aside.