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WR to Intercity


125_driver
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Can anyone help me with at what point did fleet responsibility changeover from BRs western region to Intercity? Early 90s I'm guessing. But did intercity have it's own fleet or did it "hire it" so to speak from the various regions.

I am referring to the period prior to the leading Roscos coming about in 1994.

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Sectorisation started in 1983, allocation of stock to each sector started I think in 1984 which is when I think the IC prefix started to be used on coaches. This is well before privatisation. In terms if the WR IC stock would normally be IWRX or ICCX with some charter stock.  Summer dated trains (esp the Friday night and Saturday) could be diagrammed spare EC and WC sets - from what I was told one of the Fiday night Newquay services was diagrammed for a NL  HST set for several years. 

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A nice area of confusion.  the business sectors were running alongside the Regions for some years before the Regions disappeared.  some InterCity stock - particularly the Special Trains pool of 'excursion' sets was very firmly under sector control by 1985 but it was unusual in that it had anyway been under BRB control and not Regional control.   The Regions were still effectively managing passenger stock for some years after that whatever the pool names might suggest.  I was on the freight operating and planning side in the late 1980s and it was only by about 1989 that the freight sectors were beginning to take an operational interest in their loco fleets beyond initially having them allocated to their traffic but Regional operational control continued to be exerted right up to the 1992 reorganisation although in planning terms we went went to the sector to get an allocation which we could plan to use on their trains.  In my 5 years of planning and operating involvement on the freight side (1989 - 1994) I only had one 'serious discussion' with a business sector person about the allocation and use of locos and that was in any case partly down to my extreme practical distrust of the reliability of Class 60s when they were finally released to traffic and the sector person's amazingly naive faith in them.

 

Similarly - and I was involved as a Regional operations 'On Call' officer from 1989 to 1992 - the Regional controllers were controlling use of HST sets and day-to-day of IC allocated locos but again the planners - as far as locos were concerned - agreed a planned allocation with with the relevant business sector while the Region retained maintenance control.  Sounds rather tangled doesn't it but in day-to-day terms it worked pretty well, probably because the far more experienced Regional people made sure that it worked

 

PS. There was incidentally (non-financial) cross-hire going on all the time, particularly between the freight sub-sectors although in reality it usually only amounted to a single trip in part of the working day.  Regional Controllers tended to use a loco first and only bother to ask later (usually only when they were asked why they hadn't sought permission in the first place ;) ).

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Thanks this is very much what i was looking for. 

 

So if I understand correctly, there would be a (for example) western region fleet man who essentially controlled the fleet whilst liasing with a counterpart in intercity control who would ask for a certain service provision? 

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47 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

A nice area of confusion.  the business sectors were running alongside the Regions for some years before the Regions disappeared.  some InterCity stock - particularly the Special Trains pool of 'excursion' sets was very firmly under sector control by 1985 but it was unusual in that it had anyway been under BRB control and not Regional control.   The Regions were still effectively managing passenger stock for some years after that whatever the pool names might suggest.  I was on the freight operating and planning side in the late 1980s and it was only by about 1989 that the freight sectors were beginning to take an operational interest in their loco fleets beyond initially having them allocated to their traffic but Regional operational control continued to be exerted right up to the 1992 reorganisation although in planning terms we went went to the sector to get an allocation which we could plan to use on their trains.  In my 5 years of planning and operating involvement on the freight side (1989 - 1994) I only had one 'serious discussion' with a business sector person about the allocation and use of locos and that was in any case partly down to my extreme practical distrust of the reliability of Class 60s when they were finally released to traffic and the sector person's amazingly naive faith in them.

 

Similarly - and I was involved as a Regional operations 'On Call' officer from 1989 to 1992 - the Regional controllers were controlling use of HST sets and day-to-day of IC allocated locos but again the planners - as far as locos were concerned - agreed a planned allocation with with the relevant business sector while the Region retained maintenance control.  Sounds rather tangled doesn't it but in day-to-day terms it worked pretty well, probably because the far more experienced Regional people made sure that it worked

 

PS. There was incidentally (non-financial) cross-hire going on all the time, particularly between the freight sub-sectors although in reality it usually only amounted to a single trip in part of the working day.  Regional Controllers tended to use a loco first and only bother to ask later (usually only when they were asked why they hadn't sought permission in the first place ;) ).

Also at what point did the individual TOUs take over fleet management from the regional controllers? Would it be 1994 once the Roscos got involved? Thanks 

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3 hours ago, 125_driver said:

Thanks this is very much what i was looking for. 

 

So if I understand correctly, there would be a (for example) western region fleet man who essentially controlled the fleet whilst liasing with a counterpart in intercity control who would ask for a certain service provision? 

Basically from what I saw there were no sector control offices until 1994 with the exception of local freight ops centres which were sort of sectorised by still under Regional control.  The sectors simply had fleet managers working on a weekday day turn.

 

When I set up my two TLF Control offices in 1993 2, one each for the former WR and SR  my controllers - only one on a shift didn't control traction and it was mainly with local freight ops centres.  WR Intercity was slightly different as I believe they had a Fleet Controller at Swindon who had previously been the Regional HST Fleet Controller (I'll check next time we have a meeting of the Retired Controllers Lunch group - but we have suspended meeting for the time being due to Covid-19

 

PS - The Roscos had no virtually involvement in day-to-day control or even the diagramming - the operators simply hired in the fleet they needed and then managed it themselves. 

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2 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Basically from what I saw there were no sector control offices until 1994 with the exception of local freight ops centres which were sort of sectorised by still under Regional control.  The sectors simply had fleet managers working on a weekday day turn.

 

When I set up my two TLF Control offices in 1993 2, one each for the former WR and SR  my controllers - only one on a shift didn't control traction and it was mainly with local freight ops centres.  WR Intercity was slightly different as I believe they had a Fleet Controller at Swindon who had previously been the Regional HST Fleet Controller (I'll check next time we have a meeting of the Retired Controllers Lunch group - but we have suspended meeting for the time being due to Covid-19

 

PS - The Roscos had no virtually involvement in day-to-day control or even the diagramming - the operators simply hired in the fleet they needed and then managed it themselves. 

Fantastic,  thanks for this very informative ! :-). 

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2 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Basically from what I saw there were no sector control offices until 1994 with the exception of local freight ops centres which were sort of sectorised by still under Regional control.  The sectors simply had fleet managers working on a weekday day turn.

 

When I set up my two TLF Control offices in 1993 2, one each for the former WR and SR  my controllers - only one on a shift didn't control traction and it was mainly with local freight ops centres.  WR Intercity was slightly different as I believe they had a Fleet Controller at Swindon who had previously been the Regional HST Fleet Controller (I'll check next time we have a meeting of the Retired Controllers Lunch group - but we have suspended meeting for the time being due to Covid-19

 

PS - The Roscos had no virtually involvement in day-to-day control or even the diagramming - the operators simply hired in the fleet they needed and then managed it themselves. 

Not your area I know as you point out you dealt with the freight side of things, but would i be right in thinking that the WR intercity fleet manager at Swindon would also have taken responsibility for the XC allocation to depots like Laira and Bath Rd in the period up UNTIL 1994 ...Thanks.

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On 26/03/2020 at 22:53, 125_driver said:

Not your area I know as you point out you dealt with the freight side of things, but would i be right in thinking that the WR intercity fleet manager at Swindon would also have taken responsibility for the XC allocation to depots like Laira and Bath Rd in the period up UNTIL 1994 ...Thanks.

I presume so - if they did it in the same way as TLF sub-sectors.  But it might equally have been down to the diagrammers because they had the best handle on what was needed where and they wre no doubt far more experienced than a fleet.

 

Not necessarily in this connection but while InterCity on the Western after 1992 had some very good people they also had one or two who were - how shall I put it - not so good.  One thing the sectors had to do was decide who owned what infrastructure and we got together with photocopies of the pages from the Quail track diagrams (the most accurate thing we could find) and held a meeting at which we discussed and agreed who owned what colouring up every line and connection to show the agreed ownership.  For TLF I worked on the base of what we needed to actually run our business and the Regional Railways reps did the same and this turned out to mean that InterCity picked up all sorts of oddments of infrastructure which nobody else needed and in some cases over which the only booked trains were freights (but I could run them via an alternative route so that bit of railway wasn't essential to the freight business).  If the InterCity rep had  his head screwed on more firmly he might have got the sector a better deal but he did have one way round a lot of oddments by passing them to a different interCity subsector - who must have had quite a shock when they found they were no longer getting a free ride at somebody else's expense and they were actually picking up infrastructure costs.

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