Return to Archive -by date - by topic - 2000
For those who need to justify railway privatisation, rather than, as we do, regarding it as just another of those things like the black death the seven plagues of Egypty, great solace can be found in the chart of Passenger's Charter punctuality published in the excellent ATOC Bulletin. The chart helpfully covers the years from 1994/95, when Railtrack became a separate entity,to the present day.
For the first two years, Railtrack was the infrastructure operator and British Rail ran the trains. Charter punctuality fluctuated around the 90% mark. Then in the summer of 1996 it began to climb, reaching a peak of 92.78% a year later.
So there you are then. The privatised railway offers a better service than BR.
But it pays to remember what was happening in the two years before the improvement started. Pretty well every one of the top two or three hundred managers in BR had several jobs. Their bit of BR had to be turned into a self contained business for sale, with new organisations to be created. Then data rooms had to be filled with financial and other information for use by prospective buyers. Any manager worth his salt was also likely to be mounting a management buy out. And, oh yes, there was also a railway to be run.
Amazing then that performance during this howling chaos was not worse. And understandable the strong recovery when some form of stability was restored.
Throughout 1996 and into 1997, the passenger franchises were being let and the freight companies sold. The infrastructure maintenance and renewals companies and the signalling offices were being sold, as were the ROSCOs and TESCOs.
Not surprising then that in 1996 the industry let out a collective sigh of relief and got back to the reason why most managers had joined the business - to run the railway. As a microcosm of the industry we serve, that was certainly our experience. We started writing about service improvement plans, new train procurement and all the other staples of this magazine.
But it is no accident that the peak on the ATOC chart coincides with the 1997 General Election. Or that the decline has acceperated during the first six periods of 2000/01.
Wherever you look, the industry is massively distracted from its primary task. Railtrack and the Regulator are engaged in Verdun like battles of attrition over the Periodic Review of Track Access Charges, the West Coast Route Modernisation and performance. Countless specialists are producing endless schedules and draft timetables and checking each other's work.
Meanwhile, the Shadow Strategic Rail Authority's franchise replacement programme has given train operators, whose performance had been getting steadily worse as Railtrack improved, the ultimate displacement activity. When it comes to bidding for 20 year franchises only the best managers will do while the railway runs itself, or doesn't.
Wisely, the SSRA decided that this must not be allowed to happen on the West Coast Main Line and barred the Virgin Trains management team from taking part in franchise bidding. So, in the latest SSRA Performance Bulletin we see that during the Summer Virgin West Coast achieved the hardly sparkling figure of 21% of trains more than 10min late.
Given that this coincided with major projects, and the associated ritual cutting of the signalling cables, at Euston, Proof House and Manchester you could argue for leniency. In which case what about that paragon of operators GNER which ran 22.8% trains later than time plus 10?
In their defence, GNER claimed that the summer had seen the four tank engines of the apocalypse roaming up and down the East Coast Main Line. Hardly. We prefer the distraction theory.
Not only are incumbents allowed to be part of bidding teams, but the InterCity East Coast replacement franchise inevitably involves a lot of work, the SSRA having sent back the initial offers for more polishing. In addition, GNER is shortlisted for SWT and has qualified for Thameslink. That's some workload.
And so it goes. TOCs bidding for replacement franchises are chasing Railtrack's already overloaded resources for comments on timetable proposals and feasibility studies for infrastructure improvements. Train builders are having to respond to similarly prophylactic OJEC Notices. Lord knows how many computer simulations there have been for tilting and non tilting trains over the Pennines .
Nor is it just the passenger or freight customer who is suffering from this distraction. A feed back loop has been set up in the City where the confusion in the industry is compounded by the bad news on performance. As a result, rail specialists in investment houses are finding even modest no-brainer proposals turned down by investment boards who don't understand what is going on.
All this, and we haven't even touched on Cullen and Uff, when the next election could be just six months away. And that would be the good news. An election in May 2002, with the WCRM centre stage could be a disaster politically.
As Professor Stephen Glaister pointed out at the Railway Forum annual conference in September, the Government's 10 year transport plan is only a piece of paper, no cheques have been signed and Sir Alastair Morton's fund of patient capital is not ‘a pile of gold'.
Reminding us that ‘there is a lot of fashion in this game' Professor Glaister pointed out that while its was fashionable to refer to rail as the ‘socially preferred mode of transport', the previous week's fuel crisis has showed that this was not true.
With political uncertainty ahead, that piece of paper has to be turned into firm contracts for aluminium, steel and concrete before fashion changes. Doing this in an industry at war with itself is not proving easy.
Perhaps Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott could have a mini summit of Regulators and bang some heads together. Could we have some stability, or even predictability, please?