Halsall exclusive
Network Rail’s South East Route Managing Director JOHN HALSALL tells PAUL STEPHEN how performance and reliability is being improved on Britain’s busiest Route
NR‘s South East Route Managing Director JOHN HALSALL believes his route deserves more investment.
Of Network Rail’s eight geographic route businesses, none can rival South East for the sheer number of passengers it carries. Each year, more than 500 million people travel over the network, which connects London and its southern suburbs with Kent, Surrey and Sussex, with commuters making up by far the largest proportion.
That equates to approximately 30% of all national demand, putting the Route well ahead of NR’s next busiest Routes - London North Western (246 million passengers per annum) and Wessex (230 million).
That gap is also expected to widen, as Thameslink services increase to 16 trains per hour through central London in May and then to 24tph in December, eventually offering a Tube-like frequency for passengers across London and the South East.
To accommodate this increased frequency, the Thameslink Programme is due for completion by the end of the year, concluding a £7 billion construction sequence and new fleet introduction that began in 2009. This programme also includes a completely rebuilt London Bridge station, where RAIL was invited to meet Halsall shortly before Christmas.
With the end of the year fast approaching, he is in a reflective mood and keen to address the frustrating difficulties that South East’s passengers have been forced to endure over the past 12 months.
This is because, although clearly outside of Halsall’s remit, much of his Route has operated against a backdrop of highly disruptive industrial action taken by ASLEF and RMT union members since April 2016, concerning the introduction of Driver Only Operation on some services operated by Southern.
To compound their woes, regular passengers have also had to suffer poor train performance (caused by various other types of delays) that continues to exceed the national average.
In terms of punctuality, figures from Network Rail reveal a Public Performance Measure (PPM) for the entire national network of 88.4% for the year ending January 6 2018.
During the same period, Halsall’s two primary train operating customers Govia Thameslink Railway (which owns Thameslink and Southern) and Southeastern scored 80.8% and 88.7% respectively.
Between 60% and 70% of delays can be attributed directly to NR for infrastructure and asset faults, engineering works, and external factors such as trespass, cable theft and fatalities.
However, the figures now appear to be moving in the right direction, with the ORR confirming that NR delays had decreased by 24% for Southeastern and 28% for GTR in the second quarter of 2017-18 compared with the corresponding period in 2016-17, with the largest reductions coming in points and track circuit failures.
Halsall concedes that performance is still well below where it needs to be, and that the age and poor condition of infrastructure leaves his network ill-equipped to provide the level of reliability required to keep a network running that is so close to capacity.
With 5,100 trains operating in the South East each weekday, even the smallest incident can inflict significant levels of disruption, making
achieving increased resilience a key priority for Halsall.
“There are obviously challenges that we all know about in terms of industrial action and the rollout of new trains, and we’re working really closely with GTR to help where we can,” he says.
“The assets are also improving, but not enough. It’s intuitive to think that when you have the busiest and most complex network in the country, you’d also have the best assets. But they aren’t. So yes, we are doing a good job in that reliability is getting better, but we’re not doing a good enough job just yet.
“You can see that asset failures are coming down, but in a world where you have an 80% PPM railway it’s not good enough. You need assets that don’t fail and which can be fixed in an instance rather than hours. And we’re not in that position yet.”
Halsall is far from despondent, however, telling RAIL that from his Route’s major weakness comes a great opportunity for largescale investment in Control Period 6 (April 2019-March 2024).
He argues that making a business case for expensive renewals or enhancements should be much easier for his Route, due to the effect on national economic output when commuter flows in the South East are disrupted.
By providing such a large part of London’s workforce, reducing delays on Halsall’s Route is arguably more in the national economic interest than on other Routes, he says, given the capital’s pre-eminent contribution to national GDP and its status as a global centre for international financial services.
“We’ve got broadly speaking the worst performance [in the country]. But we have a
I am unashamedly of the opinion that the South East has been underinvested in, and we need to recognise the complexity of the railway and its underlying condition. John Halsall, South East Route Managing Director, Network Rail
value associated with delay which is greater than any other Routes, and at the same time we have the oldest track. If you add them up you get a really exciting landscape.
“The opportunity that exists in the South East is therefore greater than any other Route, because every train is rammed full of people and we have some of the most assertive stakeholders, making the investment case far more compelling than anywhere else.
“It’s ironic that the challenges we face are also the opportunity to try and fix the problems we’ve had for so long. I get quite excited that there is a business case and an argument that can drag us out of the problems we’ve faced for the last two to three years.”
Halsall will not have to wait long to find out just how compelling the investment case for South East has been, with Route-based settlements for CP6 due to be announced in October. This will determine how much of the £48 billion that NR will have to spend between 2019-24 is to be allocated to Halsall, to spend on renewals and bringing infrastructure up to a higher standard.
Some £ 300 million has already been confirmed to improve asset resilience on the Brighton Main Line ( RAIL 844), and to improve drainage, anti-trespass measures and renew track and signalling by the end of February 2019. Halsall believes that this is recognition of his need for increased funding in CP6, and perhaps a sign that more will come.
“I am unashamedly of the opinion that the South East has been underinvested in, and we need to recognise the complexity of the railway and its underlying condition.
“It does beggar belief that the worstcondition assets are on the busiest part of the railway, so we are pushing hard to secure a level of investment that will allow us to turn that around and start to address the problems that our long-suffering passengers have had to live with.
“So far, I think NR has accepted those arguments we’ve put forward, but there is a long way to go. We’re talking in CP6 about £ 3.5bn-£4bn [for South East], which is an enormous amount of money, but arguably even that’s not even enough.”
A core component of Halsall’s CP6 ambitions is the rollout of a Traffic Management System (TMS) across much of his Route. He says that greater provision of TMS is needed to complement the European Train Control System (ETCS Level 2) that will provide in-cab signalling and automatic train control to Thameslink services through central London from later this year.
It is widely recognised that in order to increase frequency through the core section of the Thameslink route to 24tph, trains must be fed into the core from non-ETCS-equipped routes in a more regulated and punctual manner. TMS would assist in this, by advising drivers on the optimal speed to keep to schedule and reduce delays to other services.
“To me, Thameslink is like the acorn, and as we move forward the business cases associated with increased Traffic Management in Kent and Sussex are very strong. Over the next few years we need to roll out TMS on the approaches to London, because if you’re trying to get 24tph through a two-track railway in the middle of London, then you have to think
about delays before they happen and about half an hour’s travel time each side of it.
“Because the whole railway is so interdependent, everywhere needs to be treated as a metro-style railway if you are to deliver that in central London. It’s like the Red Arrows when they cross over - if they’re in the wrong position 15 seconds beforehand then it isn’t going to end pretty.”
In the meantime, Halsall and his team will be seeking to improve performance via closer working with the train operating companies (TOCs). Although there are no formal alliances between NR’s South East Route and GTR or Southeastern, more integrated working is being introduced. South East will also be one of the last Routes to set up a Supervisory Board, to help align decision making and strategic planning between the different parties.
The level of integration will also be taken a step further when the new Southeastern franchise begins in December, under a new franchising model announced by the Department for Transport when it issued its Invitation to Tender (ITT) in November 2017.
The winning bidder will be expected to deliver a 40,000-passenger capacity increase and universal provision of WiFi by 2022, and work with NR under an innovative new ‘one model’ approach with a single director responsible for infrastructure and operations.
Halsall is excited about the plans for holding private and public bodies jointly responsible for overall performance, which he says will deliver real benefits and improved journeys in the region.
He concludes: “A massively critical part of the driving force is the relationship between NR and the TOCs, and the Secretary of State for Transport’s aspirations in terms of bringing track and train closer together, which I think are spot on.
“I think a lot of the improvement in performance recently is as a result of that closer relationship and camaraderie between NR, Southeastern and GTR. It goes beyond ‘soft alliancing’ because we have a shared level of performance, and all of our stations are now led by a single director of stations. In terms of having a deep alliance and sharing financial pain or gain, it’s not there. But in terms of approach it is, to all intents and purposes, a deep alliance.
“What is quite exciting is the opportunity of the re-franchise in terms of improved performance by working together. The approach adopted by the DfT is incredibly different, but in a positive way.
“There seems to be more of an appetite to come up with an answer that meets passenger needs, as opposed to Treasury needs. So it could be transformational, and the one that sets the franchise model for the rest.
“It feels like all the small but critical issues in how previous franchises have worked have been picked up. And it feels like all the stars have aligned, so it’s very exciting.”
Because the whole railway is so interdependent, everywhere needs to be treated as a metro-style railway if you are to deliver that in central London. It’s like the Red Arrows when they cross over - if they’re in the wrong position 15 seconds beforehand then it isn’t going to end pretty. John Halsall, South East Route Managing Director, Network Rail