Greater Anglia pulls out the stops to boost punctuality

Managing Director Jamie Burles has vowed to do everything he can to get more Greater Anglia trains running on time.

This follows an improvement in punctuality over the past 12 months, in which 5,000 trains that ran late in 2018 arrived within one minute of their scheduled arrival time in 2019.

These figures were achieved despite a period of high numbers of cancellations on GA’s rural routes in December when there were signalling issues that affected the Class 755 fleet ( RAIL 894).

GA has been carrying out weekly performance summits with Network Rail, where every single minute of delay is analysed to see how that can be avoided in the future.

Burles said: “Overall we saw punctuality rise last year - even though we had a very difficult December on our rural lines when signalling issues preventing us from running a full train service and set back our new trains rollout programme.

“We are keeping our focus on punctuality - I know it can be better and I’m determined to make sure it does get better.”

Last year, GA and Network Rail introduced a joint Every Second Counts punctuality drive that included a more proactive recovery policy established for dealing with delays caused by failed trains, joint improvement plans drawn up by GA and NR and a £10 million booster fund created by NR for initiatives to improve performance including maintenance work on problem areas and removal of long-standing speed restrictions. One area NR is focusing on is improvement works at Liverpool Street to reduce delays caused by signalling issues or points failures.

NR’s Anglia Managing Director Ellie Burrows said: “While we’ve seen some good progress there is further to go. We’re upgrading track and overhead wiring systems to improve the reliability of the infrastructure across the region while also looking at how we better recover the service when incidents do happen.”