News in brief...
Euston jewel thief jailed A man who stole £247,000 worth of jewellery from a passenger passing through Euston station has been jailed for more than five years. Ricardo Fajardo Guerrero, 45, of no fixed abode, stole a holdall containing the jewellery in November 2012. Guerrero was part of an organised gang of thieves who used surveillance tactics to follow the victim to Euston. Officers employed a wide range of tactics to investigate the crime and close links were established with similar thefts in the London area. A common factor in each of the thefts, Guerrero was identified as the central offender responsible and was arrested in June this year in a joint BTP and MPS operation. BTP’s detective sergeant Howard Dale said: ‘This case takes on added resonance as BTP publicly launches Operation Magnum, a nationwide campaign to help rail passengers keep valuables safe from pickpockets, gadget- grabbers and luggage thieves.’
Business booming for Virgin Trains The company says it is experiencing a surge in business travel. In the 12 weeks to 22 June, revenue from corporate sales - based on Virgin’s largest business and public sector clients - was up by 12 per cent compared to last year, led by a 26 per cent increase in travel in the banking sector, 18 per cent in entertainment/ media and 15 per cent in services/ consulting.
Revenue from public sector travel increased by 18 per cent and tour operators by 12.5 per cent. Corporate clients are becoming more savvy in their buying behaviour with increased take-up of Off-Peak and Advance fares.
First Great Western depot shortlisted for European award
The company’s Landore depot in Swansea has been shortlisted for Engineering Excellence in the European Rail Congress Awards 2013. Competing against teams in
France and Spain, FGW has made the final 10 from more than 300 entries. Landore has repaired more than 3600 high speed train sets over the last 12 months and only one was cancelled due to a train fault. The awards and congress will be held on 12th November.
Page 10 September 2013
Commuters could benefit from safer journeys on trains and planes following research which predicts when drivers are likely to make human errors resulting
in accidents. Using on-board black boxes, Dr Guy Walker, lecturer in Human Factors
and Transport with Heriot-Watt University’s Institute for Infrastructure and Environment, has identified trends in drivers’ behaviour that, if ignored, could lead to serious accidents. Walker said: ‘Human factors, rather than technical faults, are now the main source of risk in rail and aviation travel. Drivers and pilots are only human, yet we’re expecting them to perform in predictable ways and when we looked at data from black-box recorders we saw that they weren’t.
‘Black boxes are now recording every train and plane journey which means we have a mountain of data that we can detect subtle trends from. This tells us in advance where dangerous weaknesses might be present.’
All trains were recommended to have black box recorders fitted following the
public inquiry into the Southall rail crash in 1997. That accident, caused by the driver ignoring warning signs and driving though a red signal, resulted in the deaths of seven people and 139 people injured. Similarly, information recovered from a black box aboard the Air France Flight which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, causing 228 deaths, found a combination of technical failure and mistakes made by the co-pilots on the flight were to blame for the crash. Walker likens these errors to the kind of every day mistakes made by the general public, such as pressing the wrong button on the TV remote or walking into a door that says pull instead of push. He said: ‘Psychologically these are the same things but scaled up, that cause an Air
France or a Southall crash. My research is about using data from the black box that detects in advance where these particular types of human factors problems are more likely to occur and how we can stop them. ‘For example, boring, routine journeys can be as tricky for drivers and pilots to cope with as unexpected emergencies, allowing bad habits to form and slowing down response times. Another example is automation. Is this a good thing? Sometimes it can rob drivers and pilots of the awareness they need to be able to respond to emergencies. This research means we can start to predict when these things might be more likely.’
Train operators are generating more than four times as much money for government to reinvest in rail services than 15 years ago according to a new report Growth and Prosperity published by ATOC.
By significantly growing passenger revenue while containing the costs they can control, train operators have increased the money they generate for government to reinvest from £400 million in 1997-98 to £1.7 billion in
2011-12.This money is helping to reduce public subsidies and sustain the biggest investment programme in rail in decades, says the report. At the same time, the operating margins of train companies have remained modest, most recently on average around three per cent of turnover.
The key factor driving the £3.2 billion increase in passenger revenue has been the phenomenal rise in passenger journeys — 96 per cent of the increase in revenue has come from passenger
journey growth, as opposed to four per cent from fare changes.
The data shows that, while rail prices and motoring costs have broadly mirrored each other, passenger growth in Britain has outstripped other external demand factors and other major European railways.
On a railway effectively the same size as 15 years ago, there are now 4,000 more services a day - a 20 per cent increase. In addition, 500 million more journeys a year are now rated ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’ by Passenger Focus, the independent watchdog.
Despite UK government policy since 2004 favouring above-inflation increases in season tickets, the average price paid by passengers for each mile they travel has only increased from 19.6p to 20.4p in 2012 prices over that period, because more passengers are taking advantage of discounted rail travel offered by Toc’s. Michael Roberts, chief executive of ATOC, said: ‘Unprecedented growth in
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