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Existing timetables are incompatible with ‘professional' driving – but whether the great drivers of the past would regard it as professional is another matter
Last month I asked for professional feedback on my theory (Informed Sources January) that adhesion related delays are being exaggerated by driving habits matched to a zero tolerance railway. Two of the letters I received came from opposite ends of the driving experience spectrum. Yet both agreed with the theory and, indeed, explained how and why driving practices have changed.
One correspondent was typical of the newly qualified drivers I referred to who had never seen a leaf fall. But no way was he worried about getting the sack for sliding past a platform end signal because he was continuously exposed to the massage ‘put safety before performance'.
As a result he saw no pressure to try to run to time, at the risk of sliding past the platform end. Provided the late running report always attributes the delay to ‘poor railhead conditions', the driver is in the clear – and Railtrack bears the brunt of the cost.
But, my correspondent drew a clear distinction between periods of low adhesion and normal conditions. Which brings me to the second driver, a veteran of the footplate and now a traction trainer. He is equally clear that ‘trains are no longer being driven in a way that will enable them to keep to time'.
Both agree that braking is the key. And both agree that that use of full service braking is deprecated while an emergency brake application is a very bad thing. And with on-train data recorders any such ‘misuse' is soon picked up.
Once upon a time, driving practice in normal adhesion conditions was to approach a station stop, or speed restriction come to that, and make a single full service brake application. Brake pressure could then be released so that the train came to a halt exactly at the platform stop board, or passed the PSR sign bang on the number.
A chum of mine was the BR Board's Traction & Train Crew manager in the ‘80s and made a point of footplating frequently so that he could watch his drivers at work. If he thought a driver had left the braking late for a restriction, my chum had the habit of putting a £1 coin on the desk as a way of saying ‘I'm watching you'. ‘That bugger took £3 off me in a single journey' he said of one driver.
And I can remember a thrilling run back from Aberdeen in 1986 in an HST with one power car sick. Despite this the driver actually pulled back lost time by following the speed profile exactly and losing not a mile an hour at each restriction by perfectly judged, skilful braking.
Today, such driving would be considered irresponsible, because the greater the skill, the greater the risk if you are caught out. Even motor racing world champion Michael Schumacher gets his braking wrong very, very occasionally.
And a driver can be caught unawares by low adhesion. Footplating a Class 91 (happy days) we entered a tunnel at 100mile/h on dry rail. On the other side of the tunnel we emerged into a rain shower. The speedometer touched 110mile/h before the Wheel Slip Protection cut in.
And most readers can probably remember sliding past the station stop board, the Wheel Slide Protection puffing away beneath the leading coach, fighting for grip. Having made a normal full service brake approach a driver could be caught out by a sudden, and not necessarily detectable, fall in adhesion.
A driver just can't afford to risk such a situation nowadays. Having a few feet of the leading coach past the platform end is a misdemeanour which can make you a ‘specially monitored driver' with points on your record. And too many points add up to your P45.
What this all means is that drivers ‘de-skill' their job to reduce the risk. Not the risk to passengers, but to their own livelihood.
Instead of the smooth sweep into a platform, stopping on a sixpence at precisely the tight spot, you now have a Notch 2 brake application well in advance, even with perfect rail head conditions, and a slow approach followed by a crawl along the platform. This is despite the fact that the brakes on the new generation of electric multiple units, old school drivers tell me, have unprecedented performance under less than perfect adhesion conditions, thanks to smart WSP.
This changed approach to driving helps explain the conflicting experience in SPAD reduction. Between 1995/96 and 2000/01, annual number of SPADs fell from 729 to 475. But the equivalent figures for Category 3-8 SPADs, the potentially dangerous ones, were 210 and 196 – virtually no change.
This means that, over the five year period, Category 1 and 2 SPADs, (Cat 1 0-25 yards over run/Cat2 25-200 over-run within the overlap) halved from 519 to 240. In addition the greatest reduction was in Category 1 SPADs.
These represented 38% of all SPADs in 1995/96, but only 31% in 200/01. The proportion of Category 2 SPADs was virtually unchanged, just 1% lower at 32 percent in 2000/01.
So five years of intensive work on SPAD prevention has seen the number of drivers being caught out and stopping up to 25 yards past a red signal each year being reduced by 130. However, the number of serious errors has stayed the same – albeit with more trains being run and, intuitively I admit, more red signals being encountered.
Now you may well ask why Ford is going on about the minutiae of driving techniques when the railway is in crisis. Note that I am not saying that the change in braking techniques is a retrograde step. But it does mean that the dynamics of train operation, on which the timetable, and thus capacity, is based have changed irrevocably.
Approaching station stops cautiously instead of with a flourish costs time and, particularly on the busy commuter routes around London , if you lose only five or 10 seconds at each stop, the cumulative effect can soon lose you a path. On my local station's departure indicators you can see trains losing more time as they pass successive TRUST reporting points on the way in from Canbridge.
And yet, the Corporate Plan (sorry, old BR Freudian slip), the Strategic Rail Authority's Strategic Plan is based on generating 40-50% passenger miles and reducing overcrowding in London and the South East.
But, sooner or later, the mismatch between the historic sectional timings on which the current Timetable is based, and the actual timings achieved with defensive driving, where driving hard to recover lost time is regarded as putting performance before safety, will have to be rectified. This will mean a complete recast of the timetable almost certainly with longer journey times and, probably, less capacity.
Add in the need for more Green Zone working, identified in the Safety Report elsewhere in this issue, and driving technique becomes a matter of considerable political importance.