Derailment at Paddington

[phil-b259]

Is it just me or have things got suddenly and noticeably worse since the Theresa May government came into power? Not trying to make political capital here, there seems to be a correlation and I am wondering if the root of the problem is higher than NR, who have done pretty well overall since inheriting the mess Railtrack left behind, but now seem to be circling the same drain.

 

The last generation of traditional railway managers and engineers are retiring, or getting out before the ship goes down if they've got any sense, so I may be being unfair to Theresa and this is just unfortunate timing, or a combination of factors. I will not air my opinion of Chris Grayling here, it would not be constructive...

At the risk of straying into politics, things have definitely got worse since the Brexit forced reshuffle with the May / Grayling combo being much worse than the Cameron / McLoughlin.

[Godfrey Glyn]

No matter what political persuasion I don't think you can lay the blame at the feet of the current PM. My wife worked with Government departments for a while, and the only thing that stayed constant was the civil servants. 

They are the ones that really wield power and influence.

 

The really senior civil servants are certainly the key to good governance but they will be the ones trying to get to grips with the implications of the brexit decision. Having observed the workings of them in education I was generally very impressed with the senior ones, less so with the lower ranks who often seemed to be just doing a job and worrying about the internal civil service politics. However remember they were forbidden to do any contingency work in the purdah period before the referendum and clearly the politicians are struggling to make sense of it. I gather many of the top notch people from all over the civil service have been drafted into the brexit department and I think much of normal governance has therefore been disrupted. That will have significant implications for a wide range of decisions that have to be made to keep the show on the road. I certainly agree with The Johnster re the minister concerned!

[Northroader]

I think in the last few years the way things have deteriorated can't be blamed on particular political persons. Rail schemes such as trans-pennine, crossrail, GW and MR electrification have all overrun, and badly exceeded costs. As a result they are getting trimmed back, so that money is still available for the sacred cow of HS2, and every other rail scheme in the country will suffer in consequence.

[Gwiwer]

Looks similar to my track laying skills....

 

Paddington this morning

 

Cheers

Will

 

 

I was also at Paddington this morning seeing off a friend.  RTT insisted the 11.36 Cheltenham Spa Express would depart from platform 2 until 11.25 when the set on 1 was confirmed as that required.

 

There were at that time about 10 Orange Army busily removing track and baulk components and as shown in post 39 the baulks have been marked "Scrap" which suggests they were already overdue for the bonfire before what ever actually caused the derailment accelerated the process.  An investigation will be required therefore it is improper to offer uninformed speculation as to what actually occurred.

 

The incident set was removed in time for the set it trapped on platform 1 to form an afternoon Plymouth yesterday although some sources suggested the train was still in platform 2 today.  

 

Whether related or not the 11.18 Bedwyn was also shown as cancelled between Paddington and Reading owing to a derailed train.  Same incident (in which case why was it affecting just this service 24 hours later) or have GWR had two in as many days?

[Trog]

I think in the last few years the way things have deteriorated can't be blamed on particular political persons. Rail schemes such as trans-pennine, crossrail, GW and MR electrification have all overrun, and badly exceeded costs. As a result they are getting trimmed back, so that money is still available for the sacred cow of HS2, and every other rail scheme in the country will suffer in consequence.

 

Rail schemes are suffering because of the over runs on the current crop, the government would not be doing its job if it rewarded failure by saying never mind here is some more money go out and overspend again. The railway needs to convince government that it can be trusted to spend money wisely and to a budget. My guess is that after the current mess, that will not happen until everyone involved has retired, perhaps in twenty years time.

[Jonboy]

 

Whether related or not the 11.18 Bedwyn was also shown as cancelled between Paddington and Reading owing to a derailed train.  Same incident (in which case why was it affecting just this service 24 hours later) or have GWR had two in as many days?

According to the travel reports on local radio (BBC Oxford) some services are being cancelled due to a lack of platforms at Paddington following this incident.

[phil-b259]

Rail schemes are suffering because of the over runs on the current crop, the government would not be doing its job if it rewarded failure by saying never mind here is some more money go out and overspend again. The railway needs to convince government that it can be trusted to spend money wisely and to a budget. My guess is that after the current mess, that will not happen until everyone involved has retired, perhaps in twenty years time.

This is indeed true - but if NR lacks the necessary tools (as in skilled and experienced people) then it's hardly going to be able to turn things round quickly whatever the politicans, the media or even taxpayers say.

 

Much like a Supertanker or one of those masive container ships, where the longer a navigation error goes unoticed the longer it takes to correct it (with a correspondingly larger effect on fuel consumption as well), the current situation with NR will not be turned round quickly.

 

Simply turning off the funding tap risks further derailments, etc as correcting past mistakes will inevitably require extra funds, just as the ship in the above paragraph has to spend more on fuel to get back on track. This may be the last thing the Treasuary want to hear of course but unless they want more repeats of Ely, Paddington and Eastleigh (Waterloo is different due to it not being a 'maintenance' derived incident), the money has to be found.

 

As has been already mentioned the key themes here are staff on the ground not having the skills, knowledge or resources to do the job properly - cutting budgets will not help solve these issues. What is needed is a period of consolidation - giving the engineering and opperating departments the resources, support and most importantly time they need to rebuild the skills and knowledge that has been lost over the past decade as people have retired or left due to the stressful working environment highlighted earlier in this thread. Political interference from Whitehall or indeed the upper echallons of NR is not helpful in this regard however well intentioned*. Indeed as we have heard it can actually be very counter productive and drive away the people NR desperately needs to steady the ship.

 

Granted, it would be great if NR hadn't taken their eye off the ball a few years ago but we are where we are as the saying goes. In some respects it's almost as if that having bought the network back up to scratch after the Railtrack era, NR thought it was a case of 'job done' resulting in complacency settling in - with the result that developing problems like those on the GWML electrification scheme were not addressed (and even then with no great urgency) until the project was well and truly 'off course'

 

* An example of this would be the visit later this week of the Chairman of NR to see my local P-way lift and pack a set of points that don't need doing (the end that does need it cannot be viewed from the station platform). I am told a 1hour line blockage has been specially arranged during the day for this (we carn't even get 5 minutes as it's "too busy" according to the planners) following which the suit will no doubt want to go round the swankey new ROC (ignoring the old 1980s power box that actually does control the BML signalling), plus of course meeting all the engineering heads and generally distracting everyone from doing what they need to be doing.

[The Johnster]

I predicted (not on this forum, in a private blog) at the start of the GW electrification scheme that there would be cost overruns and delays and that NR would be blamed even if it wasn't their fault because the project was not properly and adequately funded in the first place; as it turned out it has not been adequately manned either.  It's no good complaining that the monkey isn't playing properly if the organ grinder hasn't fed him enough and is working him to death.  The desire for economic stringency and discipline, and the need for high levels of performance and efficiency to achieve them, are in fact the very drivers of failure in this regard, well intentioned and cognisant of public purse strings or not; contingency funding and reserve time and manpower are regarded as wasteful by Treasury planners and industry beancounter yesmen who are desk pilots and do not appreciate the havoc a bad winter, or flu epidemic, or any number of unforeseen disruptions might have on the funding, logistics, and manning regime of such a large and complex task if it is so 'cut to the bone' efficient.  NR were given a poisoned chalice (build it in this amount of time for this amount of money or else, and, no, you don't have the option of refusing), a self fulfilling prophesy of failure, and are duly poisoned, perhaps fatally.  We need beancounters to keep things in order, but not to run the show...

 

Crossrail is much better funded and a degree of wobble room is built into it; had it not been it would be in the same mess!

Edited August 21, 2017 by The Johnster

[The Johnster]

The really senior civil servants are certainly the key to good governance but they will be the ones trying to get to grips with the implications of the brexit decision. Having observed the workings of them in education I was generally very impressed with the senior ones, less so with the lower ranks who often seemed to be just doing a job and worrying about the internal civil service politics. However remember they were forbidden to do any contingency work in the purdah period before the referendum and clearly the politicians are struggling to make sense of it. I gather many of the top notch people from all over the civil service have been drafted into the brexit department and I think much of normal governance has therefore been disrupted. That will have significant implications for a wide range of decisions that have to be made to keep the show on the road. I certainly agree with The Johnster re the minister concerned!

That is probably as good an explanation of the situation in the upper echelons of the Civil Service as I'll get; thank you Mr Glyn sir for this timely insight.  One forgets that the Civil Service has a limited number of proper top experienced guys, and that the Brexit negotiations will for some time occupy their best and most skilled minds, to the detriment of nuts and bolts governance of everything else.

[rodent279]

Some of the government owned companies on the continent don't do any better. Some of them have had some very high profile smashes.

And separation of infrastructure from ops is done throughout Europe very successfully, the big difference is that most of the rest of Europe has not split up and literally dis-integrated, as in the reverse of integrated, their state operator.

Edited August 22, 2017 by rodent279

[rodent279]

I'm trying desperately to remember when that track at Paddington was laid and I reckon it can be no later than the last big layout alteration in the early 1990s and possibly even before that.  In other words it's at least 20 years old and while the rate of rail wear will be low clearly timber deterioration is more age related than anything else.  Incidentally the steel spacers seen in the platform 1 line in Post No.39 were installed from new and are similar to those used in earlier track at Paddington.

Fortunately most of my experience with NR at a technical level has been from outside their employment but some of what I have come across has shocked me because of its ineptitude or pure lack of knowledge about how to do a job.  Some years back (Bletchley - Bedford resignalling so it might have still been Railtrack days I think) I had to translate a set of the manufacturer's technical information about emergency local level crossing controls into a set of Instructions for the staff who would be required to operate the crossings under local control.  That work was given to the company I then worked for as an occasional consultant because the Zone, or whatever they were called then, had nobody with the necessary knowledge and experience to do it - yet it was all very straightforward.  Similarly, and this is in NR days I 'helped out' a particular post because it's holder, who had the responsibility as part of his job, didn't really understand how to write Signalbox Special Instructions, and he wasn't the only person I know of on that particular Zone who was in that state - all because they had either been incorrectly appointed or had not been trained after appointment.

 

I remain in sufficient touch with the industry to know that these sorts of things are not isolated incidents. Similarly the April electronics failure which affected the signalling between Didcot and swindo revealed another massive shortcoming where it was virtually impossible to restore the train service due the the sheer lack of people qualified to get involved in temporary bloc working.  Back in BR days on the Western something like that on - as on that weekend - our only route to the west would have seen all hands to the pumps including - if necessary - even senior operations managers deployed on the ground in order to keep the railway running; that relatively simple dedication and depth of knowledge to do such jobs just doesn't seem to be there.

It's the same in a lot of sectors of industry-you get trained to the level you need to do your day to day job. Anything else, giving you a broader understanding, is deemed not cost effective.

I have been trained several times on a lovely radio planning package in the last 4 years, the last time in Jan 2016. Not once had I used it in anger, until suddenly, at the beginning of July, I was called upon to provide some a/l cover. I had to dive right in & use said software with 2 days notice, and though it does come back to you, I just don't have the experience using it to fix problems, or even spot them in the first place. Similarly with a piece of mapping software-I've used it, but not for 3 years, not been trained on it, and I can't even justify getting either software package installed on my laptop, because I "don't need it for my everyday job."

 

But a bit of coverage planning going tits up does not have the potential kill dozens of people within minutes.

 

And herein lies the problem. We now seem to have a generation of Managers by title , who no doubt have all sorts of degrees and letters after their name , but very little actual experience or knowledge of the basic principles of how the railway that they're in charge of actually works on a day to day level . 

 

As many have said , good, experienced staff have been either pushed out or left to save their own sanity , understandably so , and the state of the p-way in general these days is declining - speed restrictions on for the best part of a year because it isn't deemed cost effective to carry out a repair , and as others have said , I hate to say it but I can forsee another Hatfield or Grayrigg type incident on the horizon before long - I certainly don't want to be on the train that comes off the road at high speed....

I have travelled on trains since I was a child, many times, way more than the average person, been on more HST's than I've had hot dinners. I'm pretty battle hardened, and been on some rough old mk1 bangers that rattled and banged about like nothing else on earth. Been over some rough track too, once going through Hemel at speed in a Mk1 on a Cobbler to Northampton, the bounce as we went over the crossing lifted a large chap out of his seat! So I consider myself pretty used to noises and rough riding-I drive a Morris Minor, I don't scare easily!

 

I have never got off a train because of noise or rough riding-until about 3 weeks ago. I was on a Swansea HST, from Reading. I was in the TGS, right behind the power car, where I usually sit. The rhythmic banging and clattering coming from beneath, clearly speed related, really did worry me. It really sounded like something was loose. My thoughts were "if this is going to be the next Eschede or Hatfield, I have no intention of being on it", and I baled at Swindon. To my untrained eye, all looked ok from platform level, the train continued on it's way, and unless there's been the biggest cover up since Iran-Contra, nothing untoward happened.

 

Maybe I'm just getting soft, and more risk-averse, in my old age?

Edited August 22, 2017 by rodent279

[rockershovel]

That is probably as good an explanation of the situation in the upper echelons of the Civil Service as I'll get; thank you Mr Glyn sir for this timely insight. One forgets that the Civil Service has a limited number of proper top experienced guys, and that the Brexit negotiations will for some time occupy their best and most skilled minds, to the detriment of nuts and bolts governance of everything else.

It has been increasingly obvious, for a long time, that the long-term effects of Tony Blair's assault on the Civil Service would be serious and long-lasting. The central joke of Yes, Minister was that Sir Humphrey genuinely DID know a great deal more than Jim Hacker, and Jim Hacker genuinely WAS as uninformed and incapable as he looked.

 

In a world managed by genuinely experienced managers with no particular party affiliation, and no ideological motivation beyond whether the system works, where is the role for politics for the sake of politics, or the exercise of patronage?

Edited August 22, 2017 by rockershovel

[LNERGE]

Rule No1 of installing a gauge tie.... Tighten the lock nuts. They will unwind under tension and vibration. Every picture i've seen shows the lock nuts nowhere near the turnbuckle. It was going to happen.

Edited August 22, 2017 by LNERGE

[jim.snowdon]

Rule No1 of installing a gauge tie.... Tighten the lock nuts. They will unwind under tension and vibration. Every picture i've seen shows the lock nuts nowhere near the turnbuckle. It was going to happen.

Rule No 2 - investigate why it is needed and start planning the remedial works. I dare say the local TME had already done that, and then run into the next problem, getting access to the railway to deal with it, ie posession of two platforms. It will be interesting to read what, in the fullness of time, the RAIB report turns up.

 

Jim

[rodent279]

If there's any sense in this barmy fragmented railway system we have, then I would hope that the cost to NR of the disruption, and of restoring full service, will far outweigh the cost of closing the necessary platforms and carrying out whatever remedial maintenance & repairs would have been required to avoid the incident in the first place.

[jjb1970]

I think there is a classic catch 22, Network Rail are going to struggle to persuade anybody to fund further electrification based on their performance with GWML electrification but the only way they’re going to develop the necessary capability is to keep going. And if this is like some other big ticket investments where the plug is pulled because an organisation cannot deliver then sometimes the point when the plug is pulled is the point where said organisation is actually getting on top of things. I can’t say whether that is true in this case though, it may be, it may not be. Certainly as an observer who doesn’t know anything about railway electrification things appear to have been going better in recent months.

I think the fundamental problem is that DafT isn’t going away and unlike Network Rail who have taken the blame for the electrification mess, DafT are doing their usual thing of hiding behind the body armour of either NR or the TOCs. In this case it is NR, in the Southern dispute it is the TOC that is shielding DafT from the opprobrium that is rightfully theirs. I think it was the Station Master who recently made the observation that power without responsibility is never a positive thing yet DafT are basically running our national rail system and are just abdicating all responsibility whenever things go wrong to others. For all I’m not a fan of Mr. Grayling, he is effectively a figure head to make very high level decisions based on the professional advice he receives, he is a here today, gone tomorrow politician. The civil servants of DafT on the other hand are not here today gone tomorrow types (it’d probably be better if they were) and they are supposed to have the requisite technical expertise to fulfil their duties. And based on GWML electrification and IEP they clearly do not have thar technical expertise. NR are not blameless, and a lot of the criticism they’ve received over the GWML electrification seems justified but it is too easy to blame NR and ignore the baleful influence of DafT.

Lest this be seen as me saying all DafT civil servants are thick, they're not. I'm sure they have a lot of clever people at DafT, but that is not the same as having the requisite skills and experience to be doing some of the things that DafT is now attempting to do and the organisation as a whole just seems dysfunctional.

And that’d be the same DafT that’d be handed whatever power they don’t already have if the railways were completely re-nationalised, as opposed to the semi-nationalised and DafT micro-managed system we currently have.

[rodent279]

I think there is a classic catch 22, Network Rail are going to struggle to persuade anybody to fund further electrification based on their performance with GWML electrification but the only way they’re going to develop the necessary capability is to keep going. And if this is like some other big ticket investments where the plug is pulled because an organisation cannot deliver then sometimes the point when the plug is pulled is the point where said organisation is actually getting on top of things. I can’t say whether that is true in this case though, it may be, it may not be. Certainly as an observer who doesn’t know anything about railway electrification things appear to have been going better in recent months.

I think the fundamental problem is that DafT isn’t going away and unlike Network Rail who have taken the blame for the electrification mess, DafT are doing their usual thing of hiding behind the body armour of either NR or the TOCs. In this case it is NR, in the Southern dispute it is the TOC that is shielding DafT from the opprobrium that is rightfully theirs. I think it was the Station Master who recently made the observation that power without responsibility is never a positive thing yet DafT are basically running our national rail system and are just abdicating all responsibility whenever things go wrong to others. For all I’m not a fan of Mr. Grayling, he is effectively a figure head to make very high level decisions based on the professional advice he receives, he is a here today, gone tomorrow politician. The civil servants of DafT on the other hand are not here today gone tomorrow types (it’d probably be better if they were) and they are supposed to have the requisite technical expertise to fulfil their duties. And based on GWML electrification and IEP they clearly do not have thar technical expertise. NR are not blameless, and a lot of the criticism they’ve received over the GWML electrification seems justified but it is too easy to blame NR and ignore the baleful influence of DafT.

Lest this be seen as me saying all DafT civil servants are thick, they're not. I'm sure they have a lot of clever people at DafT, but that is not the same as having the requisite skills and experience to be doing some of the things that DafT is now attempting to do and the organisation as a whole just seems dysfunctional.

And that’d be the same DafT that’d be handed whatever power they don’t already have if the railways were completely re-nationalised, as opposed to the semi-nationalised and DafT micro-managed system we currently have.

I have always felt that one of the original motivators for privatisation, from the politician's point of view, is that it was an exercise in blame shifting. Bad news about the railways can be blamed on private operators/NR, not the Minister of Transport.

Edited August 22, 2017 by rodent279

[LNERGE]

Rule No 2 - investigate why it is needed and start planning the remedial works. I dare say the local TME had already done that, and then run into the next problem, getting access to the railway to deal with it, ie posession of two platforms. It will be interesting to read what, in the fullness of time, the RAIB report turns up.

 

Jim

I thought rule No2 was work out if the line concerned is track circuited so a choice can be made as to the use of non insulated tie bars or not? <G> And yes i have been called to a track circuit failure caused by the use of non insulated tie bars on a track circuited line. 'No Boss i can't fix the failure'... If the line needed tie bars i'm not about to take them off to fix a track circuit failure. The PWay had to come back out with the right bars and change them.

Edited August 22, 2017 by LNERGE

[Coryton]

the professional advice he receives, he is a here today, gone tomorrow politician. The civil servants of DafT on the other hand are not here today gone tomorrow types (it’d probably be better if they were) and they are supposed to have the requisite technical expertise to fulfil their duties. And based on GWML electrification and IEP they clearly do not have thar 

 

 

I thought one of the features of our civil service was that they do tend to keep moving people around rather than letting them build up expertise in one particular area.

[The Stationmaster]

I have always felt that one of the original motivators for privatisation, from the politician's point of view, is that it was an exercise in blame shifting. Bad news about the railways can be blamed on private operators/NR, not the Minister of Transport.

 

Very definitely not although as Roy Hattersley said one evening in a speech at a Railway Study Association dinner, speaking mainly of his colleagues in the then out of Govt Labour Party 'whatever they might say in public I can assure you that every MP I know will be glad to have got rid of the railways and the quantity of moaning letters about them which fill our mail bags, everyday'.  He was perhaps a bit wide of the mark in some respects but his comments were very clearly heartfelt.

 

But of course that isn't why the rail industry was privatised - that was down to John Major simply trying to prove he had more political b*lls than Margaret Thatcher and, as ever, the politicos (like most media commentators) hadn't got much idea how it could be done and that was left to the various advisors and appointees to work it out (a process in which I became involved as we ran illustrative table top exercises for them to teach them (or try to teach them) how a railway worked.  some of them, plus some of the then Civil Servants dealing with railways at the Dept of Transport (far from DafT in those days) were really clued up with some good ideas and the Franchising Director designate really impressed me with his approach, plus he knew how to sort Civil Servants and politicos.  Of course some of it went disastrously wrong but that was almost all down to political decisions from the amateurs in Parliament and possibly daft advice from the more clueless civil Servants(?).

 

But we are where we are and one thing which has changed is The Treasury attitude because i understand that now all NR land sale etc revenue goes not into the railway but is remitted to the treasury (and also happens with MoD land etc sales so I'm told) .  As far as the wider industry is concerned I think it has a major problem with amateurs in top roles, especially in NR kow-twing to misled and inaccurate ideas of where costs are generated from the Civil Servants (Wilkinson again) and others when the real money saving could come from structural change and getting some professionalism into senior management with the knowledge & guts to tell the Civil Sevants to go away - but I doubt we'll ever see it.

 

And so back to GW electrification.  Well we do or don't know that it was probably given a budget target and NR were told that is what you're going to spend (even if you're not under our control).  Clearly, and for a variety of reasons the cost estimating was an utter nonsense - and that must be down to NR; detailed survey and design seems to have followed costing rather than led it (if it didn't how on earth did they get it so wrong?).  But beyond that the scheme has all too obviously be grossly and extremely wastefully mismanaged from Day 1 and a lot of that isn't down to the late delivery of the High Output Train but rank amateurism and poor (if existent at all) work planning.  Claims - made in one analysis by the Public Accounts Committee - about possession planning and use of posssessions indicated to me that not only were they missing several key points but also the scheme managers had missed them as well, that is rank amateurism on a grand scale because how you can't have at least a 40 hour possession virtually every weekend on a 4 track railway is completely beyond me (and to me indicates a major organisational flaw within Network Rail which has over centralised certain key aspects of access and timetable planning with an organisation apparently 'designed' by somebody with no experience of the work involved and probably limited understanding of it (and compounded - as I know is the case on Western Zone - by what amounts to de-skilling important parts of the possession planning work which remains at Zone level).

 

The real shame of all this is what amounts to the total disinterest of more senior people in the industry.  the shambles of the practical aspect of GWML electrification has consistently been visible from the windows of passing trains or standing on a station platform yet all that has been said is about the need to forever report up the tree to DafT (I doubt they'd understand it anyway) and so on when a proactive senior manager would have been out with his eyes open and knocking on the Project Manager's door at least once a week and trying to get to the bottom of the perceived log-jams that simply hasn't happened (or if it did happen it was amazingly ineffective).  

 

Sorry to rant on but it really hurts me to see what was once a competent Region capable of progressing large schemes on time and on budget turning in the shambles I have witnessed over recent years and what's more clearly getting things desperately wrong at such basic levels that impact time and scheme costs.

[rodent279]

Very definitely not although as Roy Hattersley said one evening in a speech at a Railway Study Association dinner, speaking mainly of his colleagues in the then out of Govt Labour Party 'whatever they might say in public I can assure you that every MP I know will be glad to have got rid of the railways and the quantity of moaning letters about them which fill our mail bags, everyday'.  He was perhaps a bit wide of the mark in some respects but his comments were very clearly heartfelt.

 

But of course that isn't why the rail industry was privatised - that was down to John Major simply trying to prove he had more political b*lls than Margaret Thatcher and, as ever, the politicos (like most media commentators) hadn't got much idea how it could be done and that was left to the various advisors and appointees to work it out (a process in which I became involved as we ran illustrative table top exercises for them to teach them (or try to teach them) how a railway worked.  some of them, plus some of the then Civil Servants dealing with railways at the Dept of Transport (far from DafT in those days) were really clued up with some good ideas and the Franchising Director designate really impressed me with his approach, plus he knew how to sort Civil Servants and politicos.  Of course some of it went disastrously wrong but that was almost all down to political decisions from the amateurs in Parliament and possibly daft advice from the more clueless civil Servants(?).

 

But we are where we are and one thing which has changed is The Treasury attitude because i understand that now all NR land sale etc revenue goes not into the railway but is remitted to the treasury (and also happens with MoD land etc sales so I'm told) .  As far as the wider industry is concerned I think it has a major problem with amateurs in top roles, especially in NR kow-twing to misled and inaccurate ideas of where costs are generated from the Civil Servants (Wilkinson again) and others when the real money saving could come from structural change and getting some professionalism into senior management with the knowledge & guts to tell the Civil Sevants to go away - but I doubt we'll ever see it.

 

And so back to GW electrification.  Well we do or don't know that it was probably given a budget target and NR were told that is what you're going to spend (even if you're not under our control).  Clearly, and for a variety of reasons the cost estimating was an utter nonsense - and that must be down to NR; detailed survey and design seems to have followed costing rather than led it (if it didn't how on earth did they get it so wrong?).  But beyond that the scheme has all too obviously be grossly and extremely wastefully mismanaged from Day 1 and a lot of that isn't down to the late delivery of the High Output Train but rank amateurism and poor (if existent at all) work planning.  Claims - made in one analysis by the Public Accounts Committee - about possession planning and use of posssessions indicated to me that not only were they missing several key points but also the scheme managers had missed them as well, that is rank amateurism on a grand scale because how you can't have at least a 40 hour possession virtually every weekend on a 4 track railway is completely beyond me (and to me indicates a major organisational flaw within Network Rail which has over centralised certain key aspects of access and timetable planning with an organisation apparently 'designed' by somebody with no experience of the work involved and probably limited understanding of it (and compounded - as I know is the case on Western Zone - by what amounts to de-skilling important parts of the possession planning work which remains at Zone level).

 

The real shame of all this is what amounts to the total disinterest of more senior people in the industry.  the shambles of the practical aspect of GWML electrification has consistently been visible from the windows of passing trains or standing on a station platform yet all that has been said is about the need to forever report up the tree to DafT (I doubt they'd understand it anyway) and so on when a proactive senior manager would have been out with his eyes open and knocking on the Project Manager's door at least once a week and trying to get to the bottom of the perceived log-jams that simply hasn't happened (or if it did happen it was amazingly ineffective).  

 

Sorry to rant on but it really hurts me to see what was once a competent Region capable of progressing large schemes on time and on budget turning in the shambles I have witnessed over recent years and what's more clearly getting things desperately wrong at such basic levels that impact time and scheme costs.

 

It's all very sad, and deeply disturbing for the future of the railways, because there clearly is a lot of work to be done before the politicians will commit to major investment again.

[jamie92208]

It's all very sad, and deeply disturbing for the future of the railways, because there clearly is a lot of work to be done before the politicians will commit to major investment again.

The Northern Powerhouse and HS3 is all over the news today, certainly oop here in the north.

 

Jamie

[Trog]

The Northern Powerhouse and HS3 is all over the news today, certainly oop here in the north.

 

Jamie

 

But due to stirring by an ex-MP, probably makes anything actually happening less likely as those in power will not want it to look as if they are doing his bidding.

[Southernman46]

If there's any sense in this barmy fragmented railway system we have, then I would hope that the cost to NR of the disruption, and of restoring full service, will far outweigh the cost of closing the necessary platforms and carrying out whatever remedial maintenance & repairs would have been required to avoid the incident in the first place.

Nice point ........... not doing that is PRECISELY what led to Hatfield .............. as I keep banging on about and boring people with ........ Hard lessons being unlearnt ............... until the next time

Edited August 23, 2017 by Southernman46

[jjb1970]

I thought one of the features of our civil service was that they do tend to keep moving people around rather than letting them build up expertise in one particular area.

 

To a point yes, but they tend to be career civil servants and as you go higher up the chain there is more stability. I've dealt with a lot of civil servants at the MoD, DECC as was and DafT (not railways) and most of them have been career people within their department and most of them have spent significant periods in post. In each case the individuals seemed to be conditioned by the corporate culture of their department which is why things are not as simple as imagining it is about individual short comings. Weirdly enough, the ones I have the most respect for and who tended to be pretty passionate, competent and with a decent understanding of the end users of their department were the MoD people yet they're the ones usually pilloried because of defence procurement issues.