How can the railway cut operational expenditure?

[Starmill]

You can think that, but that’s not what the revenue models show, nor what happens in reality.

Indeed. I think the key thing is that, much as various people have tried to politely point out, not all prospective travellers are Bletchleyite, or have similar needs and incentives.

 

[markymark2000]

Fundamentally though, if you want to open up the economy, and society more generally, you need a good service throughout the day. I suspect that most of the railway's subsidy is spent before a wheel is even turned, therefore you might as well have a service that is useful to society. And that goes for smaller stops. In most cases, savings from not stopping will be negligible, so you might as well enable residents to use the station for a days journey.

Savings, whatever size, are savings. All savings which could be made to the railway are negligible but when combined, they create larger savings and while yes, a lot of subsidy is spent before a train gets moving, it doesn't take away from the fact that savings could be made here.
Reducing stops on a service could decrease the journey time in such a way that it reduces the overall trains needed at the time of day or could enable longer distance journey connections which currently aren't possible due to paths through a busy area. Inconvenience no one (since the stops aren't used already) but give the potential to increase connecting passengers or reduce the number of trains needed and thus save on a lot of costs). I suppose it depends if you look at the cost savings on a service by service basis or look at the whole picture.

You wouldn't keep throwing money into some services which have never and will never be successful in any other industry so why are we doing it for trains? If a service is regularly empty or only a few people use the trip, it simply shouldn't run. The exception is when it is operationally convenient and you have the staff on the train. The TSR and operationally convenience are very different though.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

There must be a reason why TOCs prefer to run larger numbers of shorter trains, as there’s plenty of operational reasons not to do it. Even Sundays have started to tend in this direction in places.



I agree it’s perverse on so many levels, but it wouldn’t be so commonplace if there wasn’t a revenue benefit.

Perhaps it's to do with the service level provision in the TOC's franchise agreement. Tends to be commercially sensitive information, but I'm presuming that a TOC will be penalised if it fails to run a particular service; less so if a train does run but it is short-formed. Franchise agreement might be for TOC to run trains of a shorter length than you might expect, albeit to a given frequency, so they might not officially be "short-formed", although they are reduced in length from what you normally expect.

If this understanding is correct, is anyone able to expand on this?

 

[yorksrob]

Savings, whatever size, are savings. All savings which could be made to the railway are negligible but when combined, they create larger savings and while yes, a lot of subsidy is spent before a train gets moving, it doesn't take away from the fact that savings could be made here.
Reducing stops on a service could decrease the journey time in such a way that it reduces the overall trains needed at the time of day or could enable longer distance journey connections which currently aren't possible due to paths through a busy area. Inconvenience no one (since the stops aren't used already) but give the potential to increase connecting passengers or reduce the number of trains needed and thus save on a lot of costs). I suppose it depends if you look at the cost savings on a service by service basis or look at the whole picture.

You wouldn't keep throwing money into some services which have never and will never be successful in any other industry so why are we doing it for trains? If a service is regularly empty or only a few people use the trip, it simply shouldn't run. The exception is when it is operationally convenient and you have the staff on the train. The TSR and operationally convenience are very different though.

Savings are savings, but you shouldn't make them if they degrade the usability of the railway. It has to be an all day railway to be of use of as many people as possible. You'd be hard put to find last or first trains that are empty anyway, because people who would otherwise be away earlier or later tend to gravitate towards them.

 

[Bletchleyite]

You wouldn't keep throwing money into some services which have never and will never be successful in any other industry so why are we doing it for trains? If a service is regularly empty or only a few people use the trip, it simply shouldn't run. The exception is when it is operationally convenient and you have the staff on the train. The TSR and operationally convenience are very different though.

Are you arguing for a Serpell style network, i.e. the IC mainlines only? As it sounds like you are.

If you're arguing that we keep subsidising but have some sort of passenger numbers criteria, you may be forgetting the principle bus companies also often forget of the "opportunity" a given train service provides even if someone doesn't use it. That is, your local service might have a train well timed to get to work at 0900, and one timed to get home at 1730, but nothing after that and a taxi would be say £30 so prohibitive. Anyone who might have to work overtime and has a car is going to drive for that journey. If however there was also an 1830, a 1930 and a 2130, say, even if those three services carried very few people on most days, the opportunity is there and so the person can use the train safe in the knowledge that if they do have to work late they can still get home.

This principle is where the German "Anruf-Sammeltaxi" ("phone-up group taxi", literally) concept comes in - a timetabled service (mostly bus, but it can be rail) is replaced with a timetabled on demand taxi at quiet times of day, which only runs if someone phones up and books it. Mostly they don't, but if they do that opportunity is there. Maybe some rural lines should look at this concept in the evenings, instead of running an empty unit back and forth.

 

[Bald Rick]

This principle is where the German "Anruf-Sammeltaxi" ("phone-up group taxi", literally) concept comes in - a timetabled service (mostly bus, but it can be rail) is replaced with a timetabled on demand taxi at quiet times of day, which only runs if someone phones up and books it. Mostly they don't, but if they do that opportunity is there. Maybe some rural lines should look at this concept in the evenings, instead of running an empty unit back and forth.

That would be by far the best option for many proposed reopening projects, but that’s for another thread...

 

[bramling]

Perhaps it's to do with the service level provision in the TOC's franchise agreement. Tends to be commercially sensitive information, but I'm presuming that a TOC will be penalised if it fails to run a particular service; less so if a train does run but it is short-formed. Franchise agreement might be for TOC to run trains of a shorter length than you might expect, albeit to a given frequency, so they might not officially be "short-formed", although they are reduced in length from what you normally expect.

If this understanding is correct, is anyone able to expand on this?

Can’t really comment on the above, however the concept goes back to BR days so it isn’t just a privatisation thing - albeit it’s one which has been heavily embraced by the TOCs.

 

[tbtc]

Seems far too much focus on the "2%" (typical TOC profits) and not enough on the other 98% - even though the TOC slice is less than one year's ticket price/staff wage increase and would be swallowed up pretty quickly - it feels a bit like the "£350m a week" gross cost of EU membership that politicians were promising to spend dozens of different alternative ways (even if you do achieve a net saving of that much, you can only spend the money once on other things, and I don't think that you're going to significantly increase passenger numbers with a 2% cut in fares (if prices were that elastic and the railway had sufficient capacity to accommodate the increased passenger numbers then I think that one of the various TOCs might have twigged on).

Tricky to have this kind of debate - it's generally a lot easier to focus people's attentions on small sums of money than large ones - we're all scandalised when an MP spends money on a taxi ride round the corner or "duck island" but seem to have no concepts of huge sums of money like deficits (so they can spend billions without us noticing, but we are up in arms if they dare claim fifty pence for a mars bar!).

In railway terms, we get outraged about the cost of repainting station benches every seven years to accommodate the change of TOC name but nobody questions *why* it costs over a million quid per carriage on each new train (feel free to correct me with the correct figure, but I've seen £900,000,000 quoted for the seven hundred and fifty 701 carriages being built - given the relatively sparse nature of the carriages and the potential for economies of scale for that size of order, it seems quite a lot of money per carriage to an outsider like me).

I'd be interested to know what gets spent on the various delay/repay schemes annually - that seems quite costly (when you add up all of the hotels/ taxis etc, not just the money refunded) - does anyone have a figure?

 

[Starmill]

even though the TOC slice is less than one year's ticket price/staff wage increase and would be swallowed up pretty quickly

I agree with your point - it's hard to imagine there won't be a pay freeze proposed though for 2021-22?

In railway terms, we get outraged about the cost of repainting station benches every seven years to accommodate the change of TOC name but nobody questions *why* it costs over a million quid per carriage on each new train (feel free to correct me with the correct figure, but I've seen £900,000,000 quoted for the seven hundred and fifty 701 carriages being built - given the relatively sparse nature of the carriages and the potential for economies of scale for that size of order, it seems quite a lot of money per carriage to an outsider like me).

My understanding is that the range is £1-2m, and that £1m or a little under per vehicle is considered good value for money.

 

[yorksrob]

Seems far too much focus on the "2%" (typical TOC profits) and not enough on the other 98% - even though the TOC slice is less than one year's ticket price/staff wage increase and would be swallowed up pretty quickly - it feels a bit like the "£350m a week" gross cost of EU membership that politicians were promising to spend dozens of different alternative ways (even if you do achieve a net saving of that much, you can only spend the money once on other things, and I don't think that you're going to significantly increase passenger numbers with a 2% cut in fares (if prices were that elastic and the railway had sufficient capacity to accommodate the increased passenger numbers then I think that one of the various TOCs might have twigged on).

Tricky to have this kind of debate - it's generally a lot easier to focus people's attentions on small sums of money than large ones - we're all scandalised when an MP spends money on a taxi ride round the corner or "duck island" but seem to have no concepts of huge sums of money like deficits (so they can spend billions without us noticing, but we are up in arms if they dare claim fifty pence for a mars bar!).

In railway terms, we get outraged about the cost of repainting station benches every seven years to accommodate the change of TOC name but nobody questions *why* it costs over a million quid per carriage on each new train (feel free to correct me with the correct figure, but I've seen £900,000,000 quoted for the seven hundred and fifty 701 carriages being built - given the relatively sparse nature of the carriages and the potential for economies of scale for that size of order, it seems quite a lot of money per carriage to an outsider like me).

I'd be interested to know what gets spent on the various delay/repay schemes annually - that seems quite costly (when you add up all of the hotels/ taxis etc, not just the money refunded) - does anyone have a figure?

It's an interesting example quoted about the million for a train carriage. I've often thought that having a couple of workshops knocking out carriages all the time would bring down costs, but competition laws probably wouldn't allow it !

 

[HSTEd]

It's an interesting example quoted about the million for a train carriage. I've often thought that having a couple of workshops knocking out carriages all the time would bring down costs, but competition laws probably wouldn't allow it !

I'm afraid this is the inherent problem with the modern railway.

The Mark 1, Mark 2 and Mark 3 all existed for a reason.
Sprinterisation happened for a reason.

The standardisation of control schemes across essentially all late BR EMUs happened for a reason.


Pretending that a zoo of incompatible trains is a good idea is not helping anyone.

 

[yorksrob]

I'm afraid this is the inherent problem with the modern railway.

The Mark 1, Mark 2 and Mark 3 all existed for a reason.
Sprinterisation happened for a reason.

The standardisation of control schemes across essentially all late BR EMUs happened for a reason.


Pretending that a zoo of incompatible trains is a good idea is not helping anyone.

Well, you could even say that "markets" don't suit everything, but try telling the last thirty years !

 

[JonathanH]

I agree with your point - it's hard to imagine there won't be a pay freeze proposed though for 2021-22?

In a lot of cases, long term pay agreements will probably prevent pay freezes in the short term.

It is a fact that 'inflationary' pay increases in some parts of the economy have exceeded those in other parts over the last fifteen years - but on the other hand 'merit' increases are harder to come by in jobs where many people do the same thing and there isn't individual year-on-year progression - and perhaps it is just a case of how the pay review budget works and is spread.

 

[squizzler]

I'm afraid this is the inherent problem with the modern railway.

The Mark 1, Mark 2 and Mark 3 all existed for a reason.
Sprinterisation happened for a reason.

The standardisation of control schemes across essentially all late BR EMUs happened for a reason.


Pretending that a zoo of incompatible trains is a good idea is not helping anyone.

How much did these trains you refer to cost in today's money?

In railway terms, we get outraged about the cost of repainting station benches every seven years to accommodate the change of TOC name but nobody questions *why* it costs over a million quid per carriage on each new train (feel free to correct me with the correct figure, but I've seen £900,000,000 quoted for the seven hundred and fifty 701 carriages being built - given the relatively sparse nature of the carriages and the potential for economies of scale for that size of order, it seems quite a lot of money per carriage to an outsider like me).

My favourite transport blog suggests that USA commuter trains were costing about $100k/m but have inflated recently. That would mean two million bucks for a 20m EMU car, convert to pounds that would be £1.6million, so £900,000 is actually a bargain.

Returning to @HSTEd's post, the days of big nationally owned railway works taking in wagons of raw materials at one end and extruding passenger cars from the other by the hundreds is over - even Indian Railways is moving away from that.

 

[PupCuff]

The delay attribution system has always struck me as an example of a part of the industry which doesn't pull its weight for the cost of maintaining it. Each rail business paying people (whether it's part of their job or their whole job) to investigate delays of sometimes quite literally single figure minutes. Arguments (sorry, negotiation) of whether the bird the train hit was a duck or a goose to ascertain whether Network Rail pay or the train operator pays. For the most part the money involved just goes around like playing chips on a poker table.

It could be argued that charging businesses for delays encourages them to reduce the chance of that occurrence happening in the first place. In reality it doesn't, it just leads to someone else being paid to make a decision as to whether putting right the problem causing the delay will cost more than just accepting the cost of the delay. It can also end up being weaponised - conductors fed up with drunks giving them aggro on a Saturday night deciding that if they all just sit down in the middle of nowhere awaiting BTP eventually someone at head office might realise that actually, the antisocial behavious/assaults problem on the Smalltown Parkway line is costing us quite a bit of money, we'd better do something about it. Plus, it can also end up with Control rooms feeling under pressure to cut corners (eg trying to get conductors to work forward with passengers onboard who need ambulances, or where they've been assaulted and need police assistance, etc etc) so as to reduce the delay minutes.

In my view a better system would be to still record delays (which can be done through the existing TRUST system) and just have a small team of analysts within Network Rail reviewing delay statistics on a wider level to establish areas where the timetable is a work of fiction on par with that of Shakespeare, and individual operators who are performing better or worse, that kind of thing. Mandate operators to hold major incident reviews/'lessons learned' exercises following occasions where they have incurred a delay over a certain threshold, which can also cover how they dealt with the customers (eg did we leave them on the train for 4 hours with no water) and whether policies on PIDD, rescue trains, replacement road transport etc were followed.

 

[HSTEd]

Returning to @HSTEd's post, the days of big nationally owned railway works taking in wagons of raw materials at one end and extruding passenger cars from the other by the hundreds is over - even Indian Railways is moving away from that.

Standardising control components does not require this model.
The obvious example being the Networkers which conform to essentially the same control specification.

Or the AAR, which has managed to standardise locomotives built by vast numbers of builders over decades.

Also the newest top-link semi high speed express trainsets on Indian Railways are still built... by Indian railways?
Supposedly the Railway owned carriage works is growing.....

 

[yorksrob]

How much did these trains you refer to cost in today's money?


My favourite transport blog suggests that USA commuter trains were costing about $100k/m but have inflated recently. That would mean two million bucks for a 20m EMU car, convert to pounds that would be £1.6million, so £900,000 is actually a bargain.

Returning to @HSTEd's post, the days of big nationally owned railway works taking in wagons of raw materials at one end and extruding passenger cars from the other by the hundreds is over - even Indian Railways is moving away from that.

And who does Indian railways buy their carriages from ?

 

[markymark2000]

Are you arguing for a Serpell style network, i.e. the IC mainlines only? As it sounds like you are.

If you're arguing that we keep subsidising but have some sort of passenger numbers criteria, you may be forgetting the principle bus companies also often forget of the "opportunity" a given train service provides even if someone doesn't use it. That is, your local service might have a train well timed to get to work at 0900, and one timed to get home at 1730, but nothing after that and a taxi would be say £30 so prohibitive. Anyone who might have to work overtime and has a car is going to drive for that journey. If however there was also an 1830, a 1930 and a 2130, say, even if those three services carried very few people on most days, the opportunity is there and so the person can use the train safe in the knowledge that if they do have to work late they can still get home.

This principle is where the German "Anruf-Sammeltaxi" ("phone-up group taxi", literally) concept comes in - a timetabled service (mostly bus, but it can be rail) is replaced with a timetabled on demand taxi at quiet times of day, which only runs if someone phones up and books it. Mostly they don't, but if they do that opportunity is there. Maybe some rural lines should look at this concept in the evenings, instead of running an empty unit back and forth.

No, I'm not.

For a local example for me, the Northern Mid Cheshire Line stopper can have a few stops which are rarely used in the evening. By dropping these few stops, it will have cost savings. I am not saying only serve major stops but if Lostock and Delamere (for example) have low use post 9pm, drop them as stops. The argument why many useless evening stops are kept is simply 'the train runs anyway, why not make it stop. Clearly that doesn't help the fuel bill though. The Mid Cheshire Line in the evening has the train sit in Chester for 50 minutes. If you can take some time off by non stopping a few stops each way, that would then save a unit being sat around.
Merseyrail is a good example as you can see the time difference when they run non stop. Skipping 1 stop on the Southport to Hunts Cross service would save 1 diagram. That is a huge saving as a result of dropping 1 stop.

As I have kept saying, If the stop is used, I have zero issues. When trains stop though and the doors are open less than 5 seconds because no one ever boards or alights, it's very annoying for the passengers, it's a waste of diesel/electricity and in some cases 1 stop adds enough time that additional diagrams are used.

Savings are savings, but you shouldn't make them if they degrade the usability of the railway. It has to be an all day railway to be of use of as many people as possible. You'd be hard put to find last or first trains that are empty anyway, because people who would otherwise be away earlier or later tend to gravitate towards them.

If no one is using the service or stops though, it makes the railway less usable. The increased cost of the service or it could make connections not possible. If dropping 1 disused stop can increase the usability for 10 people per night, it is surely worth doing. No one suffers but 10 people get the chance to make their connection to whatever form of transport they are using next. Sometimes upsetting a few people can have much wider benefits for existing passengers or enable new passengers to travel instead (potentially pay more since some people drive further to major stations because the connections don't work in the evening to get them home)

 

[Dr Hoo]

The delay attribution system has always struck me as an example of a part of the industry which doesn't pull its weight for the cost of maintaining it. Each rail business paying people (whether it's part of their job or their whole job) to investigate delays of sometimes quite literally single figure minutes. Arguments (sorry, negotiation) of whether the bird the train hit was a duck or a goose to ascertain whether Network Rail pay or the train operator pays. For the most part the money involved just goes around like playing chips on a poker table.

It could be argued that charging businesses for delays encourages them to reduce the chance of that occurrence happening in the first place. In reality it doesn't, it just leads to someone else being paid to make a decision as to whether putting right the problem causing the delay will cost more than just accepting the cost of the delay. It can also end up being weaponised - conductors fed up with drunks giving them aggro on a Saturday night deciding that if they all just sit down in the middle of nowhere awaiting BTP eventually someone at head office might realise that actually, the antisocial behavious/assaults problem on the Smalltown Parkway line is costing us quite a bit of money, we'd better do something about it. Plus, it can also end up with Control rooms feeling under pressure to cut corners (eg trying to get conductors to work forward with passengers onboard who need ambulances, or where they've been assaulted and need police assistance, etc etc) so as to reduce the delay minutes.

In my view a better system would be to still record delays (which can be done through the existing TRUST system) and just have a small team of analysts within Network Rail reviewing delay statistics on a wider level to establish areas where the timetable is a work of fiction on par with that of Shakespeare, and individual operators who are performing better or worse, that kind of thing. Mandate operators to hold major incident reviews/'lessons learned' exercises following occasions where they have incurred a delay over a certain threshold, which can also cover how they dealt with the customers (eg did we leave them on the train for 4 hours with no water) and whether policies on PIDD, rescue trains, replacement road transport etc were followed.

Just remember that Delay Attribution started under BR. I have posted before that IMHO it was the last great 'corporate' (i.e. non-sectoral) achievement. Having spent many years 'managing' BR performance under the patchy old control log+train register+guards' reports, days in arrears, I can assure everyone that there is no substitute for nailing the cause down as quickly as possible, preferably 'on shift'.

Strangely enough the famous 'large bird' events form a microscopically small proportion of the total delay pot.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Strangely enough the famous 'large bird' events form a microscopically small proportion of the total delay pot.

Is there any publicly available analysis of the major reasons for delays on the railway?

 

[squizzler]

Standardising control components does not require this model.
The obvious example being the Networkers which conform to essentially the same control specification.

Or the AAR, which has managed to standardise locomotives built by vast numbers of builders over decades.

My bad, I misread to get the impression you were saying we needed to build coaches in discrete tranches (mk1, 2, 3 etc), but talking of interoperability I agree fully.

And who does Indian railways buy their carriages from ?

As @HSTEd also mentioned, they traditionally always tried to produce in house. They presumably achieve very good unit costs but the factory is geared for one product, and thus unable to keep up with technology. They only stopped producing 1950s era ICF (Integral Coach Factory) ones in 2018! They now use a newer (by which I mean 1990s design) LHB type. But I understand that IR are keen to get outside firms to produce locally and they even let Talgo bring one of their sets over for a play.

Anyway, this is already off topic as it is meant to be operational rather than capital costs.

 

[yorksrob]

						My bad, I misread to get the impression you were saying we needed to build coaches in discrete tranches (mk1, 2, 3 etc), but talking of interoperability I agree fully. As @HSTEd also mentioned, they traditionally always tried to produce in house. They presumably achieve very good unit costs but the factory is geared for one product, and thus unable to keep up with technology. They only stopped producing 1950s era ICF (Integral Coach Factory) ones in 2018! They now use a newer (by which I mean 1990s design) LHB type. But I understand that IR are keen to get outside firms to produce locally and they even let Talgo bring one of their sets over for a play. Anyway, this is already off topic as it is meant to be operational rather than capital costs. Well, I could say if only we'd continued to build comfy trains with slam doors and bouncy cushions and we'd be fine ! But on a more serious note, isn't that a choice by India not to have a 'Derby' to drive forward development ? Just because you have a single system doesn't mean you can't have rolling stock development !

 

[Islineclear3_1]

Given that leasing costs are the biggest expenditure, what is the average length of time a lease runs for and how much are the interest payments? I understand this may vary by ROSCO/operator

 

[PupCuff]

Just remember that Delay Attribution started under BR. I have posted before that IMHO it was the last great 'corporate' (i.e. non-sectoral) achievement. Having spent many years 'managing' BR performance under the patchy old control log+train register+guards' reports, days in arrears, I can assure everyone that there is no substitute for nailing the cause down as quickly as possible, preferably 'on shift'.

Strangely enough the famous 'large bird' events form a microscopically small proportion of the total delay pot.

I'm afraid I fear you are looking at this through rose tinted glasses. Just as control logs, train registers, guards reports etc were outdated when the concept of delay attribution was brought in, the concept of delay attribution is now itself becoming outdated in the world of privatisation and some system which puts the onus on managing performance on an individual business level versus an industry level in my view would be the way forward. We aren't the railway we were in the 1980s, priorities are changing, and the focus of the industry needs to be the experience of the end customer, not internal squabbling over whether Alpha Trains delayed Speedy Trains by 3 minutes in the hope of gaining additional business revenue from delay payouts. The way it works now, if you're an operator beset by poor Network Rail service on a given line, there is no incentive to work with NR to improve as you are getting a nice tidy lump of money off them for the privilege of being delayed.

Large bird incidents are quite obviously an extreme example for emphasis, but the general point can apply to any cause of delay.

If the cost of several parties investigating, disputing etc, then analysing, then planning and effecting a solution to stop the delay recurring is lower than the cost of either leaving the delay be or introducing a different system to manage performance then it is successful. Unfortunately, in many cases currently that just isn't the case.

 

[Bald Rick]

The delay attribution system has always struck me as an example of a part of the industry which doesn't pull its weight for the cost of maintaining it. Each rail business paying people (whether it's part of their job or their whole job) to investigate delays of sometimes quite literally single figure minutes. Arguments (sorry, negotiation) of whether the bird the train hit was a duck or a goose to ascertain whether Network Rail pay or the train operator pays. For the most part the money involved just goes around like playing chips on a poker table.

It could be argued that charging businesses for delays encourages them to reduce the chance of that occurrence happening in the first place. In reality it doesn't, it just leads to someone else being paid to make a decision as to whether putting right the problem causing the delay will cost more than just accepting the cost of the delay. It can also end up being weaponised - conductors fed up with drunks giving them aggro on a Saturday night deciding that if they all just sit down in the middle of nowhere awaiting BTP eventually someone at head office might realise that actually, the antisocial behavious/assaults problem on the Smalltown Parkway line is costing us quite a bit of money, we'd better do something about it. Plus, it can also end up with Control rooms feeling under pressure to cut corners (eg trying to get conductors to work forward with passengers onboard who need ambulances, or where they've been assaulted and need police assistance, etc etc) so as to reduce the delay minutes.

In my view a better system would be to still record delays (which can be done through the existing TRUST system) and just have a small team of analysts within Network Rail reviewing delay statistics on a wider level to establish areas where the timetable is a work of fiction on par with that of Shakespeare, and individual operators who are performing better or worse, that kind of thing. Mandate operators to hold major incident reviews/'lessons learned' exercises following occasions where they have incurred a delay over a certain threshold, which can also cover how they dealt with the customers (eg did we leave them on the train for 4 hours with no water) and whether policies on PIDD, rescue trains, replacement road transport etc were followed.

I’m afraid this is a common railway myth. The number of people who ‘argue’ about delays is actually relatively small. In the whole of Network Rail it is a handful of people full time, with perhaps another 20 or so who have it as a very small part of their job.

Whereas the number of people who investigate and attribute delays is in the hundreds full time.

If schedule 8 (the financial component of delays) was abandoned, the number of jobs saved would be close to zero. Unless, of course, it was then also decided not to attribute any delays where there was any doubt about cause.

 

[PupCuff]

I’m afraid this is a common railway myth. The number of people who ‘argue’ about delays is actually relatively small. In the whole of Network Rail it is a handful of people full time, with perhaps another 20 or so who have it as a very small part of their job.

Whereas the number of people who investigate and attribute delays is in the hundreds full time.

If schedule 8 (the financial component of delays) was abandoned, the number of jobs saved would be close to zero. Unless, of course, it was then also decided not to attribute any delays where there was any doubt about cause.

It isn't a myth I'm afraid. Indeed, the majority of people who I hear calling it a myth are those who either have a vested interest (ie, wouldn't have a job) if it were to be abolished, or have heard it from someone who has.

If we assume by your figures that there are several hundred people in Network Rail investigating and attributing delays (which surprises even me, really that many?), all on, say, an average wage, £28k or so, there's around a £10m annual saving to be made there, which doesn't include the savings that train operators could make, or reinvest into more bespoke performance management. Plus the savings that can be made by not 'paying out' for delays. I don't claim my opinions are popular, but the question posed in the OP was "how can the railway cut operational expenditure" and I have already saved £10m, (okay, minus the £200,000 or so you'd need to employ analysts in my solution) from Network Rail alone.

In 2020 if you said to someone, we need to have a system to improve on-time performance on the railways, you certainly wouldn't be introducing something which relied on several hundred people at Network Rail working full time, spending that time trying to resolve disputes over a four minute delay which is probably going to come back that the fault lay with... Network Rail.

 

[The Planner]

Are you suggesting that delay attribution is removed entirely? If so, where are the analysts (which already exist and are doing what you suggest they do) getting their data from within TRUST if it isn't attributed to a cause?

 

[Bald Rick]

It isn't a myth I'm afraid. Indeed, the majority of people who I hear calling it a myth are those who either have a vested interest (ie, wouldn't have a job) if it were to be abolished, or have heard it from someone who has.

We must disagree. It is a myth. I have not been involved in this sort of work for a couple of decades, but know many people who still are so know it well. From what you have written, I can only conclude that you don’t know people involved nor how the system works.

The majority of people involved in delay attribution work shifts in control or Signalling centres. They attribute delays - they don’t do the ‘arguing’. That is done in part by the Level 2 guys, and there’s not many of them. Even then, only a fraction of their time is spent ‘arguing’; most of it is spent reviewing incidents that are not clear cut for which advice has been requested, and auditing attribution data and things like berth offsets etc. The arguing is mostly done at Level 3 (the handful of people I mentioned), and beyond that by the big boys and girls getting contractual, which comprises, at a guess, perhaps half of one percent of their time.

 

[tbtc]

No, I'm not.

For a local example for me, the Northern Mid Cheshire Line stopper can have a few stops which are rarely used in the evening. By dropping these few stops, it will have cost savings. I am not saying only serve major stops but if Lostock and Delamere (for example) have low use post 9pm, drop them as stops. The argument why many useless evening stops are kept is simply 'the train runs anyway, why not make it stop. Clearly that doesn't help the fuel bill though. The Mid Cheshire Line in the evening has the train sit in Chester for 50 minutes. If you can take some time off by non stopping a few stops each way, that would then save a unit being sat around.
Merseyrail is a good example as you can see the time difference when they run non stop. Skipping 1 stop on the Southport to Hunts Cross service would save 1 diagram. That is a huge saving as a result of dropping 1 stop.

As I have kept saying, If the stop is used, I have zero issues. When trains stop though and the doors are open less than 5 seconds because no one ever boards or alights, it's very annoying for the passengers, it's a waste of diesel/electricity and in some cases 1 stop adds enough time that additional diagrams are used.



If no one is using the service or stops though, it makes the railway less usable. The increased cost of the service or it could make connections not possible. If dropping 1 disused stop can increase the usability for 10 people per night, it is surely worth doing. No one suffers but 10 people get the chance to make their connection to whatever form of transport they are using next. Sometimes upsetting a few people can have much wider benefits for existing passengers or enable new passengers to travel instead (potentially pay more since some people drive further to major stations because the connections don't work in the evening to get them home)

Interesting points.

Based on the kind of figures quoted earlier in the thread, a new train might cost say five million pounds (based on the cost of a few individual carriages)... spread that over the lifetime of a train and you're talking maybe a couple of hundred thousand pounds a year just on the cost of the purchase price amortised over its expected lifetime (ignoring staffing costs, ignoring the cost of leasing it from the ROSCO etc)... so shaving just one unit off requirements could "save" the railway a lot more than the cost of some of the minor things that we get into a tizzy about.

If most "Provincial" timetables were based on actual demand, rather than being lumbered with the level of service inherited from British Rail and copied/pasted into every subsequent franchise arrangement, then we might have a bit more flexibility over things like Delamere Forest.

Edale is somewhere relatively near me that gets a fairly similar service all day/week - but is significantly busier during summer weekends as its the start/end of the Pennine Way. But the railway doesn't have the flexibility/freedom to say let's skip Edale on more services during the week/ winter but have more services stopping there at the weekend/summer instead. So lines are stuck with an inflexible service pattern, there's no incentive to try to cut your cloth to match demand, we end up offering the passengers a "One Size Fits All" offering that gets overcrowded at some times but is fairly empty at others. Frustrating.

Just remember that Delay Attribution started under BR. I have posted before that IMHO it was the last great 'corporate' (i.e. non-sectoral) achievement. Having spent many years 'managing' BR performance under the patchy old control log+train register+guards' reports, days in arrears, I can assure everyone that there is no substitute for nailing the cause down as quickly as possible, preferably 'on shift'.

Strangely enough the famous 'large bird' events form a microscopically small proportion of the total delay pot.

I'm afraid I fear you are looking at this through rose tinted glasses. Just as control logs, train registers, guards reports etc were outdated when the concept of delay attribution was brought in, the concept of delay attribution is now itself becoming outdated in the world of privatisation and some system which puts the onus on managing performance on an individual business level versus an industry level in my view would be the way forward. We aren't the railway we were in the 1980s, priorities are changing, and the focus of the industry needs to be the experience of the end customer, not internal squabbling over whether Alpha Trains delayed Speedy Trains by 3 minutes in the hope of gaining additional business revenue from delay payouts. The way it works now, if you're an operator beset by poor Network Rail service on a given line, there is no incentive to work with NR to improve as you are getting a nice tidy lump of money off them for the privilege of being delayed

Re the above two posts, my understanding is that if you are blaming Network Rail for a million quid's worth of delays (caused by their infrastructure) then that's an incentive for them to try and deal with the root cause of the problem - e.g. if it'd cost five million pounds to improve the power supply in an area where the TOC is getting a million pounds a year off Network Rail then someone has to make a decision over whether that's enough to warrant taking action.

Any large organisation would have different cost codes/ cost centres etc - given the money sloshing around the railway (ten BILLION quid a year from passengers, plus all of the support from various levels of Government), I think that we need to assess where the problems are so that we can fix issues - anyone who's ensured Cross Country will know that one minor problem can have severe knock on problems hundreds of miles away.

I suppose that one problem with all of this is that the inflexible nature of the railway means that, even if you identify a conflicting move that causes reliability issues, it might be very hard to amend things. e.g. if Stagecoach find that their bus route needs to be stretched by a couple of minutes at certain times of the week (whether that's rush hour or passing a busy shopping centre at weekends or whatever) then they can have a new timetable in operation six weeks later. But if you discover that a North Berwick - Edinburgh service crosses onto the ECML at Drem and therefore "checks" a southbound Cross Country service (which regularly accrues delays down the ECML and beyond, all the way to Plymouth) then that might take several months before a revised timetable can be implemented.

Look at it the other way round; if you didn't have people assessing where the problems lay then how would you assess where the root cause of problems actually lay (and start fixing things)?

 

[PupCuff]

Are you suggesting that delay attribution is removed entirely? If so, where are the analysts (which already exist and are doing what you suggest they do) getting their data from within TRUST if it isn't attributed to a cause?

Yes. In the system I would rather follow, it does not need to be attributed to a cause.

I look at my systems (I know that you know how TRUST works, I'd probably suggest binning that and replacing it with something more 21st century too but even I have some sense of realism) and identify there is a trend of delays occurring at a certain time between x and y. That then allows me as the analyst to ask, why is that delay occurring disproportionately there? Is the timetable reliant on the train being booked for a DeLorean? Is there an exceptionally high passenger flow at a station causing increased dwells because it's just after all the offices kick out? Therefore, I am not wasting time trying to investigate the cause of minor delays which are statistically irrelevant and in the grand scheme of things do not matter.

A passenger falls over on the train, breaks their leg and causes a 55 minute delay waiting an ambulance. There is clearly nothing which can be gleaned from the delay attribution process in terms of reducing said delay in the future as it is a random act. However, the individual TOC can undertake a lessons learned exercise following the incident on an individual basis which can examine whether there is anything in *their* control which could have reduced the delay, such as quicker calling of 999 by the crew, link in with the safety investigation in respect of trip hazards or whatever.

Re the above two posts, my understanding is that if you are blaming Network Rail for a million quid's worth of delays (caused by their infrastructure) then that's an incentive for them to try and deal with the root cause of the problem - e.g. if it'd cost five million pounds to improve the power supply in an area where the TOC is getting a million pounds a year off Network Rail then someone has to make a decision over whether that's enough to warrant taking action.

Any large organisation would have different cost codes/ cost centres etc - given the money sloshing around the railway (ten BILLION quid a year from passengers, plus all of the support from various levels of Government), I think that we need to assess where the problems are so that we can fix issues - anyone who's ensured Cross Country will know that one minor problem can have severe knock on problems hundreds of miles away.

I suppose that one problem with all of this is that the inflexible nature of the railway means that, even if you identify a conflicting move that causes reliability issues, it might be very hard to amend things. e.g. if Stagecoach find that their bus route needs to be stretched by a couple of minutes at certain times of the week (whether that's rush hour or passing a busy shopping centre at weekends or whatever) then they can have a new timetable in operation six weeks later. But if you discover that a North Berwick - Edinburgh service crosses onto the ECML at Drem and therefore "checks" a southbound Cross Country service (which regularly accrues delays down the ECML and beyond, all the way to Plymouth) then that might take several months before a revised timetable can be implemented.

Look at it the other way round; if you didn't have people assessing where the problems lay then how would you assess where the root cause of problems actually lay (and start fixing things)?

You're of course correct, in a perfect world - but actually what happens is, let's say someone says, PC, go and look after the conductors at Smalltown Depot. I'm getting 260 minutes of delay each weekend as a result of my conductors being thumped by drunks on a Saturday night, that costs me x in delays, paying for additional policing will cost me y, telling my conductors to not delay the train will get me a dispute, so I'll just accept the 260 minutes of delay each weekend. Under the current system, there becomes incentive to sort the root cause of the problem out only if the delays cost more than the solution.

I'm all for spending some of the 'money sloshing round the railway' (we have been banned from ordering stationary, make what of that you will) but it is only worth spending that money on performance improvement measures if such measures actually lead to performance improvement otherwise you are just throwing money away which could be spent on additional customer facilities, safety improvements, god forbid, reduce ticket prices (call me cynical, but it will never happen).

I think from your last paragraph, you have misunderstood my proposed replacement. I propose having people assess where the problems lie, however on a broader scale. Using your example, my systems would flag up to me that there is a trend of delays being incurred and then I would use that information to ascertain the cause. Therefore instead of having spent my day ringing signalboxes to find out why 100 trains lost however many minutes, I can focus on the big issues which cause the most delays.



It's all quite a moot point, the railway is resistant to change and whilst the current system still works it's unlikely to change. For what it's worth, I'm actually a proponent of 'big data' use within the industry. If we have the data (eg delay root causes in TRUST) we should use it better. We have so many systems, but they all run independently of each other. Imagine a railway where you can bring up Speedy Trains' 1B09 and be able to identify performance, revenue, passenger numbers, safety incidents, defective equipment, customer experience trends, catering sales data where there's a Cafe Bar, whatever else we keep, all from one dashboard - when we look at everything together, how much is that train making us or costing us and how can we make it more profitable?

Case study: A station manager receives feedback from staff telling her that there is a fare evasion problem at the station. In deciding whether there is a need for extra revenue support she could look at such a system and the dashboard for Anytown Central would show them how many delay minutes have occurred on trains around said station due to ticket irregularities from TRUST, the proportion of revenue gained off the flow vs passenger numbers recorded to identify areas where fare evasion may be endemic from revenue MI systems and TOC records, staff assaults on station staff and conductors due to revenue protection issues from SMIS, customer feedback from whatever CRM systems get used. I've no doubt other systems are used to hold data too.