COMMENT
Improving
railway performance for the passenger
The Offi ce of Rail Regulation’s (ORR’s) new director of railway performance, Alan Price, formerly the rail division infrastructure director at FirstGroup, speaks to RTM about how Network Rail and the operators handle severe weather, and preparations for Control Period 5.
“I’m
not a lifetime regulator,” Alan Price told us. “I come from a very different
background: that was one of the things that attracted me to the position.”
Price, who recently took up his new role as ORR director of railway performance, has worked throughout the railway industry (see the panel on p23) concentrating on infrastructure, asset management and renewals.
He spoke to RTM shortly after the Q3 2012-13 Monitor was released, and told us about how he envisioned his own role, and how he plans to engage with the rest of the industry.
“[ORR chief executive] Richard Price wants to move the organisation to be more collaborative and part of the industry leadership.
“I’ve seen all sides of the industry. It’s important that we do get out of the ‘ivory tower’ and go and engage with the Network Rail routes and with the TOCs.”
Bringing the route MDs and TOCs together
He told us about the recent talk he gave to the forum convened by Network Rail’s managing director of network operations, Robin Gisby, bringing together every Network Rail route managing director, and all the TOC managing directors, for the fi rst time.
“I don’t think they’ve ever all been in a room before to have a sensible and open discussion,” Price told us. “I know most of them from my ‘previous life’. What I told them was not ‘you’re rubbish, you need to improve’ – but I set out the challenges. Given where I’ve been in my career and my role now with the ORR and the
20 | rail technology magazine Apr/May 13
RDG, I’ve seen examples of best practice, I’ve seen what we can do. But there are practices I’ve seen in some parts of Network Rail that aren’t shared with other parts of Network Rail; where the alliance approach can deliver real benefi ts.
“It’s about engaging with the industry and getting out there, so I’m not sat at a desk looking through statistics every day.
“If I look at my diary for the last two weeks, I haven’t been in the offi ce for half that time.
“The operators’ forum was a good starting point for me. I think it’s important that we engage, and I still play a role with RDG and now go to the national taskforce as well.
“Before I went, they almost warned me – ‘don’t come and use this as a forum to gather evidence to use against us’. But I think they realised very quickly that that’s not my approach at all.
“I think they do value the challenge I bring.” ‘Own goals’ by Network Rail
The quarterly performance monitor published in late February showed the heavy impact the winter weather had on the railways.
PPM for England and Wales was 88%, which was 2 percentage points worse than expected and 1.4 percentage points worse than the same time last year.
The disruption was made worse by ‘major problems’ on some schemes over Christmas, including signalling issues at Paddington and the closure of the Heathrow Express on its busiest day.
The Monitor put it like this: “Overall there were fewer overruns but those that happened caused more delay and cancelled services. We have asked Network Rail to explain how some operational planning issues were caused by basic human errors and how these will be prevented in the future.”
‘Basic human errors’ is not something Network Rail would boast about (although 97% of the large Christmas-time projects were completed on time).
“It certainly is a worry,” Price told us. “Yes, we did have the big weather issues over Christmas, and a lot of people worked very hard in some ridiculous conditions to get the railway running – and we do applaud that.
“Yes that’s weather and that’s beyond their control, but I want to make sure they don’t score the own goals that bring the performance back down again.
“There were some poor examples of that over Christmas: where they booked possessions and tried to run electric trains with no overhead line turned on, for example.
“Their systems should be robust enough to make sure those things don’t happen, and impact on passengers as they did.”
Sir David Higgins’ response to these criticisms, on behalf of Network Rail, is overleaf.
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