Saving £100m at King’s Cross
I’m in the fortunate position in my job to range far and wide across today’s railway landscape - the industry itself, the regulators and Government. So I was maybe one of the first to notice recent positive changes within Network Rail, especially out on the Routes.
There may be a way to go yet in terms of creating a smaller centre and within NR’s Infrastructure Projects division, but out on the Routes things have been changing for about a year or so, in my view. And I noticed it first on the London North Eastern & East Midlands Route, after the appointment of Rob McIntosh as its Managing Director in January 2016.
It started when Rob mentioned his frustration that Doncaster’s Platform 0 and its wiggly footbridge had cost maybe £10 million more than it might have done, as a consequence of slavish (and crucially unquestioning) observance of European ‘TSIs’ ( Technical Standards for Interoperability). “I’m really looking forward to seeing a TGV there,” he muttered.
McIntosh was clearly determined to ‘get a grip’ of such costs, and so when I heard that he’d deferred the imminent King’s Cross throat project for a year, I made sure that the job stayed on my radar.
Last remodelled in 1972, this is a major, tricky project. Moving the mass of switches and crossings just off the platform ends to north of the tunnels, and reinstating track through the disused eastern bore, was always going to be disruptive and costly - with the potential for significant over-budget spending.
The pudding has yet to be proved in concrete and steel, but pioneering work done during the year’s deferment seems to have paved the way for avoiding unnecessary costs of more than £100m. Route MD Rob McIntosh and Route Delivery Director Rob Cairns are confident their plan will work.
They began from a starting point that the budget of £ 237m would be observed, and that costs would be constrained by intelligent but not-slavish interpretation of standards.
“We did a lot of work in the space around the variability that exists between partial compliance and full compliance,” says McIntosh.
“We focused sharply on what we could reasonably derogate and where we would die trying to achieve the impossible. I realised very early on that if we did not do this and we worked as we had in the past, we were going to exceed that £ 237m budget by at least £100m. That was not an option for me.” What, just for the station throat? “Correct,” says Cairns. “We are renewing pretty much all the assets for 1.5 miles from the buffer stops, including all the subsystems. Renew all that in a way that is fully TSI-compliant and you could easily get to a number north of £100m over budget. A reallife example to illustrate the point is the station footbridge.”
This is the glazed footbridge spanning the platforms about halfway along - it is served by escalators and lifts to Platforms 0-8. It was installed in 2012 when the traditional Great Northern Railway lattice footbridge was removed. Despite it being just five years old, changes in UK standards for electrical clearances between overhead live wires and structures mean that the footbridge is no longer compliant with the three-metre
clearance distance now demanded.
If this project had proceeded in NR’s normal manner, the bridge would need to be scrapped and replaced - despite being just five years old. The cost? A cool £10m. Yes, really...
But it gets worse: if NR did replace that glazed bridge, then that would trigger a chain reaction of extra work through the tunnels and beyond - and that’s where costs were set to soar by £100m+.
“So we had to think outside the box,” says Cairns. “The new electrical standards are aimed at protecting bridges in remote locations - but this is hardly remote! If you stand on that bridge for more than two minutes, security staff approach you and ask what you’re doing and move you along.
“We did a risk assessment which concluded that the way the bridge is closely monitored and managed meant that we did not need to renew it. That meant the knock-on work wasn’t needed either, and so we eliminated a potential cost over-run of £100m or so - about 50%.”
Slavish adherence to standards is a major driver of cost unless you challenge it intelligently like this, backed up by a formal and properly-done risk assessment.
Says McIntosh: “If you make these challenges in the right way - as Rob has just described - then you set out a rational argument and you get a reasonable outcome.
“In the old NR, there was a culture of compliance with a hefty dose of optimism bias thrown in about how much that compliance might cost. When that cost comes home to roost, it’s too late and you’re stuck with it.”
What McIntosh did when he paused the job was look down the other end of the telescope - from the budgeted cost end.
“I made clear that the fixed parameter at King’s Cross was the cost of the job. The last time a project was done on this basis on the East Coast Main Line was when we put the wires up.”
Cairns adds: “We all swallowed hard when Rob paused the job for a year and we were challenged to think differently. It was that transition between blind compliance regardless of cost and your new RMD coming in and saying: ‘In future you have to design to cost. You cannot come to me and say you want another hundred million quid. Get down to the grass roots.’
“And so we did. We looked at every inch of every platform… every inch of clearance… Rob absolutely insisted we design to cost. It therefore became our fixation, too.”
So, in the previous non-devolved era, this would have gone through with those £100m extra costs?
“Yes. It was set to fly,” says McIntosh. “But we care deeply about sticking to cost and there is a single point of accountability… me.”
Cairns explains that the new tracks and platforms have been measured every 10mm to identify where there was strict compliance, broad compliance and noncompliance, before moving on to take the specific actions needed to produce an intelligent and cost-effective outcome.
McIntosh sums up this approach as a switch from a culture of compliance to a culture of cost-consciousness.
“The project I inherited was the product of old school thinking. They didn’t understand what compliance meant and the quality of the engineering wasn’t what it needed to be. They were kidding themselves that it would have been on-budget.”
He concludes: “There will always be a saving if you apply this kind of thinking.”