Driver Only Operation: its history and its future…
THE subject of Driver Only Operation (DOO) - or, as it’s sometimes called, Driver Controlled Operation (DCO) - is as emotive today as it was when it was first introduced between Bedford and London St Pancras in 1982-83. It is instinctively mistrusted by passengers and staff alike.
The purpose of DOO is very clear: it is to reduce the cost of operating the railway. One can argue that by having only one member of traincrew on each train it also improves train service reliability. But that is an overstated benefit - it’s really about costs.
I was not involved in the ‘Bed-Pan’ scheme, but I was accountable for the introduction of some of the later schemes on the Anglia and Southern Regions of British Rail in the later 1980s and early 1990s.
The British Railways Board (BRB) was, at the time, cost-driven because that was the way successive governments had decided it should be. The lower the cost, the less subsidy the industry required. Provided it was safe, DOO was a legitimate tool to reduce costs.
Loss of revenue through fare evasion and the provision of assistance to vulnerable passengers were considered and dismissed for the greater good of cost reduction. There were no disability discrimination laws at that time to weigh in the considerations.
Did BRB sacrifice safety for cost savings? Everyone has their own opinion, so let’s try to be a little more objective.
The operations and safety professionals within the industry discussed the safety pros and cons of single person-crewed trains endlessly. Part of that was self-preservation. If we agreed it was safe and went ahead without proper due diligence, it would have been us in the Dock, not the Chairman of the BRB or the Secretary of State for Transport.
The safety criticality really boils down to two things. Firstly, can the driver safely dispatch the train on their own? Secondly, does the driver need the assistance of a safetycritical second person should a mishap occur during the journey?
Most incidents, a Driver can handle with proper training. Unplanned train evacuations (which is where passengers decide to get out onto the track on their own accord) aren’t manageable and require only one person to communicate outwards.
Planned train evacuations on longer trains can never be accomplished safely with just a Driver and a Guard. It is the single most hazardous task a mobile operations manager will face and requires a lot more than two people. I’ve done two, both on third-rail electrification.
In the end, the decision was taken to go ahead, the schemes were individually designed, and each was approved by Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate (HMRI), which was the ultimate independent safety regulator at the time.
Ongoing analysis since then by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) and the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB), and even the Courts as late as 2017, have all concluded that DOO is no less safe than a train conventionally crewed by a Driver and a Guard.
In 1996-97, UK rail was privatised. The expectation from the government of the day was that the new private sector owners would continue with a run-down agenda. It didn’t happen - once the obvious administrative savings had been taken in the early months, the new owners started to look elsewhere for profit. The economy was booming and most of the new railway owners decided the future lay in growing revenue, not reducing cost.
South West Trains (SWT) was one of the few suburban railways that BRB had never converted to DOO - not because it was considered unsafe, but simply because no one at the Department for Transport or the Treasury (HMT) would sign off on the size of the industrial dispute it would take to implement the scheme. It was left as an unfinished piece of work by BRB for the coming franchise owners to sort out.
After privatisation, I found myself working for Stagecoach, the new franchise holder, as its chief executive (and later chairman). My job was to make Stagecoach profits from SWT, and I couldn’t see how a bitter, drawn-out dispute with RMT and ASLEF that would cost money, destroy train service reliability and wreck customer service would help me achieve my objectives.
Instead, I did a deal with the two trades unions: I would retain Guards on all our trains if they would co-operate in improving the service that Guards gave to customers. We all stuck to the deal, and a combination of new trains, better timetable, staffed ticket barriers and motivated people pulled in ridership - and with it massive revenue.
Apart from the occasional ‘Role of the Guard’ dispute in the train operating companies, there was relative industrial peace over DOO until around 2015, and a drawn-out dispute on Southern about the extension of an existing inner-suburban scheme to the outer suburban.
Why did the dispute arise? Well, the economy was changing and the DfT believed the cost base could be reduced, thus reducing longer-term subsidy.
A compromise was eventually found for Southern, where outer-suburban trains were DOO but had a second, non-safety-critical person on the train to collect revenue and assist passengers.
I think this was a legitimate compromise. Things have changed since the 1990s, with new disability discrimination responsibilities and a more enlightened attitude to the need to serve customers. The compromise delivers this.
COVID then devastated the train operating companies overnight. Passenger numbers (and with them their fares) disappeared, and ridership is only now beginning to return to anything like pre-COVID levels. DfT and HM Treasury stepped in with hundreds of millions of pounds in support of the railways, and (once again it seems) reducing costs has become more important than increasing revenue. A pound saved falls straight to the bottom line.
Lo and behold, universal DOO is now seen as an essential pre-requisite to any future pay agreement. The railways have just turned the industrial relations clock back 30 years.
Nothing has changed on the safety front. If it had, the safety regulators would have stepped in. The decision on the extension of DOO is back to the old basic argument of ‘are the savings worth the dispute?’
What would I do? I would implement DOO, provided I could assure myself that each individual scheme is safe. I would adopt the Southern outer-suburban model of a nonsafety critical On-Board Supervisor (OBS).
I’m an optimist. I believe that one day the economy will improve, and that the railway will be able to right-size the train plan to match the new, emerging passenger flows, and implement a fare and retail restructure that matches passenger needs and embraces inclusion.
I would also, as the economy improves, revisit the older DOO schemes with a view to including an OBS into the scheme to make them more appropriate to today’s railway. But what do I know?
There is no BRB with its years of implied wisdom. There isn’t a Great British Railways. The decision is left to the new guiding mind, DfT and HMT. They are a group of highly intelligent people, the vast majority of whom have never worked a shift on an operational railway. At my age, all I have left is a hope that my industry can find a compromise before it pulls itself apart. R
■ Graham Eccles is a retired railway operations manager. He worked in Britain’s railway industry (on and off) from 1962 to 2021.