George report emphasises local expertise

More common sense from an old-British Rail hand

Having a sort-out in the post new year lull, I came across a copy of the 1998 Sir Robert Reid lecture given by civil servant turned railwayman John Welsby. Mr Welsby had been British Rail’s Director, Provincial Services, before moving to the Board. Sir Bob appointed him as BR Chief Executive in 1989 and then he had succeeded Bob Reid II as the last BR chairman. In his paper Mr Welsby took the opportunity to take the first look at privatisation ‘as it is, not as it might be or might become’. One topic he raised was performance.

After what he termed a ‘noticeable hiccup’ in the months after Railtrack was separated from BR in 1994, performance had resumed the upward trend that had characterised the last years of BR. I have always attributed this recovery to operating staff, freed from the distraction of privatisation, picking up where they had left off and working amicably together before the impact of the new contractual relationships bit.

But by January 1988 John Welsby noted that ‘after the last nine months, or so’, performance, far from continuing to improve, had actually deteriorated. The privatised railway was in danger of being perceived ‘as having collected in two years almost as much reputational baggage as BR did in 50’.

Turning to safety, John Welsby referred to concerns expressed in the latest Railway Inspectorate report. ‘Good intentions at top level, good policies and setting good examples are all necessary – but if they are not followed through to ensure reliable, consistent and pragmatic safety practice on the ground where the action is, then all the aspirations and indeed the commitments in the board room are worth no more than hot air. That was the lesson of Clapham’.

To which, two decades later, we can add Cardiff and Waterloo. His experience suggested that both performance and safety were showing the classic signs of ‘under-management of the nuts and bolts of running a safe and customer-friendly railway’.

HAINES DOCTRINE

Which brings us to Network Rail Chief Executive Andrew Haines’ speech at the Golden Whistles awards in January. Old softy that I am, I found this speech inspiring and we published it as a guest editorial last month (p6).

Returning to the railway after 10 years in aviation, Mr Haines took the view that Network Rail had ‘possibly’ neglected the skills and processes of operating the railway in the interests of asset management, major infrastructure projects and workforce safety.

While these are ‘vital, critical, essential undertakings’ they are not sufficient for providing a reliable service for passengers, he said. Rail operations as a profession has not been cultivated and valued as it should have been. ‘That dwindling expertise has contributed to our collective failure to make sure the railway works seamlessly as a system (and) we are paying the price for that in the level of performance that we are delivering’.

RESURGENT

Meanwhile, it seems that the Department for Transport (DfT) has been ahead of the game when it comes to valuing old-railway operating skills. Before Andrew Haines’ appointment, DfT had commissioned Chris Gibb’s report and recommendations on Southern performance (p84, August 2017 issue), Sir Michael Holden’s magisterial report on South Western (p10, November 2018 issue) and now Richard George’s recommendations on restoring Northern performance (p18, last month).

Richard George probably has the lowest profile of the three. He started his railway career as a BR management trainee and first made his mark in strategic planning, first for Freightliner and then InterCity where he subsequently became Manager at Waterloo. Come privatisation, he was Deputy Managing Director of the franchise-winning Great Western management buyout, taking the top job a year later. He was then a director of FirstGroup until 2000.

None of this is in his LinkedIn biography, which starts with Mr George’s role in the transport planning for the London Olympics in 2012. After the Games he joined the Interfleet consultancy, by then a part of SNC-Lavalin, and he is now Group Managing Director Rail & Transit.

NORTHERN

When Transport for the North (TfN) asked DfT for help in recovering from the May 2018 timetable crisis, DfT in turn asked Richard George to ‘assist’ with railway industry performance improvement in the TfN region.

Echoing the quality claims in French which used to appear on HP Sauce bottles, DfT emphasised Mr George’s independence at length: ‘he is an independent railway expert and not employed by, nor aligned to, any of the train operating companies or their owning groups, nor to Network Rail, nor to the DfT or TfN’.

Tagged: a train of new TransPennine Mk 5 stock was berthed in an unprotected location at Scarborough overnight on 27-28 February, which appears to have been a mistake, as graffiti vandals struck. This photo was taken the next day at York while the train was on a driver familiarisation run.
John Vaughan

Taking up the commission in September last year, by November Mr George had come up with his preliminary conclusions, which mirror those of the other railway ‘lifers’ DfT has eventually turned to. ‘There are no quick fixes. Many of the issues which have emerged will take long-term effort to resolve.’ ‘Significant capacity issues will become worse. Some industry structural and governance issues are not helping.’

But what caught my eye was this: ‘There are also indications that Signallers, Planners, Station Managers have been centralised for good reasons over several years – but this has reduced the level of local knowledge – this is key to responsive local operations’. More on this later.

BORINGLY RELIABLE

Just like Andrew Haines, Richard George’s report is all about the operator-centric railway. Yes, I know the Williams Rail Review is adjuring the industry to focus on a passenger-centric railway, whatever that may mean. But unless you get your operating and engineering right you are never going to get the boringly-reliable, commercially-competitive railway that passengers value.

As Richard George notes, the North of England has a much busier railway than it used to have and it requires greater operating discipline. Some capacity issues have not yet been fully addressed, for example depot and stabling capacity are creating operating problems. Note the frequent use of the ‘O’ word which occurs throughout his recommendations. Thus local teams involving planning, signalling and station operations need to be created. Stations dispatch training is required across ‘many stations’.

Signaller training should emphasise ‘local’ rather than ‘generic’ routes and practices. Station and depot local planning should feature early in the timetabling process. And governance should be revised to reflect operational needs. To hark back to John Welsby, what Chris Gibb, Sir Michael Holden and Richard George are proclaiming is the importance of managing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of running the railway.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

When out and about with those who came up through the BR management programme I am always in awe of their encyclopaedic knowledge of the rail network. They chat happily about this junction or that tunnel which I would need my Track Atlas to follow.

Similarly, observing controllers and signallers working on their screens it is clear that those with decades of experience can mentally convert the symbols on the screen into the situation out on the ground. This local knowledge may have been gained from working at smaller boxes before they were consolidated into larger signalling centres, or by more-senior signallers passing on their knowledge.

Today, the combination of new entry signallers going straight from training into Rail Operating Centres (ROC), plus experienced staff leaving, means that they may have no local experience. This is not unique to railways. As recent air accidents have shown, today’s young airline pilots have lost the ability to fly an aircraft manually if the electronics go awry or in the event of failure.

As Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who safely landed his Airbus on the Hudson River in New York after losing both engines two minutes after take-off, puts it: ‘Flight 1549 wasn’t just a five-minute journey. My entire life led me safely to that river’.

LOSS

Fostering local knowledge is not an easy task in an age of ROCs and Signalling Centres. As one retired signaller put it, when experienced staff leave they do not just take 30-odd years of experience with them, they can take 100+ years of experience with them, as they had absorbed local knowledge from previous generations which had been passed to them.

This is of a piece with the ‘dwindling expertise’ of the operating profession highlighted by Andrew Haines. How do you find the time and provide the facilities for people to go out and experience the physical railway being worked in real life, rather than experienced remotely on the displays of a quasi-video game?

Back in the day, when he was Assistant General Manager of the London Midland Region, Ivor Warburton used to organise social evenings where drivers and signallers could discuss over a pint how they made each other’s lives difficult. I could see a programme of ROC visits for drivers, along with footplates for signallers, with a social get together at the end of the day.

This would provide the basis of an ongoing local knowledge regeneration programme.

SPAD TRAP

Meanwhile, on the subject of operating experience and competence, readers might like to consider the diagram in this extract from a recent Weekly Operating Notice. The Rule Book is quite clear on the situation portrayed. ‘When a single steady yellow aspect is displayed together with a junction indicator, this has the normal meaning of a yellow aspect, be prepared to stop at the signal.

This applies even though a flashing aspect may have been displayed at the preceding signal’. It seems we are in danger of forgetting Colwich as well as Clapham.

New Northern DMU: unit No 195001 working 3Z11, the Carnforth - Edge Hill depot test run, passing Wigan North Western on 25 February 2019.
Joel Coulson

WON extract: Fletton Junction. For P409, the WON says ‘may display a double yellow flashing aspect for trains routed onto the Down Slow line’, while for P413, it says ‘may display a single yellow flashing aspect for trains routed onto the Down Slow line’. The diagram then shows these followed by a green signal; at Colwich, one of the drivers assumed that the flashing yellows meant the route was set for him, when he was actually approaching a red.