FUTURE OF RAIL
safety as our number one priority,” he said. “What are the lessons we can learn?”
Devolution has been key to allowing regions to operate in different ways, and has “fundamentally changed the way we integrate with our supply chain”, he explained. But the focus also needs to be on reliability, with millions invested to increase capacity and continue to improve punctuality. Butcher said: “Punctuality has improved; more people are arriving on time. Reliability is still a positive story, but not where we want it to be.”
Huge demand from both passengers and freight can add “tension” to the viability of improving reliability, he suggested. “Forecasts suggest another 400 million journeys by 2014, which is a huge increase on top of the increases we have already seen.”
Engaging earlier
There is a target to cut disruption from engineering work by around 8% for passengers and 17% for freight users, and a call for “smarter and better ways of doing things” to continue to be found. This includes doing more work off-site, before blocks of engineering, minimise disruption, Butcher said.
to
“We’re trying to engage earlier with the supply chain;
structured contracts that encourage
innovation. We might seem like we think we know everything. We don’t.”
He added that it was vital to “tap into the vast expertise that exists in the supply chain, particularly as we look away from some of the more traditional contracts”.
Different forms of contractual arrangements, such as project alliances with suppliers and framework agreements will start to see risk and reward shared in a more balanced way, to incentivise better planning and improved outcomes (more on p46-49).
Spend wisely
On effi ciency, Butcher said that while serious consideration is still needed, the fi ndings of the McNulty report in May 2011 will no longer be relevant by the end of CP5 because of the action the industry is taking.
“We need to make sure we’re spending our money wisely. We’ve reduced costs by about 18% in CP4; not as much as we expected, but that’s partly because we’ve re-invested back into increasing maintenance in response to the increased demand and volume of trains.”
But he added: “This idea that the British railway is hopelessly ineffi cient is just wrong.
Malcolm Brown, CEO of Angel Trains, and a member of the national passenger rolling stock strategy steering group, discussed growth forecasts and how rising demand must be met.
The group is working to set a long-term strategy for rolling stock in the UK for the next 30 years, something Brown said “we are desperately trying to drive the industry towards”.
He said it was vital to set a clear strategic direction for the future, with a need to “avoid tinkering with the old railway and generally just mucking around trying to put trains in different places”.
The electrifi cation programme is “a big driver”, he added, with the model assuming that after infrastructure work to facilitate electrifi cation, TOCs were not going to want to have diesel trains running in wired areas.
This does not assume fl eets will be exclusively made up of electric vehicles – but diesel trains will defi nitely be the minority.
Continued overleaf > rail technology magazine Dec/Jan 14 | 41
We’ve been looking across railways in Europe and what we’ve seen there is people who have made their railways look cost-effective by not doing any work. We need to keep investing in the core infrastructure. Even by the regulator’s measure, we will compare favourably – I’ve never heard the regulator say that, and so for me that means we compare excellently.”
There will always be opportunities for a large company to be more effi cient, he pointed out, but warned that the “big gains post-Railtrack are just not there any more. We’ve done the easy wins, it’s now harder.”
‘Risk-sharing nightmare’
The fi rst panel – including Holland, Butcher, and former chairman of Eurostar Richard Brown – discussed franchising and capacity.
Brown supported longer franchises with break clauses, while Holland warned that risk-sharing in longer franchises at the moment is going to be “a nightmare”.
Debate chair, rail commentator Christian
Wolmar, asked Butcher why Network Rail hasn’t already implemented the measures it is promising now.
He replied that there have been changes, but Victorian infrastructure and a historic lack of investment has meant that delivering that change will take time.
Other questions considered the capacity in the industry for culture change, how fast new technology should be introduced,
whether
open access is a good or bad thing for taxpayers, and Network Rail’s underspend, highlighted in the ORR’s recent report.
That money will still be spent, Butcher said, but in the next control period instead. It “won’t affect performance”, he added.
National passenger rolling stock strategy Phenomenal growth
Brown said: “Passenger growth in the UK is going up staggeringly. We have a phenomenal rate of growth; we’ve practically doubled passenger kilometres in the UK. But the national fl eet has only grown by about 11%. If you compare those two numbers you can see we’ve been squeezing an awful lot more onto our asset base.
“It’s been one of the major successes of privatisation and we can see it continuing to grow.”
The group’s models consider passenger growth, the impact of electrifi cation and major infrastructure works, as well as big- ticket projects like Crossrail, the IEP and HS2. Forecasts for rolling stock demand include fl eet retirements, particularly as diesel trains become more and more obsolete.
Predictions are continually refreshed, checked and linked with new data and strategy from
“Electrifi cation is going to be massively under- exploited unless we come up with electric trains.”
– Malcolm Brown
Network Rail, train manufacturers and TOCs. Demand is split into low, medium and high intensity streams, and the group is working to make forecasts more route-specifi c. That way, if franchises or even the franchising model changes, the information should still hold.
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