influence to help shape future transport and logistics policy development in the UK.
What are your thoughts on the new National Skills Academy for Railway Engineering particularly helping young people to find their feet in the transport sector?
This is a brilliant initiative to give young people qualifications, jobs and pride. Any government which wants to be seen to be progressive and avoiding having a ‘lost generation’ of young people, really needs to invest in ideas like this.
Are you supportive of the coalition government offering train operators more flexibility in their franchise agreements?
If you mean that there is less micro management and that the government would let us get on with running the railway in accordance with demand and develop opportunities to grow that demand, then yes.
I feel that the franchise process has lived through the early parts of the recession and proved that it does work. The system benefits the public when times are good and gives us a certain amount of protection when things go the other way.
I would like to see longer franchises and the opportunity to have a longer term investment plan. This would build on the train operators’ success. We tend to forget that over the last ten years, Britain’s railway has been the fastest growing in Europe.
How would you like to
invest further with your own franchises?
We are currently carrying out a quite a lot of work on our stations and looking at the capacity on our network because there is still an issue around peak time commuter railways not having enough seats and a solution needs to be found.
A good example is what’s happening with First Capital Connect and the Thameslink programme. Whilst there may be a delay in the delivery of the trains, this sort of investment is crucial. When we emerge from the recession we are going to need that extra capacity, both on the rail and road networks.
From a CILT perspective, everything we do around transport and logistics forms part of the national economic recovery effort. If we don’t get that investment right, the economic recovery will take much longer.
Every organisation has room for improvement and with this in mind, how is First Capital Connect planning on improving its performance?
The problems with First Capital Connect were unfortunate. Our staff took unofficial industrial action around the turn of the year and around the same time we had to cope with severe and unprecedented weather conditions. Our 319 power units did not work as well as we would have expected in the adverse weather conditions. .
Because of these combined problems our passengers did suffer but our recovery was swift. The staff dispute was resolved by the middle of January and our 319 units were operating much
more efficiently by that time following the replacement of the components which failed in the poor weather.
The last few months have been very encouraging and performance has been above target. The aim now has to be to do this consistently, day in, day out.
We announced a £10m investment plan to ensure First Capital Connect is much better placed for the future - this includes more drivers, upgrades and improvements to the train fleet and new customer information systems.
In my opinion, the one thing that let us down was the customer information system. It just become completely overloaded with the problems that we had, couldn’t cope and our staff on the station platforms were not sufficiently well informed to advise customers properly. I think that the frustration from our passengers was simply born from that.
In response to this we have introduced hand held units which can relay real time information to our staff on the platforms. We are now much better able to inform people about what we are doing to deal with problems, whether that be a replacement service or another recovery plan.
We have a good team in there, led by Neal Lawson, who is himself an engineer. He knows the trains inside out and I am really pleased with the work which he and his team have been doing.
All of these measures mean from now on the service performance of First Capital Connect will
continue to get better and this has been reflected in our improving PPM score.
How are you working to make your rail services more sustainable, both in terms of environmental concerns and business continuity?
That’s a good question, considering that both the economic and environment outlooks are less than bright, to say the least, but we have to deal with them both with equal measure.
I am pleased to say that in terms of reducing our carbon footprint, since the introduction of our carbon reduction programme in 2006, fuel efficiency in rail has improved by an average of 6%.
In terms of emissions per passenger journey, we have achieved a nine per cent reduction across our rail companies, We are also the first train operator to retrofit a monitoring system which accurately measures the amount of electricity being used in our trains.
Additionally, First Transpennine Express won the Environmental Award at the 2010 Rail Business awards for reducing its fuel consumption by around ten and half per cent.
First Capital Connect has also commissioned regenerative braking systems on all of its new 377 fleet so I am sure we will see some benefit from that.
First Hull Trains also employs a driver advisory system which informs our train drivers when they are operating the vehicle at maximum fuel efficiency.
and foremost Oct/Nov 10 rtm15
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