New year, new fight
Latest lockdown leads to timetable cuts as passenger demand falls and operators seek to protect rail staff.
CUTS to the railway timetable were expected to be announced after this issue of RAIL went to press, in response to the Government’s latest national lockdown.
In an attempt to stop the spread of the latest Coronavirus variant, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a full lockdown for England on January 4, meaning people must stay at home. Only essential travel is permitted, as was the case last March.
The Department for Transport expects operators to run a reliable service for essential workers, while reducing trains in line with lower demand.
One in four trains are likely to be axed and timetable changes are inevitable - partly because passenger numbers are falling fast and partly because in this third lockdown, a much greater number of railway staff have contracted COVID-19.
In the first lockdown, 55% of trains ran. The ambition this time is to run closer to 75%.
South Western Railway will reduce services from January 11, and further reductions may be made in the following weeks.
Great Western Railway is already on an emergency timetable, with around one in four services cancelled. The company says it is thinning out long-distance services, which few people are using, as well as late-night trains which are running almost empty. Services between London and Bristol, and between London and South Wales, are now running hourly.
Over the Christmas holiday, a quarter of all train crew at the Plymouth depot (50 staff) were unable to work for COVID reasons. One in ten crew at Westbury depot are currently affected.
GWR Managing Director Mark Hopwood said: “All legitimate reasons for getting on a train have largely evaporated. With schools and further education closing, that reduces demand further. It also puts more of our workforce into shielding.
“We have taken some sensible measures to make sure we are able to run a service that can be relied on, and that means reducing our timetable to give customers confidence so they can plan ahead.”
Govia Thameslink Railway Chief Operating Officer Steve White said there was no longer the demand to justify a large number of trains.
“We are carrying a lot of fresh air. What drives the timetable is how many customers we are carrying. On January 4, we carried 17% of our pre-COVID demand. That was before the
Prime Minister’s announcement of a third lockdown that evening. So it is clear we are well down on the 35% we were carrying in November and early December.
“At the other end of the telescope, we have to look at what staff we have. We now have up to 20% of drivers unavailable. I have never seen it that high. The average non-availability is usually around 8%.
“All the clinically vulnerable staff have been stood down, because the virus is so prevalent. The prudent thing to do is to ask them to stay at home.
“In the first wave, the main reason people were off was family isolation. Someone in the family was suspected to have COVID, so they were self-isolating.
“This time, the main reason people are off has changed. We have more positive cases now than at any time during this pandemic. And more people have been identified through Test and Trace, which obviously wasn’t around in March-April-May last year. All that means we have more people in our workforce affected than at any stage.”
Just as the pattern of infection varies around the UK, the impact on the railway is uneven. It is likely that each train operating company will manage a different level of service.
White explained: “We are currently running 86% of our timetable. You might think that gives us a headroom of 14%. But our driver diagrams are now less efficient. We have added measures such as longer turnaround times for our train crew to socially distance throughout their working day. So our 86% timetable uses 92% of our available drivers. We actually have very little headroom.
“I see us reducing to something like 75% of the timetable in the coming days. Last March-April we dropped to a Sunday service level all week. That was about 60%. As we started to come out, we went to a Saturday service level of 80%.
“A lot depends on the type of service. If your route has an hourly train, it’s difficult to run three-quarters of it. The train runs or it doesn’t. If you’re running an inner-London metro service of eight trains an hour, it’s easier to put it down to six trains an hour and have a 75% service.
“The inner-suburban traffic - for us, that’s the Great Northern and Southern Metros - is busier than outer services. We’ve seen in each lockdown that these carry more people who need to travel to get
to work.
“And we see clusters of problems. Great Western had a cluster at Penzance, with a lot of people in one depot off. So you don’t have one in five drivers off everywhere - it might be one in three drivers in one place and one in ten at another depot.”
White warned that the biggest threat to the railway is a major COVID outbreak in one sensitive location that affects a wide area.
“Like an electrical control room or a signalling centre,” he explained. “That would really limit what we could do. Network Rail has done really very well to avoid it up to now.
“We are doing lateral flow rapid testing at the Three Bridges
Control Centre [which operates signalling on the Brighton Main Line through Surrey and Sussex], where individuals take a test before being allowed to take their shift. We are actively trying to preserve the ability of key staff in key locations.”
White said the position was evolving rapidly each day: “Operators move at different rates. GWR already has an emergency timetable now, because it needs to mitigate for a shortage of staff now.
“At GTR, we normally have 900 train crew diagrams each day. If we are going to rewrite all of those diagrams and change the duties of all of those staff, it will take a few weeks. Our main changes are likely to happen in February, and we will make tactical changes in advance of that.
“In essence, larger operators need longer to change their train plan than smaller operators. It won’t happen in one go across the country.”
However, White adds that the key message to passengers is that the railway will continue to function.
“Our frontline workers are still coming in every day, in a COVIDsecure environment. If you go to your local station and find your train is cancelled, it’s not because the driver has had a lie-in or is playing golf.
“We are just as much at risk as everyone else. Our workers are putting themselves on the line to keep things running.”