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Will they ever restore the Oxenholme - Windermere service ?


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Mike

 

Thanks for the detailed reply, but lets take the point about the stock, taking out a lease to buy stock is no different a way of financing than commercial companies leasing fleets of lorries/cars. I can totally understand the government not wanting to finance the rolling stock and believe commerce is in a better position to run the system than goverment

 

Now the train/stock owning companies, do they buy the stock outright or do they borrow to finance the acquisition ?

If its the latter, it will be far cheaper if the operators took out the leases from the lenders directly, rather than take out a sub lease from a company which has already financed the purchase then put on their own margin on to the sub-lease, thats the point I am badly making. Simply cut out the middle man and make it cheaper for the users

While ROSCOs technically borrow the money from banks - many of said ROSCOs are in fact owned by investment banks as the international finance system recognises that investing depositors money in assets (rather than simply holding onto it like a piggy bank) gives a far better rate of return for both themselves and their investors. In many cases these days what you get is manufacturers, ROSCOs and investment banks all getting together to put together a bespoke package for Train operators (frequently also covering maintenance - Hitachi are under an obligation to present x number of class 800 trains to GWR or they don't get paid that day).

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Mike, can you give an idea of how much (or even whether) computer technology has been brought to bear in the field of timetabling?  I ask purely out of curiosity and interest, not seeking to undermine your point in any way.  Simply put: I don't know, and I'm intrigued about it!

 

My own experience of something similar - computer-based project planning tools - is that they are at best a useful way to record and organise task and resource information, but still not all that good at sorting out conflicts and dependencies.  (Though not quite as bad as the early days, when a favourite Friday afternoon amusement was to click "autoschedule" just to see exactly how far to the right MS Project would push your end date!  You could probably have run a fairly profitable sweepstake that way...quite possibly some project teams did just that, if their project was sufficiently boring/doomed/pointless.)

 

I spent what seemed like quite a lot of time in the back half of the 1990s going to various presentations by folk who wanted to sell me - among others - what they thought were sooper dooper timetable planning software and I kept on telling them it was little more than what you suggest.  They were tackling me from various levels of their organisation and plenty of free lunches but they simply could not deliver the holy grail - conflict resolution.  In the end they sold an advanced version their software to Israeli Railways and told me that it did have conflict resolution - and it did, but only to avoid head on collisions on single lines!

 

Part of the problem was I think that they didn't tackle it from the ground up, or rather from the right patch of ground up but in the late '90s Railtrack actually bought that software although the people who made the decision had no practical timetable planning experience at all and were as much keen to get away from BR systems as they were to find something better (in fact it wasn't better).  It delivered some advantages and was gradually getting there but it still wasn't particularly intelligent which meant a lot of human understanding of how timetabling works was still needed.  Obviously what computing should be able to do today ought to be a lot more advanced, and hopefully it is, but it won't be much good if it doesn't start from the right place and in order to do what the human brain can do it needs as an absolute minimum a series of potentially very large relational databases including geography (track layouts, signals etc). timetable planning rules, the entire suite of basic timing elements for every sort of train operating over a particular stretch (which in fact of course means every stretch) of railway, and an ability to flex paths on the graph on screen.  

 

But the latter also needs experienced timers to be able to do it and not just work by numbers.  and those sort of people are also needed as informed buyers to test the system to destruction (hopefully not) and who have the experience to exploit the machine rather than just letting in punch in the numbers.

 

Interestingly SNCF were in the latter half of the 1990s using timetable planning software which allowed them to flex trains on an onscreen graph and it really could do it as I saw one day in Paris when they needed to move a train by a few minutes.  Well it could do it but it took over 35 minutes to get the full job done whereas the contemporaneous BR system, which couldn't manage flexing on a graph on screen, would have actually done the timing part of the job (basically simple addition) and produced  a final usable print out and updated data in about 10 minutes at the very most - but you had to do the flexing on a printed graph in the old fashioned way (would have taken less than 5 minutes for that SNCF example) and then re-enter the starting time manually leaving the system to add on the rest.  The final system BR used could graph on screen and could print graphs on a plotter but all the subsequent work then had to be done manually, however it was great for simple upload to other systems such as those used for printing working and public timetables so it cut out a lot of repetitive and simple manual tasks.  By the early '90s most European railways, including BR, were using something with generally similar characteristics which had usually been developed by the Railway concerned in concert with a chosen computer and/or software manufacturer but I think only the SNCF system allowed onscreen path flexing.

 

Quite what NR use now I don't know but even if they have a good system they also need good, experienced, timers to make proper use of it.

 

I see that Brian ('Fat Controller' has mentioned the system used by Eurotunnel  and I don't know if it has changed but what they originally bought was a combination of various systems already in use with SNCF and if they have to do a new run for each operating day it sounds to me as if it is still using the SNCF model.  And that the resource planning part of it is about the sort of level which was being peddled by various companies back in the mid to late 1990s, mostly originally developed for airlines (and it was seemingly impossible to find anywhere in Europe a crew planning system which worked any other way - quite a few more free buffet lunches came from their various presentations in London).

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Mike

 

Thanks for the detailed reply, but lets take the point about the stock, taking out a lease to buy stock is no different a way of financing than commercial companies leasing fleets of lorries/cars. I can totally understand the government not wanting to finance the rolling stock and believe commerce is in a better position to run the system than goverment

 

Now the train/stock owning companies, do they buy the stock outright or do they borrow to finance the acquisition ?

If its the latter, it will be far cheaper if the operators took out the leases from the lenders directly, rather than take out a sub lease from a company which has already financed the purchase then put on their own margin on to the sub-lease, thats the point I am badly making. Simply cut out the middle man and make it cheaper for the users

 

In some respects it might but would a franchisee wish to take on that sort of commitment?  Franchises generally last for around 5 years, most items of rolling stock will last at least a couple of decades with a mid-life refurb.  Simple enough obviously for someone to borrow the money to build and supply rolling stock and also go round bidding for franchises but all the companies currently in the franchise business seem to prefer sticking with what they know and just tackling one part of the overall picture.  First Group do of course own some things outright for whatever reason.

 

However it might perhaps be salutary to note that Britain's only state owned rail operator has modernised its loco fleet by leasing as opposed to its earlier course of outright purchase. So if the state sector sees advantage in going to an outside concern when it could ostensibly possibly take advantage of lower interest rates by virtue of being state owned there clearly must be a lot more to it than immediately meets the eye.  Perhaps we are once again back to where the state spends or invests it own or borrowed money?

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If its the latter, it will be far cheaper if the operators took out the leases from the lenders directly, rather than take out a sub lease from a company which has already financed the purchase then put on their own margin on to the sub-lease, thats the point I am badly making. Simply cut out the middle man and make it cheaper for the users

Any TOC doing that would have to duplicate the structure in place in the ROSCOs to get any new vehicle through all the regulatory hurdles involved in bringing a new train into service, and the mryiad of rules around modifications and refurbishment to existing trains. The ROSCOs do that for a living, the TOCs could do it if they chose to but it would be duplication and costly. Even where vehicles were bought outright (144 centre cars for example, by WYPTE in this case) they are still managed by one of the ROSCOs for exactly that reason.

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In some respects it might but would a franchisee wish to take on that sort of commitment?  Franchises generally last for around 5 years, most items of rolling stock will last at least a couple of decades with a mid-life refurb.  Simple enough obviously for someone to borrow the money to build and supply rolling stock and also go round bidding for franchises but all the companies currently in the franchise business seem to prefer sticking with what they know and just tackling one part of the overall picture.  First Group do of course own some things outright for whatever reason.

 

However it might perhaps be salutary to note that Britain's only state owned rail operator has modernised its loco fleet by leasing as opposed to its earlier course of outright purchase. So if the state sector sees advantage in going to an outside concern when it could ostensibly possibly take advantage of lower interest rates by virtue of being state owned there clearly must be a lot more to it than immediately meets the eye.  Perhaps we are once again back to where the state spends or invests it own or borrowed money?

 

 

Mike

 

that's really my point, its not in a companies best interest to invest into a short term business. If a PLC was to take on a business and invest heavily, they must have the ability over time to profit from their investment. How can you invest for the long tern with a 5 year franchise ?

 

I have no issues with leasing rather than buying, but sub-leasing must be dearer than taking on the lease yourself. Unless I am missing something 

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Depending on the nature of the lease, it isn't just about acquiring an asset, it may be just as much about outsourcing all the hassle around managing relations with the manufacturer, product delivery, certification, through life asset maintenance etc in house. Companies can do all that in house but they'll need to pay for that capability and it means they also bring a lot of risk and uncertainty back in house. There is also the cost of finance and figuring out what to do with the asset if your franchise isn't renewed. And it is becoming more common to buy service provision rather than a conventional asset lease in that you specify what service is needed and then it's for a supplier to provide what is needed to meet that need.

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Mike

 

that's really my point, its not in a companies best interest to invest into a short term business. If a PLC was to take on a business and invest heavily, they must have the ability over time to profit from their investment. How can you invest for the long tern with a 5 year franchise ?

 

I have no issues with leasing rather than buying, but sub-leasing must be dearer than taking on the lease yourself. Unless I am missing something 

The duration of franchises has been the subject of considerable debate and I suppose there are arguments both ways although I'm inclined towards longer term franchises for the reason you mention.  I suspect the Civil Service might be wary of such an arrangement in case it gets the blame if things go wrong and judging by some thing which have happened it does seem to have problems in sorting out sensible bids from financially attractive ones. Procurement of course had s the potential advantage of being disconnected from the duration of franchises if it is in the hands of leasing companies and there have been suggestions that much longer lease periods would reduce lease prices

 

There was once upon a time a tax advantage in going down the leasing road but I don't l know if that still applies.   There are as others have already mentioned managerial and technical benefits in leaving procurement, safety validation, and testing in the hands of an organisation which is used to dealing with the complexities and which knows how to hire in the necessary expertise and services for the things it can't do itself.  There is of course nothing to stop anyone with necessary capital establishing such a concern of their own but they would still have to compete an an even handed basis with anybody else in the leasing market.  Thus - unless things have changed - there would be no financial advantage for a franchisee to lease stock from itself beyond the fact that both parts of the holding company would make a profit (not that the profits for either are at exactly wonderful percentage levels.

 

However it might be telling us something that our only state owned rail operator, which considers that it has a long term future and is planning some parts of its business, and its fleet needs 20 years ahead,  has decided to go down the leasing road and use an external company to manage its procurement and loco development and testing etc programmes and to finance and lease the locos to the operator.   It could probably just as readily have hired in the expertise to do the work directly for it on a consultancy basis and it could presumably, being a state owned company, have secured advantageous direct borrowing instead of using someone else to do all that - but it didn't.

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Mike

 

Thanks again, I repeat I am not against leasing as opposed to buying the stock, or going down the route where the manufacturer enters a contract to supply and maintain stock. 

 

The impression I got was that company which owns the stock either buys or leases the stock from the manufacturer, in turn they (after adding their costs and profits) sub let there items to the operator. My simple view is if you cut out the middle man and lease directly yourself its cheaper. However if you only have a franchise for 5 years and the lead time for new stock is 5 years how can you plan for new stock. As I said a recipe for doing things the most expensive way 

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A 33? Thought they'd all gone.

 

WCRC have a couple three 

 

33025/029/207, although I don't think 025 has been active for a few months.

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I went to Scarborough behind 35018 on WCRC's Scarborough Spa Express yesterday, and at one point the Train Manager was telling passengers in my coach that the 33 / 57 combination was to be used on the Windermeres due to complaints about the noise made by the 37s!  I took him to mean complaints from nearby residents.  From what I remember of 33s, I would have thought they could be as noisy as 37s?!  Perhaps not, if the 33 is on the 'downhill' end (if there is a downhill end!)?

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Mike

 

Thanks again, I repeat I am not against leasing as opposed to buying the stock, or going down the route where the manufacturer enters a contract to supply and maintain stock. 

 

The impression I got was that company which owns the stock either buys or leases the stock from the manufacturer, in turn they (after adding their costs and profits) sub let there items to the operator. My simple view is if you cut out the middle man and lease directly yourself its cheaper. However if you only have a franchise for 5 years and the lead time for new stock is 5 years how can you plan for new stock. As I said a recipe for doing things the most expensive way 

 

I think there's bit of a mix up there.  In most cases with new stock the rosco (rolling stock company - the original name for them for anybody who has forgotten it) has either purchased the stock with its own finance or has used borrowed money to purchase the stock so it owns it, even if it is paying loan interest on it.  There have been several instances now where the original manufacturers have obtained maintenance contracts but they are basically doing work which the operator would otherwise do, and it is still using rolling stock leased from a rolling stock provider.  The Class 800 contract is rather different as it works on a basis of providing enough trains to meet diagram requirements rather than providing a fleet to match what the operator wants and the original manufacturer also has the maintenance contract - hence redundancies among GWR technical and artisan staff because as the HSTs go part of their workload goes.  Another difference is that is this case the leasing company is part pwned by the manufacturer of the trains and it borrowed money to build them.

 

Eurostar went for outside finance to purchase the Class 373s and the national railways and latterly Eurostar UK did a lot of the testing and commissioning work although post 1994 some work went to outside contract but that was really the transition period from BR.  I doubt if any TOC now has the considerable resources required for that sort of work or indeed the necessary resources to even act as an informed buyer should it decide to buy the work in and to create that would cost money hence putting the procurement process to a rosco and letting it handle all the necessary financing and contract arranging.  You'd also need a steady acquisition of trains if you were to get value for money out of in-house expertise and that hasn't really happened.  I do wonder, as some of these franchisees have got their financial heads well screwed on, if they have looked at alternatives and seen they are not a viable change from what currently happens?

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I went to Scarborough behind 35018 on WCRC's Scarborough Spa Express yesterday, and at one point the Train Manager was telling passengers in my coach that the 33 / 57 combination was to be used on the Windermeres due to complaints about the noise made by the 37s!  I took him to mean complaints from nearby residents.  From what I remember of 33s, I would have thought they could be as noisy as 37s?!  Perhaps not, if the 33 is on the 'downhill' end (if there is a downhill end!)?

 

 

The Crompton was on the uphill end today so would be making most of the noise, and I doubt much difference in volume between a 33 and a 37 

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In theory the government should be able to exercise their immense purchasing power to squeeze fantastic deals from their suppliers, and in combination with the low interest rates they can access then government spending should be very efficient. Unfortunately it seldom seems to work out like that. I think it's worth pointing out that Network Rail is a nationalised entity and they've managed to make electrification unaffordable.

It is a total myth that governments can squeeze fantastic deals.  Economies of scale is a myth. You just end up with one supplier large enough to be in a position to fulfil the contract and so have a monopoly vs monopoly "After you George" situation.    You want a Computer, there are 100000s of options, You want 100 000 identical computers like the NHS then there is a choice of  about 1 supplier depending on which spec you want and forget discounts, you will be lucky if the unit cost comes out less than 100% of the usual price.   Lots of small deals with lots of competing firms is the efficient way.. See the USA.

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I went to Scarborough behind 35018 on WCRC's Scarborough Spa Express yesterday, and at one point the Train Manager was telling passengers in my coach that the 33 / 57 combination was to be used on the Windermeres due to complaints about the noise made by the 37s!  I took him to mean complaints from nearby residents.  From what I remember of 33s, I would have thought they could be as noisy as 37s?!  Perhaps not, if the 33 is on the 'downhill' end (if there is a downhill end!)?

 

On my trip on the branch on Thursday 37669 was certainly working hard on the climb into Oxenholme ! Not sure who is complaining about the noise however, given that the service only operates between around 0900 and 1900 (perhaps, finally, some consideration for night shift workers ?!)

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Our local TV channel had some photos from Northern of the first class 195 unit being unloaded the other day in Bristol.

 

A friend who works for Northern indicated that when these and the electric CAF units have entered service that will kill off the union argument as they will eliminate guard's.

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I spent what seemed like quite a lot of time in the back half of the 1990s going to various presentations by folk who wanted to sell me - among others - what they thought were sooper dooper timetable planning software and I kept on telling them it was little more than what you suggest.  They were tackling me from various levels of their organisation and plenty of free lunches but they simply could not deliver the holy grail - conflict resolution.  In the end they sold an advanced version their software to Israeli Railways and told me that it did have conflict resolution - and it did, but only to avoid head on collisions on single lines!

 

Part of the problem was I think that they didn't tackle it from the ground up, or rather from the right patch of ground up but in the late '90s Railtrack actually bought that software although the people who made the decision had no practical timetable planning experience at all and were as much keen to get away from BR systems as they were to find something better (in fact it wasn't better).  It delivered some advantages and was gradually getting there but it still wasn't particularly intelligent which meant a lot of human understanding of how timetabling works was still needed.  Obviously what computing should be able to do today ought to be a lot more advanced, and hopefully it is, but it won't be much good if it doesn't start from the right place and in order to do what the human brain can do it needs as an absolute minimum a series of potentially very large relational databases including geography (track layouts, signals etc). timetable planning rules, the entire suite of basic timing elements for every sort of train operating over a particular stretch (which in fact of course means every stretch) of railway, and an ability to flex paths on the graph on screen.  

 

But the latter also needs experienced timers to be able to do it and not just work by numbers.  and those sort of people are also needed as informed buyers to test the system to destruction (hopefully not) and who have the experience to exploit the machine rather than just letting in punch in the numbers.

 

Interestingly SNCF were in the latter half of the 1990s using timetable planning software which allowed them to flex trains on an onscreen graph and it really could do it as I saw one day in Paris when they needed to move a train by a few minutes.  Well it could do it but it took over 35 minutes to get the full job done whereas the contemporaneous BR system, which couldn't manage flexing on a graph on screen, would have actually done the timing part of the job (basically simple addition) and produced  a final usable print out and updated data in about 10 minutes at the very most - but you had to do the flexing on a printed graph in the old fashioned way (would have taken less than 5 minutes for that SNCF example) and then re-enter the starting time manually leaving the system to add on the rest.  The final system BR used could graph on screen and could print graphs on a plotter but all the subsequent work then had to be done manually, however it was great for simple upload to other systems such as those used for printing working and public timetables so it cut out a lot of repetitive and simple manual tasks.  By the early '90s most European railways, including BR, were using something with generally similar characteristics which had usually been developed by the Railway concerned in concert with a chosen computer and/or software manufacturer but I think only the SNCF system allowed onscreen path flexing.

 

Quite what NR use now I don't know but even if they have a good system they also need good, experienced, timers to make proper use of it.

 

I see that Brian ('Fat Controller' has mentioned the system used by Eurotunnel  and I don't know if it has changed but what they originally bought was a combination of various systems already in use with SNCF and if they have to do a new run for each operating day it sounds to me as if it is still using the SNCF model.  And that the resource planning part of it is about the sort of level which was being peddled by various companies back in the mid to late 1990s, mostly originally developed for airlines (and it was seemingly impossible to find anywhere in Europe a crew planning system which worked any other way - quite a few more free buffet lunches came from their various presentations in London).

 

Seems to me that it is the same old problem that I remember from my company over 30 years ago. Computers and software are tools, and they can be very good tools indeed, but you still need a craftsman to use them, to get the best from them and to make the final judgment.

 

You have to use a tool and not let the tool use you.

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Thanks to a friendly friend, I now have copies of both the current and the last issue of Rail magazine, in which there are excellent,informed analyses of what has gone wrong and why and when. For anyone really interested, as opposed to simply making a point about some aspect, I would thoroughly recommend forking out a few sovs.

 

I could only summarise the content by saying that the causes, faults, and appropriate timelines are all far more complex than much that has been stated here. Just one example - NR was told by the ORR to radically cut the costs of its Timetable Production function, so it did.

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Thanks to a friendly friend, I now have copies of both the current and the last issue of Rail magazine, in which there are excellent,informed analyses of what has gone wrong and why and when. For anyone really interested, as opposed to simply making a point about some aspect, I would thoroughly recommend forking out a few sovs.

 

I could only summarise the content by saying that the causes, faults, and appropriate timelines are all far more complex than much that has been stated here. Just one example - NR was told by the ORR to radically cut the costs of its Timetable Production function, so it did.

 

But in effect there's nothing new there.  We (including me personally in two successive posts) spent years - 5 in my case - reducing staff to cut costs in train planning in BR days.  The essential difference perhaps was that every time we looked at potential cost savings we considered what work we could shed and told those seeking the cuts what would have to go in order to make the cuts.  But the cost saving aspects will have in many respects little to do with the problems created by centralising train planning to a non-railway location (in traditional terms) on NR which is also poorly situated when it comes to recruiting the necessary skills from operating companies.

 

Equally NR would have been failing in their management role if they did not make clear to the ORR that if cuts were made certain consequences would result.  It is hardly a difficult task to estimate train planning workloads within reasonable limits when you know the nature of the tasks and the abilities needed to perform them plus whatever the various IT systems can, or can't deliver.  Workload troughs and peaks have hardly changed as almost all are calendar driven and can be be assessed well in advance of planning what to do with your workforce, permitting leave, planning training and so on.  If the ORR accepted the delays in process which would result then it is down to them and they should be involved in any inquiry into the recent failings.  But equally it is 100% in NR's hands to say what their response was to any proposed cuts and what impact they would have on timely completion of the various tasks.

 

Being tasked to save money is one thing - doing it in an effective way which does not damage processes unless those processes are revised is something very different.  For example if processing the annual timetable changes takes longer because there are fewer staff doing it then you alter the schedule for the overall process by allowing extra time for that part of it - the amount of work doesn't really vary even if extra trains are being added especially extra trains running on a reasonably fixed pattern/interval service.  The amount of work for special traffic alterations is usually remarkably consistent and we know that in some cases - Christmas/New Year now being the most obvious example - that the time available to do the work is extremely limited therefore it needs extra people to do it in a timely manner, which is great as long as it doesn't clash with any other workload peaks (which is quite likely with December TT change date - and is the main reason I objected to the shift to a December change date when it was discussed at the European Timetable Conference).

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Refering to the debate on timetable planning. My wife’s train from Manchester Puccadilly is due to depart 2 minutes after a container train. Now I’m fairly sure that 2 minutes is the standard time between trains on that section of line and it works fine for the usual 2, 3 and four car units. However, the freight train is very long and takes up several sections at once, hence my wife’s train cannot run twi minutes behind it, so it always runs late. Perhaps a case of lack of local knowledge?

 

Her train has to negotiate several junction with flat crossings, so being late departing from Manchester, it misses it way across the junctions (or another train is delayed) and hence its soon even later.

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I was on the last one out of Windermere today, 57316 leading with 47245 on the back.

 

Platform end rumours would suggest that WCRC are on standby from tomorrow, just in case.

I can't verify this, but interesting if true.

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