Hendy predicts a switch to weekday engineering…
THE long tradition of Bank Holiday and weekend engineering works may soon be coming to an end, as leisure travel increases at the expense of commuting.
That’s according to Network
Rail Chairman Sir Peter Hendy CBE, whose interview with RAIL Managing Editor and Events Director Nigel Harris on February 25 was one of the most widely reported elements of the National Rail Recovery Conference.
Hendy’s view that taking engineering possessions on weekdays could now prove less disruptive to traffic on the rail network prompted headlines in several national news outlets, including the BBC, the Guardian and the Daily Mail.
His words echoed an article that RAIL published last summer, when Hendy said that changes to commuter flows could lead to demand for rail travel returning to patterns last experienced in the 1950s ( RAIL 915).
“A lot of leisure travel is going to be within Great Britain,” he told the NRRC.
“Last year we saw a lot of really packed trains going to the coast. It wouldn’t surprise me if on summer Saturdays we have more demand than in the working week.
“The railway might have to get used to that. If Saturday and
Sunday get busy in summer, we should do engineering works at another time.”
Hendy (pictured) also predicted that total rail use could remain below 80% of pre-pandemic levels until the end of the decade, although NR is looking at a range of scenarios.
This could mean that fewer trains are run in future when compared with the pre-pandemic timetable, and that performance gains achieved by running an emergency timetable for the last year can be continued.
He added: “The service doesn’t run better if you put too many trains on the track. We’ve proved that. You shouldn’t try to get more out of the infrastructure than it can give you. All of my experience is that people prefer reliability to journey time.”
Transport Select Committee Chairman Huw Merriman agreed
of food and beverages.
“All this is aimed at driving increased revenue by providing a better experience that customers want to use,” he said.
“That includes intelligent fare capping to replace restrictive season tickets and component pricing to end the damaging headlines of the past about split ticketing.
“Things have changed, and we must now come together to see beyond today’s commercial, regulatory and legacy environment. 2020 brought some tough challenges which we successfully overcame. We now face an even bigger challenge, but through collaboration and putting the customer first we can build back better.”
Ultimately, key decisions on reforming the fares and ticketing structure remain within the gift of Government ministers and would need to be sanctioned by the Treasury, in particular.
Despite progress in this area being notoriously slow, Horne said: “There’s no greater reason [for the Treasury] to move than money, and we’ve heard from a number of large companies that they will allow employees to work from home post-pandemic and are reducing office space.
“We need to do our bit to encourage people back into city centres, and have a new mindset that recognises that our customers now have a choice of using Zoom for meetings instead of travelling.” that there should be no return to pre-pandemic service levels, while the rescheduling of engineering and the rise in leisure travel was a point also raised by LNER Managing Director David Horne (see separate story).
Merriman said: “It’s a point I made to the Secretary of State [for Transport Grant Shapps] after the start of the lockdown - that PPM [Public Performance Measure] was sky high as we had less passengers and more bandwidth.
“I’ve advocated throughout this pandemic that we should learn the positives, while this would also allow more freight on to the railway.”