Railway franchises in the coming year

[rockershovel]

I see the railways being mentioned on the tv and press, and not in a good way. 

 

The Guardian has a (rather characteristic) piece about local elected mayors advocating that local authorities take over running of commuter services. I can’t see this as a credible proposal (that particular boat has sailed, I think) but there’s no doubt that the existing system of quasi-franchises can’t survive. 

 

It will be interesting to see what develops. 

 

[APOLLO]

Northern Rail definitely needs sorting out somehow. New trains and no drivers, etc. The new timetable leads to en route crew changes at Wigan (and other places) - Barrow to Man Airport etc. Sometimes these trains terminate mid route with no advance warning - everybody turfed off etc.

 

Split east (Yorkshire) & West (Lancashire) is being talked about - may help I don't know.

 

All the money on new trains & depots is a wast of time if there is insufficient staff.

 

Brit15

[rockershovel]

I’ve travelled in Europe and elsewhere over the years, and I’ve long ago come to the conclusion that the least worst solution to this particular conundrum is the European-style quasi-privatisation with the government retaining a controlling share and exerting overall strategic control. 

 

Allowing strategic control of staffing for purely commercial reasons is always a disaster. You’d have thought that particular lesson would have been learnt during the nationalisation era, when whatever else was or wasn’t achieved, the NCB in particular became a centre of technical excellence and the railways produced the HST125 (but dropped the ball in respect of the Pendolino). 

 

Same goes for political direction of strategic direction. The thing I find most depressing and unconvincing about HS2 is that we appear to have embarked upon a hugely expensive, major infrastructure project whose very purpose still seems to be the subject of such controversy - far less the actual cost, or nature and scope of its benefits. 

 

[woodenhead]

1 hour ago, rockershovel said:

I see the railways being mentioned on the tv and press, and not in a good way. 

 

The Guardian has a (rather characteristic) piece about local elected mayors advocating that local authorities take over running of commuter services. I can’t see this as a credible proposal (that particular boat has sailed, I think) but there’s no doubt that the existing system of quasi-franchises can’t survive. 

 

It will be interesting to see what develops. 

 

Inter City (inc the likes of Cross Country and Trans Pennine) need to be centrally run as they cover large areas of the country.

 

Local services need to be locally managed as elected mayors have suggested because they deal with the transport of people within defined areas - what business is it of central government about what times and frequency of services between say Bolton and Manchester - they don't do it with the buses or the trams so why do they insist on micro managing the trains?

 

Having a locally managed ticketing and timetabling means the trains, buses and trams in Manchester can be coordinated and have a combined pricing structure like London - why is London allowed to be different?

 

TFL is slowly extending it's reach with Crossrail - seems it's one rule for the South and another for the rest of the UK.

 

On HS2, it's not popular in the Chilterns, I don't think the people of Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield & Liverpool are complaining.

 

 

[melmerby]

The West Midlands conurbation has some (IMHO not enough) control over local trains through the body Transport for West Midlands, that's why the WM Trains franchise has two brand names.

West Midlands Railway, partnership betwen TfWM & West Midlands Trains

London & North Western Railway, Longer distance services run alone by WMT

However the two brands "collide" in the West Midlands where they cover common ground.

 

WMR has been forced to offer Season Tickets at last years prices due to poor performance.

(Trains cancelled or stopped short due to lateness, shortage of drivers etc.)

 

There was a farcical set of announcements one Saturday in New St. which basically went:

(These were all the same service)

WMR service to XXX will be running late due to having not left the depot yet.

followed a little later by

WMR service to XXX has been cancelled due to no driver available at depot.

followed a little later by

WMR service to XXX is running YYY mins late due to having just left the depot.

[Gwiwer]

There are some false economies being made.  It may save a little on rolling stock and possible on staffing but to persist with the nonsense of a stopping train leaving London Euston and calling at most points to Liverpool or Birmingham during which journey it serves a largely local need and could come under the auspices of a regional or local government body of some kind makes little sense when looked at logically.  Or the train which begins its journey at Whitby and ends at Morecambe (I was on one such once) being advertised along successive legs as a Whitby - Middlesbrough, Middlesbrough - Sunderland, Thornaby - Newcastle, Sunderland - Metro Centre, Newcastle - Carlisle, Carlisle - Barrow and Barrow - Morecambe working.  Some overlap; some don't.  But the same set is required to perform and keep time with barely a few minutes pause, even at the major stations, in several hours.

 

Of course railways and logic have seldom sat comfortably together.  

 

There is the ongoing fiasco of the Gatwick Express which has apparently been "justified" by the Brighton Line Route Utilisation Survey.  Four times an hour (it should be every 15 minutes but that's another story) a half-empty red train flies through Clapham Junction and East Croydon leaving hundreds of passengers frustrated and is denied to users of most forms of discounted ticketing.  The result is severe overcrowding on the Southern services which are designed as much as anything to move people between the Sussex coast, airport and Capital.  Overcrowding on these is now severe for most of the day every day at least north of Gatwick.   That they are also filled by Oyster / PAYG users between Victoria, Clapham and Croydon is a quirk of the London zonal ticketing which has produced this as an unintended consequence; parallel local stopping services are running almost empty.

 

It is past time that matters were taken back in hand centrally.  Not necessarily by Westminster directly running the trains.  But by vertically-integrated railway operators who can agree to share tracks, take responsibility for delays and failures (and not simply claim "due to congestion" at every turn) and who have an open-ended remit permitting investment, development and a can-do not a constrained-by-contract attitude.

 

The franchising system is fatally broken.  Even some in Government have said as much.  Some competitions have been cancelled while the Wet Ministers Westminster tries to work out what to do next.  What to do next is to have Directly Operated Railways steadily take control until all franchises are expired and develop this into the future single operator which then manages suburban / metro, long-haul and regional journeys as they see fit.  There wasn't a lot wrong with the way NSE / IC / RR was cast.  The actual day-to-day operation of course always depended upon individual managers.  

[The Stationmaster]

If Crossrail is an example the last thing I would want to see more of is allegedly 'local' control of commuter services.  I really cannot see how on a mixed traffic railway with numerous different passenger ('customer'), and freight,  needs and requirements an authority remote from those passengers can offer the sort of service they need let alone the service they want or pay for.  This is exactly what has happened with Crossrail on the GWML where the 'quality of the offer' (i.e. the trains) has gone down in its outer area and the timetable has become a bad joke for some of us.

 

And speaking from very recent experience its even worse when late running occurs and sensible ideas of train regulation (such as put the faster one in front of the all stations stopper) give way to what seems to be required by a local authority run concern which doesn't give a tuppeny damn about passengers from outside its local tax paying area and isn't even prepared to talk to user groups etc who represent those passengers.  And let's not forget - the West Mildlands Charter was a disaster for longer distance trains (and their passengers) running through the Charter area with Cross-Country services in particular absolutely hammered when it came to punctualit.y

[Oldddudders]

I am very out of touch with the circs of Northern and its driver problem, but I can see where it may have arisen.

 

When I joined BR in 1966, almost all the - circa 250k - staff were governed by Voluntary Collective Bargaining Agreements, spearheaded by the three unions - TSSA, ASLEF and NUR. Pay-scales were national, albeit with trivial allowances for those in the immediate London Area. By and large, it worked.

 

Privatisation cut across a great deal of that, of course, and many of us found ourselves in companies who set their own pay-scales. OTOH, signalmen, who had traditionally vied with drivers on pay, all remained within one company, Network Rail, né Railtrack, and continued to have a national pay-scale. The influx of new trains, probably actually beginning with Eurostar, encouraged TOCs to advertise for the best men they could find - at attractive salaries. No longer was it seniority over suitability - the rallying cry of the blue-collar unions. So there is a real market for drivers, and woe-betide the TOC that can't compete on salary and conditions. Add-in the power of the CFO in any C21 company, for whom headcount is a virility symbol, and his/her heavy hand on the bottom line, and super-economical diagramming of trains and crews is the order of the day. This brings about an extra fragility in services when perturbation arises. No spare men and no slack in any diagram. The result is a collapsed service the moment anything goes wrong. 

 

I guess Northern finds itself with some or all of those issues. Instant fixes are not obvious from this distance. 

[The Stationmaster]

14 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

I am very out of touch with the circs of Northern and its driver problem, but I can see where it may have arisen.

 

When I joined BR in 1966, almost all the - circa 250k - staff were governed by Voluntary Collective Bargaining Agreements, spearheaded by the three unions - TSSA, ASLEF and NUR. Pay-scales were national, albeit with trivial allowances for those in the immediate London Area. By and large, it worked.

 

Privatisation cut across a great deal of that, of course, and many of us found ourselves in companies who set their own pay-scales. OTOH, signalmen, who had traditionally vied with drivers on pay, all remained within one company, Network Rail, né Railtrack, and continued to have a national pay-scale. The influx of new trains, probably actually beginning with Eurostar, encouraged TOCs to advertise for the best men they could find - at attractive salaries. No longer was it seniority over suitability - the rallying cry of the blue-collar unions. So there is a real market for drivers, and woe-betide the TOC that can't compete on salary and conditions. Add-in the power of the CFO in any C21 company, for whom headcount is a virility symbol, and his/her heavy hand on the bottom line, and super-economical diagramming of trains and crews is the order of the day. This brings about an extra fragility in services when perturbation arises. No spare men and no slack in any diagram. The result is a collapsed service the moment anything goes wrong. 

 

I guess Northern finds itself with some or all of those issues. Instant fixes are not obvious from this distance. 

There were considerable problems with one of the earlier franchisees in that neck of the woods where they effectively stripped out a lot of traincrew related costs and with ith stripped out all sorts of things which not only helped to keep the railway operational but also contributed to keeping it safe.  Since then I think their successors have to some extent been playing catch-up.

 

However the current problem is is no doubt twofold - firstly they have a major staff training programme in hand because the new franchise agreement required them to obtain new trains. Traincrew cannot be in two places at once - they are either training or driving booked service trains - simples.  I suspect the other problem they have, for whatever historical reason, is that they rely on volunteers instead of rostering to cover Sundays and Bank Holidays and nowadays the financial incentive to work such turns is not as strong as it once was, and it will no doubt be difficult to move such days back to being rostered.   That is almost certainly a consequence of poor management and might not even be poor management in the present franchisees.

[HillsideDepot]

It will be interesting to see what direction the Government will take with rail and/or local control.

 

Speaking from a bus point of view (I work in the Passenger Transport Unit at Wiltshire Council) we've got the much trumpeted Bus Services Act 2017 to work with. This was supposed to give us all sorts of additional powers over the local bus network, including over commercially operated services. As an authority we are conservative (small c here, but large C politically) and our councillors probably would be reluctant to be one of the first authorities to try something radical, so we didn't really think that they would want us to franchise our bus operation. However, when I studied the legislation there was little we could do unless we had an elected mayor, or were Cornwall. Even things like Enhanced Partnerships are of little use, and the DfT guidance admits that informal partnerships would probably be more successful in most cases, as partnerships with Stagecoach West have proved by simply working together with a common aim, we can grow the bus market.  

 

So when the DfT come round asking why no one is making use the the 2017 Act we had to explain that it isn't designed for us; we simply can't tick the right boxes to enter the starting block, let alone make it work!

 

But then, would we want any of the provisions to work for us, in isolation? Wiltshire is a essentially doughnut, with population around the edge and just soldiers and tanks on the Plain in the middle. So some towns look to Swindon (with its own Borough Council), others look towards Bath & North East Somerset (which in turn is part of the West of England Combined [transport] Authority), and whilst parts of the south look to Salisbury, Salisbury also looks to Southampton. So should we join with our neighbours? And if we do with what sort of degree of influence? 

 

And so it is on the railway. Bristol "local" services run out to Taunton, Cardiff, Westbury, Gloucester, all of which are outside the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) area. Should trains turn back at the boundary? Should the Bristol "metro mayor" decide the stopping pattern and frequency at, say, Avoncliff? Already WECA has decided its "metro" service should run to Westbury when, from a Wiltshire point of view, maybe Swindon would have been better giving us trains which could stop at a new Corsham station, offer an east of Bath Park & Ride and at some point possibly a Royal Wootton Bassett station, as well as adding capacity at Chippenham for the 7,000 new houses planned here. 

 

Moving north, would Manchester speak to both Liverpool and Leeds? Would Leeds want also to speak to York? And if suddenly there are 4 authorities all demanding control do we end up with a Liverpool - York conglomerate? Would that be "local" management? Or would Liverpool trains leave Manchester a minute before Leeds trains arrive, because "local" management really has to be "local"?

 

It's easy to write a good headline, but much harder to write the legislative structure which will be needed to make it all work! 

[Covkid]

3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

However the current problem is is no doubt twofold - firstly they have a major staff training programme in hand because the new franchise agreement required them to obtain new trains. Traincrew cannot be in two places at once - they are either training or driving booked service trains - simples.  I suspect the other problem they have, for whatever historical reason, is that they rely on volunteers instead of rostering to cover Sundays and Bank Holidays and nowadays the financial incentive to work such turns is not as strong as it once was, and it will no doubt be difficult to move such days back to being rostered.   That is almost certainly a consequence of poor management and might not even be poor management in the present franchisees.

 

Traincrew are actually in three places Mike.

 

Enjoying their rest days and annual leave

At work working trains

At work training or instructing

 

Some parts of the media are trying to portray the traincrew in a bad light by refusing to help their employers out by giving up their valuable time. Now perhaps some unfortunate people have T&Cs which dictate that they have to work their days off but traincrew don't.  Therefore it is entirely up to the crew whether they want to sacrifice personal and family time to try and correct the mismanagement of the franchises by the TOC owners and more importantly the DfT.

 

When at work the crew are either working to a roster, or released from a roster to instruct or train. To put this simply Depot X might have three links of 24 drivers, totally 72 drivers as the complement. Let's just say there are

three vacancies

two long term sick

two drivers off trains on chain of care

one driver on incompatible medication

four drivers released for instructing and assessments

 

That means that you only have 60 instead of 72 to run your service with - without selecting your drivers to release for traction training.  Release four - one for each instructor and you are down to 56 drivers available, and don't forget that each link of drivers only has so much crossover in terms of route and traction, so you cannot always use a Link C driver to cover a Link A vacancy.

 

This has been life on a daily basis for many years, partly brought into focus by the fact that train drivers are now well paid and most do not need to work any overtime and rest days, and those that do see 40% taken by HM revenue in tax.

  

 

 

 

 

  

[rockershovel]

Some quite interesting points, above. I will offer the following thoughts in response:

 

1) trains and road haulage are fundamentally dissimilar. Trains run on dedicated tracks, which can only be used under closely controlled circumstances. They run as major consists, not individual units. They run to predetermined schedules to a far greater extent than Road haulage. There is no rail equivalent of the sizeable proportion of independent operators (particularly, individual motorists) working to no published schedule at all, and with no contractual or performance liabilities attached. 

 

2) the same is true of the allocation and reimbursement of costs. Other than fuel tax, which is not payable in this country on any fuel taken on before entry, and the very few toll roads (and as anyone using it will be aware, commercial traffic avoids the M6 Toll entirely), there is no relationship whatsoever between revenue to HMG and road miles driven. Rail costs are itemised in great detail and charged directly to the user, ie the Operating Company. 

 

3) this also applies to staffing costs. Railways require a large workforce exercising critical skills, which are not available from any other source. The costs of this staff bear directly on the operating company, whether they be operating the track, the signalling or the rolling stock, and nowhere else; there is a clear requirement for those skills to be maintained over time by the operators, and that requirement is rarely (if ever) recognised, let alone acted upon by those operators, if they can cherry-pick other operators instead. 

 

4) the same applies to routes. There are a finite number of train paths, and various inconsistencies and conflicts inherent in the allocation of those paths. Overall strategic control is essential, and repeated experience from a variety of sources (the mooted nationalisation of the railways before WW1, and the subsequent Grouping; the consolidation of London’s transport network; Nationalisation; state control and consolidation of US railroads due to the pattern of repeated bankruptcies, and the maintenance of services deemed essential; the various nationalisations and consolidations of European railways and metro networks) and it becomes clear that centrally controlled intervention following the progressive inability of localised operators to deliver essential services, is largely unavoidable, sooner or later. 

 

5) the next problem is that since the market is NOT free and uncontrolled, because it is in large part the province of operators from overseas whose governments do not share that view. What has actually happened to our privatised rail networks, and other utilities? Who, in fact, are Arriva, Abelio, DB Schenker, EDF et al? The government of the day plunged our railways into a privatisation which they did not understand, for ideological reasons and because they felt (with good reason) that they would not survive the inevitable, impending General Election - and we have been dealing ever since, with the consequences of opening the sector to operators better organised in their ideas, and feeling no inherent responsibility to the nation. 

 

 

It will be most instructive to see what transpires. The government have achieved the considerable feat of provoking the British, particularly the English, voters into paying attention to their antics and machinations. They have done this under the pretext of “taking back control”, and that particular genie won’t go back into the bottle, any time soon. 

[DY444]

In BR days train crew were not very well paid, Sunday services were relatively sparse on many lines and even the late Sunday afternoon mini-peak was small beer compared to today.  The establishment at most depots included spares and the low pay meant many train crew were prepared to work overtime, rest days and Sundays to supplement their income and generally there were enough to run the service on offer.  There were some exceptions; there was a standing joke that the 1754 Victoria - Selhurst never ran once for the entire period it was in the timetable but one or two unofficial sightings cast doubt on that, but by and large the advertised service ran most of the time and there was often enough crew to run reliefs, excursions etc. 

 

The problem today is that the service still relies on that old mentality in many places especially for Sundays but it fails to account for the fact that pay is better (particularly for drivers) and the imperative for crew to get overtime, rdw etc to make ends meet is no longer there to the same extent.  Many TOCs have tried to be clever and cut costs by reducing the establishment but the service always suffers and no-one learns.  The franchise system clearly plays a big part as the cost cutting is a natural temptation.  The only way to fix it properly is to make Sundays part of the normal week and to ensure the establishment is sufficient to handle the service on that basis and to cover training, route refresh etc etc.   That requires all concerned to stop passing the buck and sort it out. 

[lmsforever]

I do not think that rail services should be controlled by councillors they have no expertise in railways and have not got a good track record in the way they carry out their responsibilities .Manchester Liverpool will be at war with each other and passengers will suffer poor services better to leave things as they are with the overall pattern of services reflecting passenger demand.The Northern franchise needs splitting into two  with franchises that reflect growth and better support from DAFT  although the time has come to stop them running railways.Lets have railwaymen running our trains then we would not have concrete seats on trains designed by civil servants.

[rockershovel]

It’s the long-term consequence of the managerialism and financialisation, which has spread throughout our whole system. It isn’t that “no one learns”, it is that the lessons are excluded from consideration, because unacceptable; that in fact, you CANNOT simply continue to cut until profits magically appear; that some activities are necessary in the wider sense but are not profitable in, and of themselves; that there is only a finite amount of value within a system, and running at excessively high utilisation rates inevitably degrades the whole system with increasing rapidity. 

 

[Supaned]

On 28/12/2019 at 16:20, Covkid said:

 

Traincrew are actually in three places Mike.

 

Enjoying their rest days and annual leave

At work working trains

At work training or instructing

 

Some parts of the media are trying to portray the traincrew in a bad light by refusing to help their employers out by giving up their valuable time. Now perhaps some unfortunate people have T&Cs which dictate that they have to work their days off but traincrew don't.  Therefore it is entirely up to the crew whether they want to sacrifice personal and family time to try and correct the mismanagement of the franchises by the TOC owners and more importantly the DfT.

 

When at work the crew are either working to a roster, or released from a roster to instruct or train. To put this simply Depot X might have three links of 24 drivers, totally 72 drivers as the complement. Let's just say there are

three vacancies

two long term sick

two drivers off trains on chain of care

one driver on incompatible medication

four drivers released for instructing and assessments

 

That means that you only have 60 instead of 72 to run your service with - without selecting your drivers to release for traction training.  Release four - one for each instructor and you are down to 56 drivers available, and don't forget that each link of drivers only has so much crossover in terms of route and traction, so you cannot always use a Link C driver to cover a Link A vacancy.

 

This has been life on a daily basis for many years, partly brought into focus by the fact that train drivers are now well paid and most do not need to work any overtime and rest days, and those that do see 40% taken by HM revenue in tax.

  

 

 

 

 

And it is a very similar situation with a TOC that I am very familiar with.

 

On paper there are 150 drivers available across 4 links. Each link has certain route or traction requirements , meaning that in Link 1 only 60 drivers on paper can cover every job.

 

At present the depot has 13 vacancies , meaning that even before sickness , leave , chain of care , training etc, that many lines of work have to be covered - this in turn automatically eats up any spare capacity built into the headcount .

 

There are presently 7 trainee drivers in progress , however these will not be fully quaified to work on their own much before the middle of 2020 due to the route learning and traction training they have to undertake once passed out. Likewise, if a driver transfers from another TOC , their training period is longer and it is often several months before they are fully trained to do the work in their respective link , so even employing 15 qualified drivers does not fix the problem overnight.

 

Another issue which most TOCs are facing is that there is currently a group of drivers of a certain age who were all trained at the same time under BR, who are now nearing retirement age and in many cases are electing to leave the industry earlier than age 65 which previously was the norm.  There seems to be no rolling plan in place to continually replace these crew as they retire , and as alluded to elsewhere in this thread , as cost cutting and headcounts are now key it seems , there is no appetite for carrying any sort of surplus of men.

 

Furthermore , as seems to be common across the industry , diagrams have been tightened up to extract the maximum percieved efficiency out of the workforce , with little margin for late running etc which then merely exports delays around the network as a result, Also , the TOC in question has a maximum agreed working day length of 10 hours , and many of the new diagrams are close to that time limit , which combined with the lack of spare cover means that drivers are working far longer hours per week than any average link calculation , bearing in mind that spare turns are 8h45 in length , and regardless of 4 or 5 day week shift pattern , so tired crews are electing to not work any rest days or overtime simply to try to recharge the batteries - it's a viscious circle in that there's a shortage of crews , but the crews they do have are being worked harder and longer and something has to give.

 

I also suspect that as the fines for cancelling a train for a lack of driver are far less than the cost of employing a driver , the TOCs really don't worry too much about it - perhaps something that could be looked at by the powers that be to make such a thing less attractive to do?

 

Obviously the festive period will have a greater proportion of staff not wanting to work overtime to be able to spend time with families etc , it seems this festive period has served to show up just how few staff there actually are running the trains and how much the industry does rely on goodwill and overtime - and one final thought on the matter of goodwill , only a few weeks ago West Midlands were more than happy to throw the guard grade away on the altar of DOO , so perhaps is it any wonder that those same staff are far less inclined to work overtime as a result?

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 30, 2019 by Supaned

[The Stationmaster]

55 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

It’s the long-term consequence of the managerialism and financialisation, which has spread throughout our whole system. It isn’t that “no one learns”, it is that the lessons are excluded from consideration, because unacceptable; that in fact, you CANNOT simply continue to cut until profits magically appear; that some activities are necessary in the wider sense but are not profitable in, and of themselves; that there is only a finite amount of value within a system, and running at excessively high utilisation rates inevitably degrades the whole system with increasing rapidity. 

 

Actually it hasn't been quite like that.  Several people in the industry (one of whom I wouldn't play in plastic washers) have made their names by making deals with traincrew to reduce costs (hence their rail industry ignorant franchise bosses think they are wonderful managers) by basically cutting out spares and looking to Rest Day Working to fill the gaps the spares would have covered.  At least one manager (who being ex BR ought to have more sense but basically knew sweet f.a. about traincrew management) did an all inclusive pay deal by a similar tactic and completely standing aside Sundays and Bank Holidays from the normal roster by making them 100% voluntary - I suspect that she has not been alone in doing that.  But it saved oodles of money hence she became a highly sought after 'expert manager' - and left a trail of devastation and cancelled trains behind her when she went on to higher things.

 

The difference would have been in BR days that more experienced senior managers would have questioned exactly how these cost-cutting ideas would work, especially when they were accompanied by considerable rises in basic pay which, as 'DY444' explained have made additional earnings for certain things, such as Sunday turns, less attractive.  The only answers then are to either include Sundays and Bank Holidays etc in the basic rostered week as part of the salary deal (which was the case in the TOC I worked for). or to pay even higher level of enhancement to encourage people to volunteer for such things as Sundays, or to continue the former BR practice of making it clear that although they were outside the Guaranteed Week such things as Sunday and Bank Holiday turns (usually excluding Christmas Day) would continue to be rostered on as equalised a basis as possible over the course of a year or years.

 

So the problem is that if you do a dumb deal and  you get good immediate results and if your bosses haven't got the knowledge or understanding they will look at the financial headlines without understanding what the are signing off.   On the other hand in I think only one case the management simply slashed anything and everything to reduce costs without even putting what they were doing through safety validation - which got them into considerable trouble (good0 but also resulted in a long lists of train cancellations (bad) and reduced safety standards with a rising SPAD rate (very bad).

[rockershovel]

Suspaned, above, seems to have put his(?) finger on a very important point - the long-term degradation of inherited assets which is inherent in any sort of fixed-term franchise operation. The only time I have seen this effectively countered was with Thames Water in the 1990s. Faced with a major programme of TBM tunnelling in London, to be carried out by contractors appointed under a framework scheme, TW invested in four TBMs with EPBM mode provision, from Lovatt of Canada. 

 

These machines were then allocated to the framework contractors with specific provision for operation, upkeep and maintenance on a cost-plus, open-book system. This achieved several things; it eliminated the well-known contractors' habit of thrashing machines into the ground (so to speak) for a return on one contract, it significantly ameliorated the risk inherent in such operations by removing great deal of the adversarial relations which tend to surround such activities, and assured long-term use of these very expensive assets. 

 

One of these machines will be arriving at Werrington soon, almost thirty years on. 

 

In the context of this discussion, the long-term asset base is the pool of ex-BR drivers which have, in effect, been asset-stripped over time. Any operation which does not provide long-term asset base renewal, is sub-optimally managed; this may be to provide profits for third parties who have no long-term interest in the continued operation of the function, expecting to lose the contract, find it become unprofitable or simply focus on something else over the course of time. 

 

Having spent most of my working life in sectors in which 24/7 operation is the normal course of events, although not necessarily continually stable, it has always been a mystery to me why the railways did not grasp this nettle, long ago. 

 

 

[62613]

6 hours ago, lmsforever said:

I do not think that rail services should be controlled by councillors they have no expertise in railways and have not got a good track record in the way they carry out their responsibilities .Manchester Liverpool will be at war with each other and passengers will suffer poor services better to leave things as they are with the overall pattern of services reflecting passenger demand.The Northern franchise needs splitting into two  with franchises that reflect growth and better support from DAFT  although the time has come to stop them running railways.Lets have railwaymen running our trains then we would not have concrete seats on trains designed by civil servants.

The DafT have hardly covered themselves with glory, have they? Neither, really, have the privateers. Considering the assault on local government that's occurred over the last 30 or 40 years, it's a wonder councils achieve anything.  I would say they have a better idea of what their citizens want than some bureaucrat in Whitehall.

 

[rockershovel]

.... which does not address the issue, that what the residents of a particular town might want, bears no necessary relation to the requirements of an overall strategic direction of a national network. 

 

 

[caradoc]

2 hours ago, 62613 said:

The DafT have hardly covered themselves with glory, have they? Neither, really, have the privateers. Considering the assault on local government that's occurred over the last 30 or 40 years, it's a wonder councils achieve anything.  I would say they have a better idea of what their citizens want than some bureaucrat in Whitehall.

 

 

Local councils do not exactly cover themselves in glory either however. Two examples from my home town, Oxford:

 

In High Street, at the bus stop eastbound between Carfax and Queens Lane, they widened the pavement to give more room for passengers and pedestrians. However, with a bus stopped (often for a while as all services are DOO and boarding, especially in a tourist and student city like Oxford, can be very slow), coupled with vehicles parked (legally) on the other side of the road, the road was completely blocked, causing total gridlock. So they had to narrow the pavement again; The markings on the road surface still show where this was done.

 

In the Marston area, money was spent on revising the road layout in the 'Access to Headington' (actually access to the JR Hospital, built in completely the wrong place) scheme, including traffic lights with pedestrian phases; Except on the walking route from Marston village to the city-bound bus stop, meaning that pedestrians (including my 89-year old mother) have to cross in front of traffic and hope the lights don't change while they do so.

 

So, sorry but I have no faith whatsoever that councils would be better at running rail services than anyone else.

 

 

[lmsforever]

Totally agree with last post not so far away in Aylesbury the council has made a complete cock up in traffic management massive house building no bypass one crash and the whole town comes to a standstill.  I can  only imagine if councils got control of our route to London it would be chaos leave transport to those who know what they are doing by always consult with them but don't let them have control.

[rockershovel]

One of the things I’ve heard repeatedly in my travels around the FSU, is the belief that the Soviets squeezed all value and competence out of the system. I sometimes get the feeling that our system is trapped in the same cul-de-sac. 

 

Look at the stiffly-posed, bewhiskered images of the men (almost entirely men, though not all) who built our imposing, neo-Gothic municipal buildings, standing awkwardly in their ornate robes and massy gold chains of office. Their grim faces denote men who DID things; built railways across India, supplied locomotives and small brass fittings to the world; directed armies of sweating navvies as they transformed the countryside, riding through all weathers to do so. Men who commanded great ships, raced each other in clippers to be the first to land the tea crop, led armies bearing red coats and Martini-Henry rifles across continents. 

 

Compare and contrast with what you find today in any local authority or government department...

 

[Adamski94]

The problem I see as has been mentioned is the lack of railwaymen/women in managerial positions. The directors are mostly ex retail from places like Marks and Spencers who, whilst probably very competent at running retail industries, do not understand the fundamental difference in the way the rail industry works. The other issue is simply running a business, hence the above scenario, instead of a service. As was mentioned it is more economical to cancel a train than to provide spare stock and crew for when disruption occurs. It all adds up to a system that lacks any empathy for its customers which leads to more friction then with front line staff who then feel very disenchanted with the industry and then feel less and less loyalty and pride towards it.

[mdvle]

1 hour ago, rockershovel said:

One of the things I’ve heard repeatedly in my travels around the FSU, is the belief that the Soviets squeezed all value and competence out of the system. I sometimes get the feeling that our system is trapped in the same cul-de-sac. 

 

Look at the stiffly-posed, bewhiskered images of the men (almost entirely men, though not all) who built our imposing, neo-Gothic municipal buildings, standing awkwardly in their ornate robes and massy gold chains of office. Their grim faces denote men who DID things; built railways across India, supplied locomotives and small brass fittings to the world; directed armies of sweating navvies as they transformed the countryside, riding through all weathers to do so. Men who commanded great ships, raced each other in clippers to be the first to land the tea crop, led armies bearing red coats and Martini-Henry rifles across continents. 

 

Compare and contrast with what you find today in any local authority or government department...

 

 

Just think of what your local authority or government could do today if given the budget to do it, and the authority to force through their decisions regardless of what they pesky voters or landowners thought, and didn't care how many people were killed or maimed in the process...

 

Much of what some consider a great era, where as you say "men got things done", was the result of an abundance of money, cheap almost slave labour, no regard for H&S, and a total disregard for what anyone but the nobility thought.

 

I don't think many here want to return to those working conditions, or have entire homes/towns/neighbourhoods destroyed in the name of progress.