At the end of the day it’s DFT’s project. They’re the sponsor, and it’s they who have specified things like the services to be operated, the stations to be served, and of course the rolling stock. They chose to amalgamate four different service groups (all of which have been stand-alone franchises at various times) into one mega-franchise, and it’s they who selected Govia. It’s they who have failed to plan something which was able to be smoothly and seamlessly introduced, and they who have clearly totally failed to monitor progress and make a correct decision as to whether the project was in a state where it could reliably go live, and perhaps they who have failed to identify “red flags” which should surely have cropped up over the last year or two. Ultimately, and arguably, it is they who have designed, specified, tried and failed to implement something which many have seen as destined for failure, for various reasons which I won’t repeat here, but which boil down to trying to impose something on an infrastructure which isn’t capable of operating the planned service robustly. *If* some of the timetabling issues are down to Network Rail, then again that ultimately boils down to the DFT, and again whether they should have gone live when they did.
As for GTR, they come over as a sloppy operator. Things went downhill almost from the day they took over. Their employee relations seems to be dire, and most concerningly their management seems completely disconnected from reality, it’s astounding that they predicted “minimal impact” a day or two before the launch day, or that things would settle down “quickly”. Post launch their handling of the situation has again been poor, although given the scale of the shambles it’s hard to say whether another operator may have done better - but again the quality of the communications coming out from senior level has been absolutely dire, again pointing to an organisation where the top simply don’t have a grip on what’s going on under their feet. I suspect there’s a lot more to come out over time as to whether GTR did raise red flags in the period leading up to launch day, and without knowing exactly what did and didn’t happen it’s hard to judge further - this will be something which will be very interesting to hear about if and when it does come out in the wash!
