World Cup winner on the bus.

“...the idea that NR timetablers should shoulder the blame for the current chaos is untenable, unreasonable and unfair.”

for four years, why can’t the timetables be planned by computer, like airline schedules?

Why couldn’t the timetable change have been postponed ?

The first answer is relatively straightforward to explain. Airline schedules are comparatively easy to plan and sometimes remain unchanged for many years. This is because the line of route between take-off and landing needs no maintenance - it is generally always available. On the railway, however, there is a complex requirement for engineering interventions along the entire line of route, which are both planned long-term and unexpected, at short notice. Both require changes to rolling stock movements and train diagrams and the crew rosters which follow them, within the base timetable.

Trains end up in the wrong place, maybe, for their next duty and need unplanned moves, while staff who have to work a longer than planned shift will see their subsequent rosters tweaked to try and maintain the contracted hours of the working week. There are too many unplanned and unknown variables to completely computerise the process.

In order to issue traincrew rosters eight weeks in advance (essential for traincrew to plan their work around their home lives and arrange duty swaps if needed), then timetable changes for (say) service changes around a planned Sunday engineering closure need to be planned from 30 weeks in advance. At 22 weeks out you would aim for a stable possession plan, and the TOC would submit a bid for timetable changes which might affect the whole week around that Sunday possession. At 18 weeks out, the TOC would expect a response from NR. At 14 weeks out the TOC would complete planning its train movements to deliver the service agreed with NR at 12 weeks, and this would enable train crew rosters to appear at six weeks out. This would give time for traincrew needing to arrange duty swaps to agree and submit them, thereby arriving at an agreed and reliable roster in which everyone can have confidence.

And this all assumes a reliable existing fleet, established depots and routines, and existing and understood infrastructure, all serving routes which all staff are familiar with. With this Thameslink upgrade, we sought to introduce new trains, new infrastructure, new signalling equipment and new routes, to provide an enormously intensified service creating capacity for an extra 40,000 passengers in the peaks. All this required drivers to train to drive new trains on very complicated routes, over which many had never driven before.

This was a noble but massive undertaking. It was planned by a joint industry- Government board of highly respected professionals and senior government officials who, since January 2017, had planned this upgrade and who honestly believed that the plans were robust enough to implement in May 2018. How it went so catastrophically wrong is now the subject of a formal inquiry, which I’ll come back to. We established in the RAIL 854 Comment that late Government decisionmaking meant that the time available for NR and TOCs to accomplish the process outlined here was horribly compressed. Rosters which we know would normally expect to appear at least six weeks out - in order to enable crew to arrange swaps if needed and for resilience to be verified - were published just three days before launch. It is no wonder the system collapsed.

The inquiry set up by Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling under Office of Rail and Road Chairman Stephen Glaister has been tasked with answering this core question. Critics are legitimately concerned that ORR is compromised to a degree in that pressure it exerted on NR to cut train planning costs is a likely root cause of this chaos. Will ORR therefore be marking its own homework? This is a legitimate concern to which ORR has to respond. It must be seen to be running a genuinely thorough and transparent inquiry, otherwise its doubtless expensive ultimate findings could come into question and carry insufficient weight.

The second question I asked earlier has been asked repeatedly by commuters: should the timetable launch have been postponed?

We have connected our network, regionally and locally, in ways it has not been connected before. Yes, the new Thameslink services use an existing link over which there has been a more limited service since 1988 - but this has been massively enhanced in terms of frequency, complexity and volume.

An unintended consequence is that disadvantages as well as benefits flow through those enhanced conduits. More trains, improved services and greater connectivity flow in one direction - but are balanced in the other by the easier export and transfer of disruption, perturbation, delay and other chaos. Thameslink has achieved this on the north-south axis through London, and let’s not forget that later in the year we’ll have the same potential on the East-West axis, with the Elizabeth Line. This is another reason why we MUST learn the lessons from this painful saga: this must not happen again, under any circumstances.

We have done the same thing locally in Manchester at a city level. Yes, the Ordsall Chord creates many new benefits - but in connecting north and south Manchester in a new way, we have also created a new route along which disruption can more easily be exported in both directions, in ways which were impos- sible before. Incidentally, the Ordsall Chord was not a standalone project - it was one of a number of schemes including electrification, new platforms at Piccadilly, and remodelling at Oxford Road, all of which are essential if the full benefits of the Northern Hub are to be captured and exploited. If we now don’t finish this programme fully and promptly we’ll have maximised the potential for disruption while compromising and limiting the intended and anticipated benefits. But this is a story for another day.

Back to the timetable upgrade. It would be well-nigh impossible to have postponed launch of the new timetable for Northern and Thameslink because of the impact on neighbouring and integrated services. For example, service frequency improvements for which TransPennine Express was committed could only be accommodated if changes to the Northern timetable happened at the same time. Individual TOCs are therefore not empowered to postpone their timetable upgrades, because this might in turn prevent another TOC from meeting its own commitments.

Amplify this principle across the country and you could rapidly conclude that you have to upgrade the entire national timetable - or none of it. Only Government could order such a country-wide policy.

As we delve ever deeper into this mess, the idea that NR timetablers should shoulder the blame for the current chaos is untenable, unreasonable and unfair. Government and the rail industry must share the blame here: that is increasingly obvious. I will avoid prescribing a solution. Instead let me outline the fundamental flaws and truths, which I believe this appalling letdown of passengers and taxpayers has exposed to what I hope will prove to be the disinfectant of full sunlight.

We simply cannot continue with the current strategic management of the railway.

Much more specialist knowledge and experience is needed at the most senior strategic level, within a clear pyramid of accountability.

There is clearly a growing and dangerous disconnect between the railway’s front line and the current DfT railway managers.

A new way of bridging that disconnect is urgently needed.

Ultimately, the railway is about people. People at the top, who must be both in charge AND accountable… and the people actually doing the job on the front line.

And those two groups must talk to each other much more than they currently do.

I will conclude by disagreeing - if only slightly (!) - with Christian, who says in his column in this issue: “The bigger picture is clear - the railway is one business and needs to be run as such.” I’d refine and redefine that by saying: “The railway is one system and needs to be planned and operated as a system.”

As in aviation, there can be many businesses, but the railway must be run as a single system.