NR on timetables
Network Rail writes to all TOCs asking them to reconsider plans for the December timetable change after the chaos in May.
NETWORK Rail has written to all train operators asking them to reconsider their plans for the December timetable change, in the wake of the chaos caused by the May timetable.
NR Managing Director, System Operator, Jo Kaye (pictured) revealed the plans when she appeared before the House of Commons Transport Select Committee on June 18.
She said NR was “looking very hard again” at the plans for December and asking operators to re-examine their ambitions for the timetable change, so that if changes are necessary, NR can handle them now. She said that in the longer term, franchise specifications will need to be examined.
“The Department for Transport and other franchise specifiers would need to think about how the benefits they wanted to see in a new timetable would fit within any potential cap [in changes],” she said, adding that NR would “need to take a good hard look at what is planned, to avoid a repeat of what we have seen”.
Kaye said processes regarding the December timetable have started (sources told RAIL all bids had to be in by June 8).
“We have established a team to look at cross-industry readiness, and our incoming chief executive [Andrew Haines] has taken some views from that and from his own discussions with the train operators.
“It is very much a live conversation in the industry at the moment. In the coming days and weeks, the level of confidence in December will become much clearer.”
Kaye said any decisions on rolling forward the current timetables would require the vast majority (if not all) of the operators to agree.
“I have not formed a clear view on the level at which a cap should be set. That is a discussion that needs to be thought through long and hard, rather than just alighting on a number in short order,” she said.
“I would not say that we were over-ambitious, but we were very
ambitious and rightly ambitious, because we were ambitious for the people we wanted to deliver benefits for. With hindsight, you might describe it as overambitious, but at the time we were rightly committed to making those changes in the way we wanted.”
Kaye told MPs that the May timetable featured about four times the average number of changes. She said the first version of the timetable was completed on time in November last year, but three issues then made it invalid.
“The first was that we discovered electrification of the Bolton line would not be completed on time. Secondly, the Thameslink phasing decision was taken. Thirdly, from a national perspective, although it is not the key focus of this Committee today, the non- availability of some rolling stock in Scotland meant that the timetable we had written for Scotland was not going to work either.”
This related to late delivery of Class 385s by Hitachi. Rewriting the timetable took longer than hoped, Kaye said.
Asked if rolling over the timetable was an option, as requested by Northern, Kaye said: “If we had rolled the timetable over, we would have had to roll over the whole national timetable. There was not the simple option of just continuing with one plan for one operator, because we had already made changes for other train operators who use the same infrastructure.
“That is why we had to rewrite the timetable rather than just roll it over. To roll over the national timetable would have lost the benefits of the May timetable change for other parts of the network.”
She said the intention of the rewrite was to mitigate the risks that had appeared. “We believed - albeit with hindsight that was clearly incorrect - that those things could be managed in the time available and still deliver the timetable change.” ■ Network Rail received timetable applications (as per the agreed plans) in August 2017 and spent the next four months developing and piecing together those plans, Kaye told the TSC.
“We completed that on time in November. That is one of the factors that gave us confidence that it could be delivered,” she said.