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Passenger benefits
Clearly both the operator and its passengers benefit from more reliable trains. Jenner said it was too early to say precisely how much of the recent performance improvements Southeastern has been experiencing is down to this one project, but said: “Our PPM has been climbing rapidly, plus, for the first time, last period, we were below 100 casualties across our entire fleet. Our incident rates are falling rapidly, and our reliability is increasingly dramatically.”
But he acknowledged: “There was quite a large penalty over the last 18 months in fitting this: we had a substantial part of our maintenance allocation allocated to the fitment of this kit. We’ve tried where possible to swallow
that work, and while we’ve maintained the serviceability of the fleet, we’ve lost more than a third of our maintenance allocation to these projects, so it’s been quite a painful process for us. But it’s all behind us now and we’re beginning to see real benefits.
“We’re very keen to understand the benefits post-implementation. There are some benefits we didn’t perceive: we didn’t expect some of the more intransigent defects to be so visible in the system, for example.”
Jenner said the system is part of what is a “very sophisticated suite of engineering IT”, which is increasingly integrated, and increasingly online. Depots and engineers are now being issued with iPads, because so many of the applications available are useful even when stood right next to the train itself, but particularly so in remote locations if a train fails.
There are other remote condition monitoring systems and front-end interfaces out there, but before this project, there was nothing on the market that would satisfy Southeastern’s needs.
Jenner said: “We knew we’d have to build something bespoke: there was nothing on the
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market that was smart enough to do what we wanted it to do. There was quite a bit of new thinking, research and innovation required to get to this level, and to their credit, our suppliers have delivered.”
The system has even attracted the interest of an airline, Virgin, Jenner said – not so much for the technology itself as for the organisational structures implemented by Southeastern to be able to use it effectively.
He said: “We’ve obviously done a lot of work in restructuring our depots to effectively use all the data.”
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