Timetable meltdown
Operators blame Network Rail as new May timetable descends into chaos with thousands of trains cancelled.
OPERATORS have largely blamed Network Rail for the problems suffered by rail passengers following last month’s overhaul of timetables, with Govia Thameslink Railway and Northern passengers enduring a catalogue of delays and cancellations.
For weeks, the companies had been warning passengers that the May 20 change might not go smoothly. A week after the new timetable launch, GTR was still reporting a Public Performance Measurement (PPM) performance figure of just 38% on the Brighton Main Line, with one in three trains running more than half an hour late and many dozens of GTR services cancelled each day.
Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling apologised to MPs in the House of Commons. He said he had informed Network Rail that this must not happen again.
“Many passengers have suffered disrupted journeys,” he said. “I’m sorry this was the case.”
Train operators said it was becoming increasingly challenging to plan for disruption, with NR confirming final details of line closures to enable engineering works only a few days in advance. Previously the infrastructure owner was obliged to provide 12 weeks’ notice.
On the late May Bank Holiday, closures included a blockade on the Great Western Main Line between Didcot and Bristol, with buses replacing many trains. And on Thameslink and Southeastern, a closure between Brixton and Shortlands in south London had a significant impact.
“It means we are given less than a week to draw up driver rosters,” commented a senior train operator source.
“Less than a week to organise extra guards to work on a Bank Holiday, so we are relying on the goodwill of our staff to make sudden changes to whatever family plans they may have for a day off.
“And, most importantly, less than a week to inform passengers where and when they can or cannot travel.
“And, of course, we take the reputational hit. When it comes to pointing the finger of blame, perhaps people should look a bit more closely at Network Rail’s central planning team. Network Rail is the system operator. It rejects many of the trains we would normally expect to run.”
Govia Thameslink Railway, Great Western Railway, Greater Anglia, Northern and TransPennine Express were all said to be affected by the late notice.
In the past, Network Rail issued details of any track or signalling work 12 weeks in advance. The industry calls this T-12. This year NR has moved to six weeks’ notice (T-6). This has been widely criticised by train operators and passenger groups.
GTR said it was given less than four weeks’ notice of the final clearance of its May 20 timetable change, for which every service at every station south of the Thames moved to a new time.
Three years in development, it was described as the biggest timetable change on the railway. Britain’s biggest franchise, accounting for 23% of all passenger journeys and 3,600 services a day, had one-third of the expected amount of time to complete its train planning.
This caused GTR significant issues, as the switch involved retraining 1,000 drivers on new journey patterns and new rolling stock, with 350 drivers also switching depots. The company faced other difficulties, including not completing planned driver training and therefore having to delay the introduction of some scheduled services, phasing them in over a three-week period.
The Thameslink Programme Industry Readiness Board, chaired by Network Rail director Chris Gibb, had previously identified a lack of qualified drivers, with insufficient drivers in the right locations or with the right route training - particularly on new Thameslink routes to Southeastern destinations and
on services between Horsham and Peterborough.
Later than planned delivery and acceptance of new rolling stock also meant less new stock available for driver training.
Therefore, amid failings by the train operator, it was not possible to quantify the precise impact of the late timetable confirmation.
Ahead of the May 28 Bank Holiday, a company source said: “I think you’d better warn passengers that we are in for a rough ride. We’ve gone from T-12 to T-6. For the big timetable change it was T-4, and now it seems we are less than T-1 - a week’s notice.”
Last-minute decisions by Network Rail had also been blamed for unexpected disruption affecting thousands of GWR passengers over the Bank Holiday weekend of May 7, with a majority of long-distance services to Paddington terminating at Reading. No trains ran between Maidenhead and west London.
Even the company’s news release made the reason clear: “Network Rail has been unable to amend online timetables in advance of this planned engineering work, and some services will differ from those originally advertised. Network Rail has been unable to inform passengers of changes to the timetables as early as it would like.”
Another train operator commented: “Network Rail gives us 80% of the timetable at five weeks out. But that’s the easy stuff that keeps the Key Performance Indicators ticking over at a justabout acceptable level. It’s enough for us to put passenger information on our website.
“But the missing 20%, which we get just a few days in advance, is the key stuff around the engineering work which requires us to bring in an uncertain number of extra staff - the stuff that makes services fall out of their normal patterns.
“Being given most but not all of the service pattern at five weeks out is not much good to us. It means we are scrabbling around at the last moment pulling in extra staff. We have enough drivers - that’s not the issue. We are relying on their goodwill to be interrupted in whatever else they were planning to do over their Bank Holiday weekend.”
A third operator commented: “It’s not catastrophic for us, but it needs careful working through. The information passengers need is on our website four or five weeks out, which is less than it should be for selling advance tickets. It is not ideal. But the final train planning is being done by us at two or three days out, which is seriously inconvenient.”
Grayling said in the Commons: “A timetable change on this scale involves reorganising staff rotas. It involves training for new routes. It involves reorganising how you deploy your trains.
“For the second time in six months, Network Rail was far too late in finalising the planned timetable changes, and they have left the rest of the industry struggling to catch up. I’ve told the leadership of Network Rail this cannot happen again.”
When asked how rapidly performance would improve, a GTR spokesman would only comment: “It’s a moving picture.”
Grant Shapps, Conservative MP for Welwyn Hatfield, urged Grayling to strip GTR of its franchise.
“This is probably the world’s most incompetent railway company,” he told MPs. “They must be in breach of their contract. We want the Secretary of State to look at ending the franchise now, rather than in 2021.”
Sir Oliver Head, Conservative MP for North East Hertfordshire, said: “There was no advance notice that there was going to be this scale of disruption. It really came out of the blue.”
Grayling conceded that delays during the first few days of the new timetable amounted to “a major teething problem”. He said it was an uncomfortable truth for Labour that the problems resulted from failings in the nationalised part of the railway.
NR did not wish to comment on the claims by train operators, suggesting that it was “not helpful” for different parts of the railway to be seen criticising each other.
Nevertheless, a Network Rail source said it would be unfair to lay all the blame on the planning team, as train operators were increasingly seeking to amend their service requests a week or two before a planned blockade.
He added that the original GTR timetable changes were completed by Network Rail last November, but the Government had subsequently agreed to a phased introduction of the Thameslink service, meaning that the May timetable had to be rewritten from scratch.
Alterations to rolling stock on some Great Northern routes made the situation worse, he said. Services planned for new Class 717 trains were initially being operated by older Class 313s, which could not maintain the same schedule due to slower acceleration and braking.
The source also commented that some train operators depend heavily on weekend overtime, but well-paid train drivers are increasingly reluctant to volunteer for additional work at antisocial times.
Another source commented: “There is politics at play, with the Secretary of State trying to protect private franchising after a series of bad news stories that started with East Coast.”