LAST month in Railnews, under the heading ‘We need right time all the time’, East Midlands Trains’ managing director Tim Shoveller – widely recognised as one of the smartest operators in today’s rail industry – made an impassioned plea for perfect punctuality.
As the rail network fills up (and some may say it is overflowing already in some areas) the need for a Right Time Railway becomes ever more necessary.
My worry, though, is that ever since John Major foisted the Passenger’s Charter on British Rail in 1992, the culture in the industry has steadily moved towards the view that it’s okay for regional or local trains to run up to five minutes late, and for inter-city trains to run up to 10 minutes late.
Worse still, it seems not to matter if trains are even later at intermediate stages of journeys, provided they are considered capable of reaching their end point within five or ten minutes of lateness. The passengers thus inconvenienced, even to the extent of missing connections, may form the majority who use these trains. But lateness at destination is what counts – even if there is no-one on board!
I have often been on right-time long-distance trains that have been stopped to allow a late-running service to overtake. Both trains have then reached their destination eight or nine minutes late. This may not have impressed the passenger, but such performance enables the industry to claim both trains as ‘on time’.
The difference between industry claims for how well it is doing on punctuality and the reality of what passengers actually experience has been highlighted by South West Trains, which laudably launched a ‘Right Time Railway’ project.
The result has been that, while the official method of monitoring punctuality, the so-called Public Performance Measure (PPM), has recorded 92 per cent of SWT trains arriving within five minutes of right time, the reality has been that only about 70 per cent of trains actually reached their destinations at the advertised times.
Does it matter? Well, yes. The impact of intermediate late running can be serious, especially at key locations such as Reading, Birmingham or Leeds, where the effects on other train services around the network can spread out like ripples on a pond, giving proof to the Chaos Theory (that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can cause a storm on the other side).
Yet industry culture today seems to tolerate a level of unpunctuality.
A classic example of a route where trains really must run precisely is the ‘Coventry Corridor’ – Rugby-Coventry-Birmingham, one of the most-intensively used routes in the country – which has to accommodate, on only one pair of tracks, a mix of stopping local trains, semi-fast regional services, plus 125mph Virgin Pendolinos and CrossCountry Voyagers, as well as long, heavy freight trains crossing at Coventry, en route between Leamington Spa and Nuneaton.
Everything must operate to time to ensure the timetable functions properly. For example, if a London Midland local service from Birmingham, terminating at Coventry, is as much as one minute late, it can delay a Virgin West Coast Pendolino departing for Wolverhampton.
If the local service approaches Coventry a couple of minutes late and is halted to permit the Wolverhampton service to proceed on time, it will likely delay the following Virgin service from Wolverhampton to London, which by then should be on the tail of the stopping service.
Things can only get worse when the new West Coast timetable is introduced – when, instead of the present frequency of two London Midland services and two Pendolinos each way every hour in the ‘Coventry Corridor’, there will be three LM and three Pendolino services each way every hour – a 50 per cent increase.
Yet, it seems that it is okay to treat trains up to five minutes late as ‘on time’. Passenger information screens do not advise of any lateness until trains are six minutes or more late. Indeed, I boarded one train recently that was nine minutes late leaving Birmingham International – yet the information screens continued to show it as ‘on time.’
There is another, increasingly significant reason for ensuring trains run on time – energy consumption. If trains run ‘out of course’ they can require others to be stopped or slowed due to conflicting movements at junctions or platforms occupied by preceding services. So unscheduled braking and acceleration becomes necessary, adding significantly to energy use and carbon emissions.
Every timetable has got to be precise from the outset – not packed with excessive recovery times or ‘performance allowances’. Professor Rod Smith, of Imperial College, London, told a Railway Forum conference in April: “We need a robust timetable. The present one is fictional before it is even published, and leads to much unnecessary starting and stopping.”
Prof. Smith further emphasised carbon emissions. Calling Britain’s level of electrification “woeful – the lowest in Europe, except for Ireland” – he said our mix of diesel and electric traction, and the lack of a robust timetable, results in about 50 grams of CO2 per passenger kilometre, whereas Japan’s Tokaido Shinkansen – where delays are measured in seconds, not minutes – produces just 9.3g pass/km.
Right time, all the time, must become the clarion call for our railway.