Philip Haigh
New Chief Executive Andrew Haines wants to restore Network Rail’s core principles as a service company offering services to its customers, says PHILIP HAIGH
Operating… not engineering.
HALFWAY between Littleborough and the western portal of Summit Tunnel lies a littleused trailing crossover.
Littleborough marks the traditional boundary for Greater Manchester. Venture further east and you’ll be through the tunnel to be greeted by Walsden and Todmorden in West Yorkshire. In reality, Littleborough is no boundary, as trains for east and west hustle through with some merely using West Yorkshire as a convenient way of returning ‘over the hill’ to serve Blackburn.
This service pattern also means that if there’s a problem east of Summit Tunnel, there’s little way of isolating Greater Manchester’s services. That crossover at Littleborough would be useful, but it can only be controlled from an adjacent groundframe. Access to this frame is not easy. There’s a footpath nearby, but no roads.
Preston power box controls the release for the groundframe, rather than nearby Rochdale West signal box which opened in 2011. All of this makes it harder to turn trains back at Littleborough when operational needs demand.
I can’t imagine Littleborough is the only example of a seemingly minor matter making it harder to run a railway for passengers’ benefits. I only know of it because of local rail user group STORM. It’s a good example of local knowledge remaining vital to effectively run trains, particularly during disruption.
That Littleborough crossover remains under the control of a groundframe released from a remote power box is an example of a railway on which engineering has trumped operations. Judging by Network Rail Chief Executive Andrew Haines’ recent words, that should change.
Haines is a railway operator. He knows that his customers - whether that’s train operators or you and me with our tickets - want a railway that runs reliably and punctually. He doesn’t see NR as an asset management or engineering company - it’s a service company offering a service to its customers.
Of course, to offer that service it must maintain and renew its assets, and that demands engineering knowledge. But railways exist to carry goods and passengers - they don’t exist to employ engineers. Network Rail has skewed so far from operations to engineering that its professional head of operations reports to its chief engineer.
So, despite my rusty engineering degree, I welcome his decision to place more emphasis on railway operating. As Haines said recently: “In the months since I joined Network Rail last August, I’ve been very open that I took this job because I want to put passengers first and deliver a better, more reliable service. Because I believe a renewed focus on the end users of the railway, which of course includes freight, is the very best chance we have to restore confidence in our industry and our competence.”
I daresay Haines could operate Littleborough groundframe if needed, but I wonder how many other senior railwaymen retain (or ever had) this ability?
Let me be clear: there are others, but they’re becoming fewer. They need these skills because I suspect there’s an art in senior managers knowing how to get a disrupted railway back on track - not least being able to stand back and direct the efforts of those in the thick of it.
Haines reckons that as Network Rail was forced to become more efficient, it was operations that bore the brunt of savings rather than engineering or asset management. That’s no real surprise, coming on the back of Hatfield’s fatal accident caused by a broken rail and deaths at Potters Bar and Lambrigg caused by faulty points.
At a time when fewer trains ran, this tradeoff worked. But as timetables became more crowded, the gradual devaluation and neglect of operating skills became more apparent.
Haines set out some of the problems in January. Operating has no formalised training and clear competence standards that create a clear career path. Apprenticeships don’t have the rigour of NR’s maintenance equivalent.
Current structures place those with less competence in positions of managing those with more.
I’m not convinced his last point is necessarily a problem. Across many companies, you can find young graduates managing teams that consist of more experienced members with plenty of time at the coal-face. And there’s much to be said for a good leader letting his experts loose on a problem, rather than trying to fix it himself.
Haines’s final example was to note that NR doesn’t systematically rehearse and simulate incidents to enable operations teams to practise how they respond. He added that this was becoming more important because there are fewer incidents today than yesterday, so there’s less opportunity to solve them.
That’s akin to airline pilots practising what to do when an engine fails because, in the rare event that one does, they need to know what to do with minimum fuss and delay.
It’s vital that railway managers practise how to react to incidents such as at Lewisham in March 2018, where one train after another failed in icy weather and passengers decided to clamber down onto a live railway.
Haines has promised some changes. One is to cut the personnel management burden from operations managers so that they can spend more time on their core job, as a trial on NR’s London North Western Route. Success could lead to this being expanded to other routes.
At London Bridge, a joint team of NR and train operators has found and made many small changes that make the railway run more smoothly. They include making quick changes to timetables, altering train headcodes so that they give better information to signallers, and increasing dispatch staff to cope with a rise in simultaneous departures from both sides of island platforms.
Haines gave a strong hint that he’s not happy with timetabling being centralised in Milton Keynes. It has “cemented the divide between those who plan changes to the timetable and those who operate it on a daily basis and can, if given the chance, often spot problems before they happen”, he said in January.
In an age of networked computing power, it should easily be possible to repatriate timetabling to NR’s routes to be closer to its train operating customers. Such a switch comes with the same risk as when NR centralised it… and that is that skilled staff leave for other jobs.
Certainly, centralisation did Manchester few favours when Ordsall Chord opened. As Haines said: “Nobody really looked at how we would reliably operate 15 trains an hour, across six flat junctions in the space of a few miles, with disparate rolling stock, much of which will have travelled for several hours picking up potential delay on the way.”
Ordsall Chord is a fine example of today’s complex railway. On one level, those six flat junctions Haines mentions lend themselves to an answer developed using local operating knowledge and skills. On the other, some of those junctions carry freight from as far afield as Felixstowe or Southampton. Some carry longdistance passenger services to Scotland and north east England. The chord also exposes the folly of casting in stone service patterns before the infrastructure necessary for them is complete.
If nothing else, Ordsall Chord shows that the railway is a network with many strands and pieces in which nothing is fixed until all is fixed, and choices can come down to one or another but not both.
At its heart, railway operating bridges the divide between track and train. When privatisation created that split, it meant the end of broader operating careers that was running a railway rather than looking after one or another part of it. Knitting both together to form a good career should not be impossible, but it will demand selfless co-operation between track and train companies.
But as Haines said: “We haven’t developed as we should have done a pipeline of world-class operations talent or cultivated ops as a profession to rival any of the others within the industry.”
“Haines is a railway operator. He knows that his customers - whether that’s train operators or you and me with our tickets - want a railway that runs reliably and punctually.”