Philip Haigh
PHILIP HAIGH examines why passengers and operators at both ends of the country suffered in May, and is concerned that the railway will fare no better when the next series of changes takes place in December
Timetable changes.
RAIL has closed the north-south divide. Northern’s services since May 20’s timetable change have been decimated by cancellations and delays. Similar problems wrack Southern’s network.
More accurately, the problems in southern England came from Thameslink, which joins Southern, Great Northern and Gatwick Express under the GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway) umbrella.
May 20 brought wide-ranging new timetables across GTR’s network - the time of every train changed. Routes changed too, as trains switched to using Canal Tunnel between Finsbury Park and St Pancras so that trains from Peterborough and Cambridge could run through central London towards Brighton, rather than terminating at King’s Cross.
This was Thameslink delivering the biggest part of its £6 billion upgrade project that has kept thousands of construction workers busy for over a decade. I had the chance to explain some of this to BBC Radio 5 Live’s listeners late one Sunday night, but the programme concentrated on fears that the timetable would collapse on its first weekday morning. It duly did.
The railway has two timetables. One matches trains to tracks and the other matches drivers to trains. The railway calls the latter ‘diagrams’, and they are every bit as important as the times that passengers see. Just as you can’t have two trains on the same piece of track at the same time, so you can’t have a driver on board two trains at the same time.
GTR has never had enough drivers - particularly on its Thameslink part that it inherited from First Capital Connect, which had similar problems. Drivers need specific training on the routes they will use and the trains they will use. All those Great Northern drivers who for years have been taking Class 365s to and from King’s Cross now need to be passed to drive Class 700s through Canal Tunnels and Thameslink’s core - a core which has a new signalling system to further complicate training.
This training had to take place while GTR continued to deliver its daily service. The operator faced the choice of either cancelling trains before the timetable changed to allow drivers to learn their new routes, or cancelling trains after the change because it didn’t have trained staff.
Nor did it have the option of drafting in freelance or temporary drivers to cover. UK rail doesn’t have pools of such drivers, and even if it did they would also need to learn their routes and trains before they could work.
GTR’s senior managers were already reeling from vociferous criticism from the RMT union about changes to guard’s duties, groups complaining about discrimination towards disabled passengers, and commentators labelling their seats as ‘ironing boards’.
They now found themselves well and truly wedged between a rock and a hard place in delivering timetable change on a scale not seen in decades. What should have been a story of more trains and more seats became one of chaos and disruption.
“On what should have been its proudest hour and the delivery of Thameslink, the rail industry in this incarnation couldn’t get it to work,” BBC reporter Tom Edwards wrote.
Northern’s service was also felled by incomplete driver diagrams. It had started planning in good time for a timetable that would feature some diesel services converting to electric to release diesel trains to run more trains elsewhere (I’m simplifying this - there were plenty of other changes).
Then Network Rail announced late in the day that it wasn’t able to finish electrifying the route through Bolton, and it finished wiring to Blackpool later than planned. This forced Northern to ditch its work and start again without (it appears) enough time to properly
plan its driver diagrams, leading it to try to deliver its new timetable with its old diagrams. They didn’t match, hence the widespread cancellations.
On top of all these problems comes the final collapse of Virgin Trains East Coast. Despite paying more to government than its nationalised predecessor, and despite posting chart-topping customer satisfaction scores, it will be labelled a failure. It’s rather like saying the person who comes last in an Olympics 100metre sprint final is a slow runner.
I hope its successor, DfT’s London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) under Chairman Robin Gisby, has the cash needed to fix many of the problems with VTEC’s trains. Things such as water leaks in kitchens, faulty toilets, or the vestibule sliding door that I’ve noticed twice in recent weeks being held open with nylon straps. Fix this crumbling edge of quality and the operator will be on a better footing. It was these details that jarred with VTEC’s claim that all was awesome.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling must have wrestled with the options before deciding to nationalise the East Coast’s long-distance operator, rather than granting VTEC a not-forprofit management deal. Ideologically, he’s a privateer, and this led many (including me) to think a management deal more likely. Instead, Grayling has delivered a strong message that he expects private companies to deliver their promises. As indeed they should.
Private companies will now be following the development of Grayling’s preferred publicprivate East Coast Partnership. This involves the operator taking the lead in East Coast operations despite being a smaller operator,
“Despite paying more to government than its nationalised predecessor, and despite posting chart-topping customer satisfaction scores, it will be labelled a failure. It’s rather like saying the person who comes last in an Olympics 100-metre sprint final is a slow runner.”
and despite Network Rail having a far greater influence on the line and its performance.
This leaves the operator as the fall-guy for all sorts of problems it cannot control. That could be a tough sell. Britain only has three private rail operators - Stagecoach, Go-Ahead and First. A fourth (National Express) quit following its East Coast experience in 2009 to pursue easier ways to make money elsewhere.
Stagecoach is the 90% owner of ‘failing’ VTEC. Go-Ahead concentrates on suburban services and is majority owner of GTR. First is planning a London-Edinburgh open access operation and may be quite happy to stick with this plan.
That just leaves foreign companies, chiefly state-owned railways. Even their owners must be noticing that Britain is no easy ride. Nederlandse Spoorwegen has had to put money into Abellio’s ScotRail franchise, and promised a huge premium to win Greater Anglia in 2016. Deutsche Bahn didn’t see a penny from its Arriva operations in Britain last year. MTR remains as inscrutable as the ageing cliche of its parent country.
In short, Grayling faces the real prospect that no one will want to bid for LNER - not even as a simple franchise, let alone as an ill-defined partnership with a bureaucratic Network Rail and an indecisive Department for Transport.
Into this maelstrom steps Andrew Haines as Network Rail’s next chief executive. Welcome back!
Haines is used to crises. When he joined First Great Western a decade ago, it was in the aftermath of a new franchise that almost immediately let passengers down, triggering a £29 million fine from government. FGW was little respected, and Haines put in the foundations that led to the company improving its reputation and building itself into today’s Great Western Railway that is bringing new trains into service despite Network Rail’s woeful performance in delivering its promised electrification.
Haines brings experience of delivering 2004’s major timetable change to South West Trains, and of introducing new fleets of trains to that franchise. He’s the first NR chief executive to have been a customer.
He will take over from Mark Carne in time to see the Office of Rail and Road deliver its final determination into 2019-24’s financing and operational, maintenance and renewal plans in late October.
But he will probably arrive too late to influence NR’s delivery of December 2018’s timetable. Going by the rules, NR must publish December’s working timetable on June 8, two days after this magazine lands on shop shelves. With May’s problems unresolved, I suspect NR will be late.
South Western Railway is planning major changes from December 2018, a month that also features the start of the rollout of IEP intercity trains to East Coast passengers. It should be the month in which ScotRail accelerates Edinburgh-Glasgow timetables, having finally introduced its troubled Hitachi Class 385 electric trains. TransPennine Express should be bringing its Mk 5 coaches and Class 68s into traffic. And GTR will be bringing another raft of changes, as it moves towards using the full capacity of its upgraded lines through central London.
2018 was to be the year in which rail services dramatically improved after years of planning and building finally delivered their benefits. May has been a disaster. December must be better.
About the author
Philip Haigh is a former deputy editor of RAIL who is now a freelance writer specialising in railways. He is an associate member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. You can contact him via thorpestreetmedia.com and follow him on twitter at @philatrail