Ruud Haket
The statistics are impressive, with Greater Anglia carrying 1.3 million extra passengers during the Games, making a total of 7.7 million journeys during the period. That’s a whopping 20 per cent more people using the service.
‘It was not only our staff who were in a different mood, but also our customer base,’ says Haket. ‘It was a pleasure to be on the stations during those times.’
Learning both ways
There’s a school of thought that says other countries always do things better – and that certainly rings true with the railways. People are quick to bemoan the UK’s rail network, so has Haket been able to bring any best practice from the Netherlands to the UK? ‘The first thing to say is that you can learn both ways – it’s not one-way traffic,’ he points out. ‘To begin the other way round, we organised Stratford Regional around the Olympic Park, and it was the Dutch Railways [NS] that came over and looked at how we did the crowd management, as they have a lot of big events there. So it’s not a one-way street.’ However, with cycling such a big lifestyle choice
in the Netherlands, Haket was always going to bring some cycle-friendly elements from his homeland to the UK. After all, the two countries share a similar terrain as far as East Anglia is concerned, with cycling very popular in towns such as Cambridge. ‘We are planning a number of cycle points in Chelmsford and Cambridge, while we’ve already started a station cycle hire scheme in Norwich. I recently walked around Utrecht station where there were thousands of bikes. In Holland, traditionally, you have two bikes – you don’t put a bike on the train, you have one to get to the station and one
when you get off. How we look at biking is certainly something that we bring with us, and if you look at the number of biking initiatives we have in the franchise, it’s quite a bit.’
And talking of franchises, does Haket believe that they work – and is it in the railways’ best interest? ‘If you look back from privatisation to now, you don’t recognise the railways,’ he says. ‘And you don’t hear me say that privatisation brought all the new rolling stock, because that’s plainly not true. The rolling stock has to be replaced for safety reasons, and that just coincided with the first few years of privatisation. But what it did bring is much more focus on customer service.’
According to Haket, there are more passengers on the railways now than in 1920, which was the previous top year for passenger numbers, with far less infrastructure. ‘That focus and growth has got to be linked with franchising. You are competitive. Every time you go into bidding, you have to have innovation because otherwise you can’t make that winning bid. Overall, as a system, it works.’ A longer-term view and gradual improvement towards modernisation are things that Haket believes our railways need – the system needs to be brought up-to-date. That, and a desire for central coordination with regards to customer information, is where the industry could improve a lot. Having a good rapport with Network Rail certainly seems to help. And with Haket’s Network Rail counterpart, Dave Ward, situated just upstairs from him in the same building – it seems the two have formed a close working relationship. Each does his own job, without the other having to breathe down his neck.
DECEMBER 2012 PAGE 17
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