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You wouldn’t expect a possession overrun to result in a blue light emergency response. But that’s precisely what happened at Clapham Junction in the early days of the Network Rail-South West Trains ‘Alliance’.
No track workers were injured. But four ambulances were called for passengers aboard delayed and disrupted trains during the Monday morning overrun near Twickenham. And, of course, more delays accrued from the time it took paramedics to reach the stricken passengers and treat them.
Alliance Managing Director Tim Shoveller recounts this tale to show how incidents on one part of a railway can affect another.
“When Network Rail talks about a possession overrun it would think about the safety of the people on the site, quite rightly, not wanting them to put them under pressure to get the possession done quickly. I completely applaud that.
“But we also have to understand that when a possession overruns the consequence is not just about the workforce, the consequence is also about the passengers who collapse because their trains are so overcrowded.”
Shoveller had started this story by talking about the costs involved, before developing his argument to show how his railway now reacts differently because the track and train operator are joined together.
A Monday morning overrun is clearly visible in the takings from ticket machines and booking offices. In this case, they dropped £300,000, he recalls.
“We were able to see the consequence of that possession overrun as a railway,” he tells RailReview.
“And what that meant was, yep, there was the Schedule 8 cost to the Route (which is shared with SWT), and there was a loss in revenue that was equivalent to £300,000 because people didn’t - couldn’t - travel. The two to three-hour overrun took out the Monday morning peak. So Schedule 8, which was equivalent to £300,000 funnily enough, and £300,000 from people - it’s the equivalent of £600,000, as well as huge disruption.”
He continues: “If you join the whole thing together you get a different view of safety. The point is that it’s not one thing or another. You take a different view on what the costs are. Those types of event are unaffordable. So at a time when McNulty was perhaps saying there was too much contingency, perhaps we should say: ‘no, no, no, no. On this railway - perhaps not a typical railway in terms of volumes or revenue - it’s not right’.
“I’d do anything to avoid a £600,000 possession overrun. And I’d do an awful lot to avoid taking four passengers to hospital because the train was so overcrowded. And of course, when a passenger faints on a train, it delays the service. So at the very time when the railway is already broken, you create a yet greater dislocation of service.”
A crowded network
When the Alliance was launched in 2012, it was very clear about what it wanted to achieve. According to its press release: “It is aiming to cut delays for passengers, provide better customer service, deliver more effective management of disruption, and improve the efficiency of the railway through more collaborative working and better decision-making.”
On those measures, it’s failed. Performance has dipped, passenger complaints for South West Trains have risen, and National Passenger Survey satisfaction scores have fallen. But is this the whole story?
Shoveller does not duck the statistics, but says: “Is the Alliance working? Absolutely, yes! Define what working means. Have we saved hundreds of millions of pounds? Is train performance better than it’s ever been? No. Did we ever think that was likely? Er, no. But nevertheless, that’s the common expectation.”
Reminded of the words of the press release, he continues: “Is it better than it would have been? Absolutely! No one disagrees with that. Is it better than it could have been? Bloody right! How could it not have been? There’s a counter-factual argument to say ‘why would it be worse then?’
“When we talk about all the initiatives that have been delivered, and doing a lot of what I would call the basics - getting a lot of the basics right, which to a degree weren’t as in place as they should have been - how could any of those things have made performance worse? So I have absolutely no doubt, and we can prove on instance-by-instance basis that performance is better that it would have been. Absolutely no doubt.”
He sharply counters accusations of failure, and rejects suggestions that his railway should be divided. He argues: “The performance deterioration started 18 months before the Alliance started. If you take out last winter (and it’s crazy to include last winter because it was the worst winter in 200 years, and there’s been nothing like it in my railway career) and replace it with an average of the last five years (and we’ve had some bad winters) you get a very different perspective on life. We have to keep a context. It was in trouble before we started.
“For the amount of effort and energy we’ve put into this, the easiest thing to do would be to say: ‘yes, you’re right, this hasn’t worked, let’s break it up’. No one has yet been able to give me any idea of why that would make it better. Everything we’ve done is about working together and solving the true root-cause of the problem. If we go back to how we used to be, then by very definition we’d have to undo many of the initiatives that we’ve now done.”
