by George Muir, ATOC Director General
December 2004

There is a distinct feeling in the air of an industry beginning to get to grips with things – “about time”, you may rightly say – and a good deal of credit goes to the supply industry. Of course the Rail Review and White Paper is changing the Governance of the industry, but the improvements on the ground are the result of the hard work of the last few years. It is frustrating to endure the enormous time taken to implement any initiative on the railway, but if people plug away, the work does come to fruition, and the effect is cumulative.

There are three things I like in the rail review. Firstly, I really like the recognition of the positive role of the train operators, recognition that they are, in effect, the champions of the passenger within the industry.

Secondly, I like train planning moving into the industry. I think joining planning (such as Route Utilisation Strategies) and implementation closer together can produce better outcomes, and lower costs. The opposite, planning carried out in an organisation, the SRA, separate to the delivery organisations, Network Rail and the train operators, is cumbersome and makes trade-offs and cost saving measures more difficult. Network Rail is to lead the planning process, but the train operators — freight and passenger — must be very closely involved at every stage.

Thirdly, I like the “come back line manager” message, which I detect in the White Paper. Advisers, inspectors, rules, standards, KPIs are all very well, and all have their place, but you can’t beat a good professional line manager going about their normal business – making things work.

The supply industry has very good line managers, and we have seen clear improvements in the reliability of systems and components recently. Good line managers want to see good supply chain processes.

We also rely on strong partnerships with our suppliers. A good example of how we’re doing this as an industry is the ARTTT (ATOC-RIA Transforming Trains Together) a major initiative on supplier development that we, together with the Railway Industry Association, launched in September 2003, and is now beginning to deliver real results. Its aims are to improve component (and train) reliability and reduce costs.

We work with our suppliers to deliver specific projects and develop long term constructive relationships. We focus on solving specific cross-industry problems engineer to engineer. As part of ARTTT, we have devised a cross-industry procedure to enable us all to make beneficial engineering changes more efficiently and also developed a web-based application to track critical equipment life cycles – train operators can view components all down the supply chain to the over hauler and vice versa. We all learn lessons from analysing trends and sharing best practice.

ATOC is also pleased that Network Rail will strengthen its customer focus by appointing someone put forward by the passenger and freight operators.

For train operators themselves, the review will has seen a small change in the franchise map, with the number of franchises over coming down to 19. It is hard to overlook the quality of the small franchises, but as important is progress with re-franchising. There have already been some good signs in this regard – at the time of writing, the East Coast franchise tender has just been issued and the new Northern franchise has been signed and will start in December 2004.

Over one billion passenger journeys were made in 2003, the highest number for more than forty years, and proof that train operating companies are changing rail travel for the better.

TOCs were asked to increase passenger usage of the railway and they have achieved this – with stunning success. The growth of rail travel in Britain: 45.6% in passenger kilometres in the South East, 37.8% in the Regions, and 26.7% on long-distance intercity routes did not just happen by accident. It happened because train operators saw an opportunity to attract passengers, to grow their revenue. They put on more (and better) services,, and marketed it. Sometimes it was overdone, and the timetable could not handle the trains. That is a lesson which has been learnt.

The point about growth in the railway is not trivial, or a mere statistic. More people have chosen to travel by train and they are travelling further for their work and leisure. This is the case across the whole country and according to a study we published in June 2004, Britain now has Europe’s fastest growing railway. Over the past ten years the number of passenger kilometres travelled on Britain’s railways rose to 40.4 billion in 2003, an average increase of 36.1% – higher than in any other country in Europe. In second place is Spain, third – Ireland and fourth – France. In terms of the growth of passenger journeys, Britain is second only to Spain.

Other than growth there are other hugely beneficial changes. Since train companies became privately owned, many lines and routes are enjoying the benefits of part of a £4.5 billion investment in new trains and we will soon have one of the youngest rolling stock fleets in Europe, with an average age of 14 years. There are also now 12% more trains running on the network than in 1995.

Network Rail is undertaking a huge programme of investment in track and signalling, The new multi-million pound Train Protection and Warning System (TPWS) has been fully installed across the network and is helping to reduce the likelihood of a serious accident occurring. The root and branch modernisation of the WCML, and of the cross-country services have been pushed through. You could go round the country pointing to other substantial improvements.

I take very seriously the inconvenience passengers experience where punctuality has been poor. The intensity of the train service required for the growth in passengers and the scale of the engineering work on the tracks presents a real challenge. We have to learn better how to organise and run the very intensive service we how have.

The overall journey experience of passengers has improved by many measures: journey planning and timetabling is unrecognisable from 10 years ago – National Rail Enquiries is a railway success story with real-time train running information, internet, WAP and SMS messaging all part of the mix. Buying tickets is easier, and £150 million of tickets are now delivered by Ticket on Departure machines at more than 80 stations which save passengers time and give them greater flexibility.

There has been a major investment in station refurbishment and modernisation and in customer information. On-train comfort has also been greatly improved with thousands of new and refurbished trains now flooding onto the network.

In reality, the structure we now have on the railway is a good way to deliver a complex, passenger responsive, railway service. There is clearly a requirement for a national network operator – a national timetable and national planning and delivery of infrastructure, economies of scale and a premium on methodical, predictable delivery.
But the business of train operation and passenger service has different dynamics. It requires a focus on passengers, whose requirements are essentially local. For a successful railway, train operators must be strongly motivated to attract and look after passengers, which is what private train operators do within necessary cost constraints.

These two parts of the railway, the network operator and the train operators, must work together. This we do, much more so than outsiders seem to think and we will be working even more closely as a result of the Rail Review. This includes working jointly with Network Rail and the SRA to improve the quality and timeliness of services for our passengers and there will be further joint working to improve punctuality.

Things are changing for the rail industry in many ways – for the better. Even abroad, the perception of Britain’s railway is improving. At a recent railway reception in Brussels, I talked to some of the MEPs and European Council Members and was struck by the growing respect they have for how we are doing things in Britain.

They see collaboration across the industry and a lot of good practice as we have gone through the pain of reorganisation, which a lot of railways have still to face and we are coming out the other side. Many of the things we are doing for Britain’s railways are actually beginning to be copied by other European countries and are also increasingly being reflected in EU railway policies.

The real challenge for Britain’s railway is this: not a nostalgic debate about state versus private, but rather meeting the challenge of constantly rising expectations of passengers and the need to cut costs. This is what all need to focus on. We owe this to ourselves as an industry, to the thousands of men and women who work in the railway and to our passengers who will make more than one billion rail journeys this year. I wish you all well for 2005.