Philip Haigh
Passengers want better punctuality, more chance of a seat, and better value for money, but there’s no straightforward way to ease the crowded railway and change poor public perceptions,
The risk of rail reorganisation.
SMALL boys play trains, but grown-ups have a better game; they call it railway reorganisation.
Not my words, but those from an editorial in the Economist from around 50 years ago.
Dating from around the same era is a betterknown quotation: “When you reorganise, you bleed.” That one is usually attributable to Gerry Fiennes, a former general manager of BR’s Eastern Region, although he gave the credit to a speaker at BR’s staff college in Woking.
What I will say is that every time you reorganise, you turn inwards. Managers and staff start thinking more about themselves than their customers. If you’re worrying about your job, then you’re not worrying about your customers.
Network Rail is currently being reorganised into a different structure, with regions inserted to provide another level of management between its routes and its HQ. These new regions come with greater autonomy from that HQ, but also come with many changes in senior management as new people take up new posts.
As May 2018’s timetabling crisis bubbled up and broke, Rail North was transforming itself into Transport for the North. It was looking inwards when it might have been better to concentrate on the railway companies for which it - with the Department for Transport - was responsible ( RAIL 885).
None of which is to say that companies and organisations shouldn’t change. But they must be very clear about why they are changing and the problem they are trying to fix by changing.
Government appears keen to ditch the current franchising system. This has companies competing to run groups of services. Their bids are expensive and time-consuming, but they aim to improve the service passengers see.
And the improvements passengers want are better punctuality, more chance of a seat, and better value for money. Rail companies have struggled with punctuality for many years, but have made great strides in bringing more seats and better value.
Increasing the number of seats on a train is one way of accommodating more passengers. Running longer trains is another. Train operators have done both, but government has also blocked such plans. It decided to lengthen only 31 of Virgin West Coast’s 53 nine-car Pendolino electric multiple units, and it rejected TransPennine Express plans to add an extra car to its crowded three-car diesel units. Only now are TPE passengers beginning to see longer trains, as new fleets enter service.
Running more trains is another way to increase the number of seats for passengers, and train operators have made the most of this opportunity.
Take Great Western Railway. On a line with track capacity little changed since British Rail days, it runs two trains to Cardiff every hour. BR’s summer 1993 timetable had only hourly trains for most of the day.
London-Leeds service was also hourly, as was Manchester via Stoke-on-Trent. Today, Leeds is half-hourly while Manchester has three trains from London every hour - two via Stoke and one via Crewe. Liverpool remains hourly for inter-city services, but this is set to change under the next West Coast deal awarded earlier this year to First and Trenitalia.
Of course, running more trains crowds the tracks, and punctuality falls amid congestion. With more trains running, there is less space in the timetable to isolate one late train from others around it. Punctuality falls as the difference in speed between different trains rises ( RAIL 843). NR analysis shows that as the difference rises from 5mph to 15mph, punctuality falls from 90% to 80%.
Responsibility for late trains rests (from a passenger perspective) with the train operator. They have more control over train faults than track faults, but neither they nor Network Rail can be blamed if a lorry hits a road bridge or a passenger becomes ill. That said, NR puts plenty of effort into preventing and mitigating bridge strikes, while one train operator (South Western Railway) now has paramedics on call at Clapham Junction to help passengers.
Value for money is a perception, rather than an absolute. It’s intimately coupled with performance.
Rail companies receive a battering at least three times a year for rising fares: once when the inflation figure by which government controls regulated fares is revealed; a second when they announce the new fares; and a third when those new fares take effect. Most of the coverage focuses on season tickets because they have the highest price. Never mind that they offer considerable discounts when compared with an equivalent string of ‘open’ tickets permitting peak-time travel.
In peak hours, railways have always been busy. That’s obvious. And that’s why the railway needs so much track and rolling stock capacity. Expecting peak fares to be cheap when peak travel demands so much investment is unrealistic. But perception has little to do with realism.
If the peaks are busy, then it’s logical that rail companies are quieter off-peak. Traditionally, carriages would lie idle until called once more into action for the next peak. But private rail companies realised they were paying for this stock whether or not they used it, and paying a large chunk of access fees to Network Rail
whether or not they ran trains. It therefore made sense to keep running and to offer discounts to fill the otherwise vacant seats.
This was the rise of ‘advance purchase’ tickets, with which train operators tied the passenger to a particular train and seat. They created various grades of such fares - some provided only a small discount, while others gave very cheap travel.
They have filled seats, and advance purchase has helped the railway double the number of passengers using it (compared with numbers at privatisation). But it’s had a consequence of making season tickets appear more expensive.
At the same time, the way many people work has subtly changed. There is more homeworking today thanks to email and the internet. The city office worker might only travel to that office four days a week, rather than five. This makes season tickets more expensive per journey and can tip the passenger over to using advance purchase tickets. It’s more fiddly and time-consuming to organise, but the financial result may be worth it.
In turn, this has hit the train operators that rely heavily on daily commuter traffic, such as South Western Railway into London Waterloo and Greater Anglia into London Liverpool Street. Cutting one commuting day may help their overcrowding, but it doesn’t help their finances - not least because recent deals with the Department for Transport use Central London employment as a key measure.
If such employment falls, then the operators can trigger financial protections. But if it remains static while ridership falls or fails to rise as fast as expected (because people remain in Central London employment but don’t travel to Central London every working day), then there’s no protection and DfT still wants its money.
Virgin Trains East Coast failed because ridership and revenue did not increase as predicted in its bid. It still rose, but not enough to satisfy the deal it had made with DfT. The result was that Stagecoach and Virgin lost a lot of money.
That’s business. One guy wins while the other schmuck loses, as the Americans might say. Except the other party to the contract hardly won either - DfT now has to settle for less premium money than it expected. It too signed the fatal and flawed deal. Just as it decided on Central London employment as the proxy for overall economic growth in other franchises.
Under franchising so far, bidders have to accept DfT’s assumptions. They might argue that they are wrong, but the playing field must be level for all bidders. DfT dismissed recent bids from Virgin and Stagecoach because they didn’t comply with DfT’s assumptions around pensions.
So, is franchising flawed? Or merely the assumptions and deals the DfT makes? If it’s the latter - and I think it is - then would concessions be any better?
Here the DfT (or a new body - perhaps a remodelled Network Rail?) would decide what passengers want, what fares they should pay, and what timetables they should use with any private involvement confined to supplying staff and trains to that timetable. DfT or its subsidiary would take the financial risk, with the operator merely receiving a fee. It seems to work on a mundane operation such as London Overground, but there’s no chance it would bring the revolution that Virgin brought to West Coast passengers after privatisation.
Concessions are franchises’ dull cousin - the one that simply does what they’re told. Concessions rely on decisions taken a distance away from passengers by those having no direct relationship. Much as I flinch from expressions such as ‘customer experience’, remote decisions are no way to run a railway.
And unless ministers want to cut timetables, concessions will do little for punctuality. That needs more capacity, of which High Speed 2 is a long-standing component, if timetables are to be more resilient. More capacity can also come from enhancement programmes, but DfT appears to have none planned beyond those already announced. And if timetables are cut, then so are seats - and that’s likely to provoke complaints.
There’s no easy way out of today’s crowded railway and its poor perceptions. Any government thinking that reorganisation is the answer is merely admitting that it has no other ideas.
“Every time you reorganise, you turn inwards. Managers and staff start thinking more about themselves than their customers.”