COMMENT
Tube Lines experience
Lamonte told us his experiences at Tube Lines – and with the military before that – have a real bearing on his new role with TfGM.
“It’s been a continuum, building on substantial projects. When I arrived at Tube Lines, the Jubilee line was in a right mess, blasted all over the Evening Standard every night.
“It was about getting all the parties together: the signalling contractor, LU as the operators, and ourselves as the maintenance and upgrade folk, to just try to have a one-team approach. Of course, that worked well, because ultimately at the Olympics, when the system was put to the test, the Jubilee line fared incredibly well.
“We took maintenance of the fl eet in-house from Alstom, we pushed up the availability considerably, and did it in a more cost-effective way.
“That shouldn’t decry from the efforts the contractor was making on the Northern line, where they’ve done a great job, but on the Jubilee line we did our own thing.
“There was also the initiative putting blue lights onto our emergency response vehicles, and having the British Transport Police working with us [see RTM June/July 2012 for more on this initiative].
“So, there are some themes around co- operation and collaboration, there’s a theme around service delivery and getting the best for customers, there’s a theme around getting projects on time, to budget and trying to ensure it’s what they customer wants. Those themes lend themselves, absolutely, to my role here.”
Metrolink extension
Getting projects on time is a big issue with the Metrolink extension, parts of which have suffered embarrassing delays in recent years, for a number of reasons. A key one has been delays to the signalling system, after Thales was contracted in 2008 to provide the new tram management system. Problems installing the new system contributed to the delays in opening the south Manchester to Oldham
line, and knocked the Rochdale and Droylsden openings off their original schedule. Acrimony, court battles and fi nancial demands between Thales and TfGM have since been splashed all over the local paper.
In a judgement at the High Court earlier this year, Mr Justice Akenhead said: “TfGM is broadly of the view that delays and other problems have been caused by the failure of Thales to provide an effective design and deliver a working and safe system…this project has been subjected to very substantial delays with many of the sections of work being already late, compared with original contractual completion requirements. In terms of milestones, no more than about one-third are said to have been completed. Something has obviously gone seriously wrong.”
Upcoming line openings
In the wake of these problems, we asked Lamonte how confi dent passengers should be that upcoming line extension openings to East Didsbury, Rochdale town centre and Ashton will happen on time.
He told us: “I think passengers can be far more confi dent that we are on top of the roll-out of lines. When we say a line is going to open, we make sure it does. We said we’d have Droylsden and Rochdale open on February 11 and 28, and we did.”
Even these openings weren’t trouble-free, however – a signal failure on the evening of February 28 meant Rochdale services had to be suspended on their fi rst day from 6.45pm to 8pm. Such failures are all too common, some Metrolink customers would say.
“It’s true to say there have been incidents along the way,” Lamonte said. “For example, there’s a road junction near Oldham that four cars so far have decided to stick themselves across the track – there’s only so much you can do! And equally, United Utilities have let us down with the odd power failure along the way on some of the other lines. I wouldn’t say that there is a trend in any of that; it’s simply that there are a lot of small problems that sometimes cause us service diffi culties.”
Continued overleaf > rail technology magazine Apr/May 13 | 25
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