Listen to your passengers, Gibb urges operators
RAIL companies must work harder to discover what the public wants from them, according to Chris Gibb.
The former Virgin Trains boss and current Network Rail non-executive director was speaking independently at a conference about capacity and performance run by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London on November 14.
He said he doubted any passengers paid attention to posters displayed at stations detailing operator performance. “They’re only interested in their train,” he said.
While many managers were very good at talking to passengers, Gibb said that the railway must place more emphasis on the latter’s views, and asked who was talking to London-Scotland airline passengers about what they wanted from rail.
Gibb went on to say that rail companies should also pay more attention to staff, and engage with them. “Don’t just brief them, engage with them,” was his message. He explained that if staff understood why timetables had changed, for example, they would be able to explain those changes to passengers.
Former Iarnrod Eireann Chairman Dick Fearn echoed Gibb’s view. Now chairman of the Western Route Supervisory Board, Fearn argued for decisions to be taken at lower levels, noting that many winners of RAIL’s National Rail Awards Train Operator of the Year were smaller companies such as c2c, rather than larger ones.
Gibb also argued that railways should take a wider view by thinking about the whole rail system when making changes, so that trains, stabling and crews all matched.
His comments came as Network Rail prepares for what Capacity Planning Director Chris Rowley called the biggest change for many years, with next May’s timetable featuring changes to 100,000 schedules (around 60% of the entire timetable). Rowley cited London Overground, where frequencies will increase by around 25%.
Northern passengers will witness the biggest change ever, said Planning and Performance Director Rob Warnes. Upgrades such as the recently completed Ordsall Chord and current work at Blackpool would contribute to the changes, as would extra trains cascaded as a result of electrification in Scotland and northern England. The first stage of major changes to GTR services following Thameslink’s upgrade will also start in May 2018.
Delegates from across the rail industry heard Network Rail reveal plans to develop a whole-system model. Industry Performance Relationship Manager Simon Reay said the company was looking towards academia for help. Such a model would help reveal how performance might change when different services were changed.
Later in the conference, Paul Naylor from CPC Project Services showed how close examination of data from London Underground’s Jubilee Line helped improve performance, by revealing where problems lay. He said that as LU looked more closely at delays from two minutes down to ten seconds, different problems became visible.
MTR Europe Operations Director Oliver Bratton provided a counter view to models, arguing that it was very difficult to specify what an actual point-to-point timing was because of the many variables that affect train performance.
He said it was possible to show how trains varied from their booked paths, but difficult to show how one train affected another. However, he said that better visualisation of train running could lead to better performance.