Inside WCR HQ
RAIL visits Carnforth depot to discover how West Coast Railway Company is bidding to recover lost ground.
WEST Coast Railway Company (WCR) has “gone through a really difficult 18 months”.
So says the Carnforth firm’s managing director Pat Marshall, reflecting on the period since steam locomotive 34067 Tangmere ran past a signal at red at Wootton Bassett Junction in March 2015 ( RAIL 771).
In that time, WCR has been stopped from running once by Network Rail (April/May 2015) and once by the Office of Rail and Road (this February/March). It has also had the regulator twice consider revocation of its safety certificate (although that course of action was rejected each time), and serve an improvement notice earlier this year on route-related driver competence.
That’s aside from the ORR’s decision to prosecute WCR for breaking health and safety laws, which on June 27 led to a £200,000 fine after it pleaded guilty at Swindon Crown Court ( RAIL 804).
“We have made some changes,” said Marshall. “We’ve tried to work with the ORR. We’ve opened our doors to them, we’ve opened all our files to them, and hopefully they can see that we’ve taken the advice that they have given us.”
Route learning, plant work
According to the ORR’s website, the April improvement notice “was served as the arrangements for managing driver competence with respect to the monitoring of route refresher requirements, and the provision of related safety information and the management of route risk assessment, are not robust”.
Andy Taylor, WCR’s operations manager for the south of the country, told RAIL: “We now have a planning meeting once a month where we sit down with all the disciplines - engineering, suppliers, stock, traincrew, operations, station access. We look at all the jobs that have been proposed - have we got the coaches to do it, have we got the men to do it, have we got the route knowledge and the men that do it? That’s one thing that’s made a big positive contribution towards planning.”
He added: “A lot of drivers come to us with a lot of existing route knowledge, which is certified from other companies. We generally then do a practical assessment of their route knowledge there, so we can verify it. Drivers tend to have very specific route knowledge.”
Cab access agreements are in place “with most of the major TOCs now”, he said, adding: “We have some agreements with other train operating companies for route learning materials, maps, route risks and things like that… so that all helps. We have an absolute myriad of route maps that have been produced in-house, with the risks associated with it.”
Those materials are not all new. Indeed, WCR says some of its resources are used by other companies.
Taylor adds: "You never draw a line under it l in this industry. Things always ddgo forward, you can always make things better. You can learn from things that happen, you can learn from other people... you're d always pushing forward to make things that little bit better."
Parked up at Carnforth at the time of RAIL’s visit was a pair of wagons that had come in on wheel skates, having been rescued by WCR after they failed on the West Coast Main Line.
WCR says that’s a sign of an aspect to its activities that most people never even see. Those have included carrying out surveys for electrification projects, line proving, snow ploughing and ‘ice breaking’, conducting ‘yellow plant’ and Colas drivers on rail monitoring trains, and even providing guards for Grand Central.
Taylor argues that such activities are not only useful commercially, but also in terms of maintaining route knowledge. One driver, he explained, “did some survey work not so long ago at Paddington, and went in and out of every platform”.
Such ‘invisible’ work contrasts with the public charters, particularly the steam-hauled trips, for which West Coast Railway Company is best known. Marshall said one downside of ambitious one-off trips juggled into the timetable around engineering work and the like is that there have been “many times where we’ve literally got through by a possession by… four minutes”. She described this as “too risky for us”.
So, when it comes to steam tours, the company believes the future will increasingly be about repeat-itinerary trains rather than one-off trips. The argument is that regular itineraries become more routine, while creating fixed, timetabled paths that can be used regularly for the steam element of trips simplifies planning.
Tours could be diesel-hauled to the start of the steam legs - another advantage considering that busy, faster timetables are expected to increasingly squeeze steam.
Goodbye ‘Royal Scotsman’?
A particular blow to West Coast Railway Company in recent months has been the loss of the contract to run Belmond's 'Roya Scotsman' to GB Railfreight. WCR Managing Director Pat Marshall said that losing the prestigious land-cruise job " was - to us - a disaster. WE've gad that contract for the last ten,
11 years. And for that to be given to GBRf is a hard pill to swallow.”
However, she said the Carnforth company hadn’t given up hope of regaining the ‘Royal Scotsman’ at some point in the future: “I know they’ve signed a contract for the next five years, there’s clauses… on either side - the haulage and the winter refit.
“On their own they don’t stack up, but together it stacked up nicely for us. And I’d like to try and get the ‘Royal Scotsman’ contract back.”
Class 47s and the future
On January 23 2013, WCR ‘47’ 47500 derailed at Salford’s Ordsall Lane Junction, while being the rear engine on a ‘top and tail’ stock move from Ardwick (where it had been for wheel reprofiling) to Carnforth. The ensuing fire made news headlines. It also, inevitably, caused damage to the former Western Region celebrity engine (it was previously named Great Western). More than two years after the publication of a Rail Accident Investigation. Branch report that resulted in three recommendations for Network Rail, The Scorched Brush ‘Type 4’ is still stored at Carnforth.
WCR says the dispute has now “gone legal”. For its part, the infrastructure owner would only say on July 8 that: “Network Rail is presently in the process of reviewing new damage analysis supplied to us on June 17 2016, which had been requested some time ago.”
Class 47s were once everywhere, but not any more. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that WCR is now the type’s largest operator. Painted in Carnforth’s standard maroon, the Brush locomotives have been employed on new duties supporting steam charters, hauling trips in their own right, and carrying out associated empty stock moves.
Yet even here, thoughts are moving beyond a 50-year old design to ‘what comes next’.
WCR Chairman David Smith explained to RAIL that his company has “loads of ‘47s’ - we’ve spent money on them, and we’re looking now at the future, and perhaps properly rebuilding a ‘47’”.
He said the company is even considering installing a more modern engine.
“There isn’t anything on the market that really suits the charter market,” he said. “The ‘57s’ have been a good replacement, but even then they’re not the easiest things to keep going.”
He said the company has even looked at rebuilding ‘57s’. As for potential new acquisitions, he added that while there’s “nothing planned at the moment, we are looking round”.
Slow steps as the way forward?
So where now for WCR? Marshall conceded: “I think we’ve gone through a really difficult time, but we’ve come out of it a lot stronger - as a company, certainly as a management team. And I think we can only go from strength to strength. Maybe slow steps, but I think that’s the way forward for us.”
WCR Traincrew Standards Manager Mick Rawlins also has a message, against the background of some of the criticism he feels has been levelled at the company recently: “People make mistakes, they do in all TOCs. There’s incidents happening out there daily with TOCs, and it’ll happen to us as well, because we’re only human. But to vilify us for everything that we do, I think is totally out of order.”