TRACK & WORK SITE TECHNOLOGY
Bringing contracts back in-house
The ‘Metro: all change’ programme in Tyne and Wear is entering its fourth year – with attention on the £389m scheme shifting from disruptive track works to behind-the-scenes improvements, while the rolling stock refurb hits its halfway mark. RTM spoke to Nexus director of rail infrastructure Raymond Johnstone.
A
fter years of major track and station works to modernise the Tyne & Wear
Metro, with major weekday disruption as a consequence, this year the focus is more on the communications and safety systems.
But there are changes in the ways that passenger transport executive Nexus is delivering the work, too, with a bigger emphasis now on in- house delivery and less on external contracts.
Raymond Johnstone, Nexus’s rail infrastructure director, explained that some previous contracts were “just unaffordable”, hence its decision to internalise much of its signalling and fibre-optic cable renewal work around the network 18 months ago. Financially, that has proved a smart way to go.
Johnstone explained: “Just over a year ago we 66 | rail technology magazine Feb/Mar 14
set up our in-house Capital Delivery Team, about 60 posts, and that’s been a real success story. We looked at the market rates we’d got from the previous frameworks and compared that to an in-house facility. We produced a business case which concluded that if we continued to go externally to the marketplace, it was going to cost us about £24m. If we internalised it was likely to cost about £16m.
“We’ve since refined that, and got a bit more sophisticated, and our latest forecast is that work is likely to outturn around £11m – even lower than we first predicted. That’s because we’ve got smarter as we’ve gone on.
“Evidently we won’t be able to do that in every single asset category: there are some capabilities which we will just never possess in Nexus, and we are the first to recognise that,
©Matt Thorpe
©Phil Thirkell
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