Review into timetable meltdown.
PHILIP HAIGH examines the Office of Rail and Road report into the Thameslink timetable problems
ON the face of it, cutting two trains per hour from a timetable with 20 trains every hour through its key corridor doesn’t sound difficult.
It’s the sort of thing a train operator might do to run an emergency timetable, and it was how Thameslink and Network Rail planned to implement May 2018’s timetable of an 18tph service. The pair had been working on a 24tph timetable with 4tph removed, and so it appeared logical to repeat the recipe to give 18tph.
It was not to be. September 20’s report from the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) into May’s timetable meltdown notes: “In practice, the apparently simple approach of removing services from the higherfrequency timetable proved to be challenging. The complex nature of the new Thameslink network and service patterns meant that it was difficult to isolate the impact of removing individual services from the timetable. This was further complicated by inclusion of a DfT direction regarding East Midlands Trains’ services. Following this it became apparent that the phased introduction of services would require more changes to the timetable as a result.”
So it was that NR’s System Operator was forced to produce a new Thameslink timetable in far less time than the rail industry’s rules allowed for. It found tricky problems building it around EMT’s services along the Midland Main Line towards Thameslink’s northern terminus at Bedford.
Thameslink had planned to run a 20tph timetable from May 2018, and then increase it to 24tph from December 2018 using Network Rail’s new cab signalling on the route’s core from St Pancras through Blackfriars to London Bridge. This 24tph core is key to a range of improvements Thameslink has been promising passengers for many years. It focused considerable efforts from NR, train operator Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) and those supplying their trains and signalling.
Yet the core was not the only constraint on Thameslink’s network that couldn’t cope with more services. On the East Coast Main Line at Welwyn, the double-track section over the viaduct and through tunnels couldn’t cope with Thameslink’s specification. Nor could Windmill Bridge Junction near Croydon.
These constraints forced the Department for Transport in 2015 to permit GTR to remap Thameslink’s services - essentially adjust them by sending trains elsewhere once they’d passed the core. In this way, DfT could keep its 24tph promise and justify the immense funding it had put into Thameslink.
Looked at another way, it raises questions about the very specification of Thameslink, and whether chasing 24tph was the right answer from a larger network perspective.
It suggests that one senior railwayman with experience of GTR was right when they suggested that Thameslink’s problems in May were not the result of anything that happened in the final three months.
Nevertheless, it serves to illustrate Thameslink’s challenges, and helps explain why DfT began to think from 2016 that gradually increasing frequencies across the core section would be sensible.
In this, it was following London Underground’s experience on the Victoria Line. However, a metro such as LU’s Victoria Line is better suited to being specified by service frequency than a complicated network such as Thameslink’s, which serves many destinations.
The ORR report records that GTR followed the DfT’s idea and proposed a four-phase increase that started with 18tph in May 2018, rising to 20tph (December 2018), 22tph (May 2019), and 24tph (December 2019). GTR put this to DfT in spring 2017, but had to carry on planning for its 20/24tph timetable because that was its contractual requirement.
ORR notes: “GTR was not relying on the replanned phasing for its own operational delivery or resilience, and explained to the Inquiry that the decisions to replan phased introduction of the timetable were driven by concerns regarding infrastructure capability
and service resilience, rather than GTR’s operational capability.”
It adds that it found no evidence to suggest that the decision to re-phase Thameslink’s timetable was driven by concerns about GTR’s readiness.
The report says: “All parties to the Thameslink Programme told the Inquiry that 24tph remains a technically achievable outcome. All parties have endorsed the expectation that 24tph will be delivered as the programme completes. GTR maintains that it was preparing to operate at a frequency of up to 24tph (initially phased at 20tph) before the decision was taken in October 2017 to re-phase to 18tph from May 2018, and was confident of its ability to do so in line with the terms of the franchise.”
Reading between the lines, these ORR comments suggest that the DfT was having cold feet about the railway’s ability to deliver Thameslink. It then decided to reduce what it saw as the risks it faced by reducing the timetable, but in doing so too late it introduced risks greater than those it thought it was removing.
No one will ever know if GTR and NR could have implemented their 20tph timetable last May. GTR has certainly criticised the 20tph timetable it received in November 2017, telling ORR it was “not fit for purpose” - containing 600 rejected trains and 4,000 flexes to accommodate other trains.
ORR’s report says: “The Inquiry found some disagreement between GTR and the System Operator about the attribution of cause for the apparent poor quality of timetable development from late 2017. The Inquiry heard from some other TOCs, including those not seriously and directly affected by the timetable changes, that the offer they received in November 2017 was also of poor quality.”
The System Operator was under pressure. Had May’s timetable gone well, it would have made more schedule changes than ever before (May 2016 had 10,500 changes, May 2017 had 14,525, but May 2018’s had 42,300).
With the changes it had to make to Thameslink’s timings, the changes forced on Northern by Network Rail’s failures to finish engineering works, and more changes caused by Hitachi failing to deliver ScotRail’s new electric trains, it was under huge pressure.
It was in an impossible position, but this hasn’t stopped ORR’s criticism.
ORR argues that the System Operator was in a good place to assess the risk from all the railway’s projects that were feeding into May’s timetable. Although the System Operator had the best view, ORR acknowledges that it’s the Department for Transport that makes the decisions, but tempers its criticism by saying that DfT can only make these decisions on advice from the railway industry.
That advice differed depending on its source. ORR found that in the context of Northern’s problems, NR’s Infrastructure Projects, System Operator and local Route took different views. Any government might struggle to decide the best course amid such advice. There’s real scope for a rail authority, composed of experienced staff, to form a single view to advise governments and ministers.
This is a lesson the railway and ministers should have learned from the West Coast Route Modernisation. This featured spiralling costs and lengthening deadlines before the newly created Strategic Rail Authority gripped it and produced one plan to finish the project. The SRA also helped solve the southern power supply problem that threatened to delay plans to replace Mk 1 electric multiple units, having been initially criticised for doing too little.
Government (the DfT) could do these things - should it have the will to listen clearly and the competence to test what it hears. Thameslink shows it has neither in sufficiency, and that it’s unwilling to let anyone else do it.
“Reading between the lines, these ORR comments suggest that the DfT was having cold feet about the railway’s ability to deliver Thameslink. It then decided to reduce what it saw as the risks it faced by reducing the timetable, but in doing so too late it introduced risks greater than those it thought it was removing.”