TRACK TECHNOLOGY & RAIL LIVE
The future for track renewals
Network Rail’s Steve Featherstone spoke at Rail Live, and sat down with RTM afterwards, to outline the major changes taking place in track delivery.
S
teve Featherstone, Network Rail’s programme director for track, has a
10-point plan to improve delivery and cut unit costs (see box out).
He used Rail Live to go through those 10 points in detail, starting, of course, with safety and the Everyone Home Safe Every Day message, plus some key topical safety messages on ALO working (adjacent line open), cutting ballast dust levels, and a fundamental review of fatigue management.
Plant reliability is a massive issue. Featherstone raised it last year, too, in our interview with him at Rail Live’s predecessor event the National Track Plant Exhibition.
He said the old attitude of squeezing suppliers to get kit for the lowest possible price caused huge knock-on
£50 on the more reliable piece of equipment, or to service an existing piece of kit earlier than the manufacturer’s precise cut-off date, is a “bad decision” of the highest order.
He told RTM: “If you’re working in a lean process, in a tight possession, the plant has to work. Whether it’s an on-track machine, an RRV, a hand tool or small plant – it has work. We need to work with the supply chain, if we want ultra-reliable plant – what do they need to provide that? It’s about replacing all the parts that might fail, and ending up with a high- reliability machine.
“Increasingly, we’re putting reliability clauses into contracts, to favour the suppliers providing the most reliable machines. It’s blindingly obvious, but it’s taken a long time to dawn on us: it’s all about reliability.”
problems, introducing
unnecessary risks onto jobs where reliability is key. Every mobilisation of the high output team, or plain line team, costs about£250,000 a shift – jeopardising that by refusing to spend
He gave the example of the Wigan blockade last year. “AP Webb provided the plant, and it [cost] more than if we’d gone to the cheapest plant supplier: but we couldn’t afford for the plant to fail. So, six months out, we worked in partnership with the supply chain. There was no margin of failure. It had to be handed back on time. Everything that could have failed was checked or replaced. It was the most incredible campaign in terms of machine reliability, and hardly anything failed. We have to have that mindset all the time.”
Marginal gains That point about plant reliability is particularly 108 | rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 14
important when seen in conjunction with point 8 of his, innovation. Featherstone is a big fan of the concept of marginal gains, as used to great success by the British Cycling team under Sir Dave Brailsford, who is often quoted by the track team.
Featherstone said: “We currently can’t quite do 236 yards in eight hours [the length of a string of rail and the optimum length to reduce welding, wastage and save time – the current average is 180 yards a night]. But there are bits of the process where if we can just shave 10 minutes off here, and five there… the solutions we see here at Rail Live will help with those marginal gains.”
The plain line team tried a 236-yard renewal with Babcock at the end of May. The work was completed, but an RRV breakdown meant it over-ran, taking just over 10 hours instead of nine (an extra hour of contingency was already built-in).
Featherstone wrote about this experience
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