COLLABORATIVE WORKING
The Anglian alliance A
Abellio Greater Anglia head of corporate affairs Jonathan Denby discusses the TOC’s long-term work with Network Rail, and the new joint performance plan to get performance back on track.
bellio Greater Anglia entered into an alliance with Network Rail immediately
upon taking up its short franchise in February 2012. While not as ‘deep’ as the South West Trains
alliance, the collaboration
nevertheless has seen extensive joint working and co-location, with the headquarters of the TOC and Network Rail’s regional team based together first at East Anglia House in London and, since May 2013, at Stratford.
Abellio Greater Anglia’s head of corporate affairs Jonathan Denby told RTM: “In such a short franchise, you wouldn’t normally plan to move HQs within two and a half years! But we deliberately made that step as a way of embedding that closer working with Network Rail. Right from the start, we looked at a number of ways to work together more effectively.”
Now the two companies have entered into a joint performance action plan to raise performance standards, which slipped over the winter, investing over £1m to improve services (see box out).
That plan was signed when Greater Anglia was just four months away from the end of its franchise, though since then, on 16 April
the DfT confirmed that the TOC would stay in place for another 27 months – great news for its 3,000 employs.
Denby explained that one of the big successes of its alliance with Network Rail has been the rescheduling and redesigning of engineering works on the Great Eastern Main Line (GEML) that meant that rather than having 30 or more weekends a year disrupted, there are now only eight, with more work being done in the late evenings and at other times.
Denby said: “From a stakeholder point of view, that’s a complete transformation. However well you handle bus replacement, passengers would always far rather be on a train.
“We managed to achieve that for 2013, and are continuing that for 2014. That proactive approach has worked really well, and has been instrumental in delivering better performance over the course of the franchise.”
Performance anxiety Joint plan
Performance last spring and early summer was as good as it’s ever been on the route, since the late 1990s at least, with PPM hitting 95.7%
The key points of the Abellio Greater Anglia plan
• A contract with Direct Rail Services to provide locomotives and carriages to support service provision on its local routes and increase intercity service carriage availability up to the current franchise end date in July. • Recruiting additional maintenance staff at its Norwich Crown Point depot.
• Review of contingency plans to improve recovery times in the event of disruption and minimise the impact of any short carriage formations which do occur.
• Further modifications to West Anglia route Class 317 trains to improve door reliability.
• Work with Network Rail to secure a reduction in speed restrictions and engineering work over-runs, and to ensure a more robust operation of the freight services using the Ipswich to Felixstowe line to lessen their performance impact on the
28 | rail technology magazine Apr/May 14
Denby said the new performance plan is aimed at getting the MAA back above 92%. “After we
passenger services operating on this route.
• Additional fleet advisor working with the operations team to provide 24 hours cover to minimise the impact of any in-service faults.
• Development of further targeted investment schemes to tackle the key causes of delays and disruption.
• Work with Network Rail to improve the reliability of the cab-to-signaller communication system on the Class 315 and Class 317 trains used on services between Shenfield and London and on the West Anglia route.
• Extension of remote train monitoring systems which help track train systems and identify faults before they cause delays or more serious problems.
• Review of traincrew deployment and contingency plans to enable the quickest possible recovery from disruptive events.
in period 2 of 2013-14 (see graph).
But as Denby explained: “It was a very difficult winter, with the severe weather, storms, flooding, landslips, waterlogged equipment and so on. We’ve not had the cold and the snow, but actually the sustained stormy and wet weather has been at least as disruptive, if not more so. That’s been the case across a lot of the country, even though it’s not all been quite as high-profile or dramatic as Dawlish.
“Despite having a difficult period from late October when the storms started, our MAA (moving annual average) [91.7%] is still comfortably above where it was when the franchise started [90.9%].”
More than 200 trees were brought down in the storm on 28 October alone, while carriage availability has also been badly affected by flood damage, fatalities, wheelset damage and the consequences of cyclical heavy maintenance and refurbishment programmes.
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