CrossCountry managing director Andy Cooper
ANDY Cooper is confident that a well-motivated staff, better use of ticket selling technology and big improvements in the train fleet will ensure that CrossCountry delivers the results he needs during the life of the new franchise.
Over the eight-year term of the franchise, which switched from Virgin to Arriva ownership in November last year, the managing director will see government subsidies of £1.056 billion. But as the years go on the subsidy levels are destined to drop drastically and by 2015/16 the level will have decreased to around £5 million.
Andy, 50, who led Arriva’s bid for CrossCountry, has taken on a very different franchise to the one vacated by Virgin. For a start it’s a full blown private limited company franchise, while the Virgin model was a ‘non-standard’ one, built on letters of agreement with the Department for Transport.
He has also lost part of the CrossCountry empire to other operators but gained other routes, notably Birmingham to Leicester, Peterborough and Stansted airport and Nottingham to Cardiff.
Birmingham-based Andy Cooper joined British Rail as a graduate traffic management trainee back in 1980, cutting his railway teeth in junior freight management jobs in heavily industrialised South Wales.
Later he moved into senior InterCity roles, then had spells with Great Western and at Railtrack before becoming MD of Central Trains and holding other top management roles.
Now he is running a train company which is far from parochial, a company which runs nearly 280 services a day, nationwide, over 1,654 route miles.
He is well aware of the challenges of upping performance levels on services which criss-cross the rail network from the north east of Scotland to the far south and south west of England. Trains are subject to the vagaries of day-to-day disruption and problems at key junctions can mean major delays further on in journeys.
Performance levels are improving and are at 87.1 per cent of all trains arriving right time. But he wants consistency not “sudden wonder peaks”.
He and his management team are also well aware that the future holds many opportunities to grow the current 30 million passengers a year carried on their trains. The spiralling cost of petrol for road vehicle owners is likely to be a major factor.
“With the cost of petrol now around 109p a litre people are looking closely at the costs of filling up and realising a lot of our fares are quite competitive,” he says.
The entire fleet of Voyagers, Class 170s and, soon, High Speed Trains again, are all being rebranded. The 29 three-car and two-car Class 170 Turbostars are currently undergoing a complete refresh at Clacton depot.
“These trains are working very hard for us, services are pretty busy between Birmingham and Leicester.”
But although brand image is important, Andy is aware that an easily obtainable, attractive fares structure, good customer service, reliable services and improved trains are the only way to win new passengers.
He sees big potential at Stansted, where he believes the last Cross-Country trains of the day leave the airport station “much too early”.
The plan is to extend a number of Cambridge-terminating trains to the airport station from the December timetable, giving passengers arriving on late flights the chance to get back to the Midlands.
He also believes there is a case for running trains all night to and from the growing airport, although that is currently only an aspiration.
“Running all night would give us a whole new market – airport workers need to get to the airport for all sorts of shifts.
“There is a big prize to be had there and we need to work with Stansted and the DfT.”
Andy Cooper and his train planners are also looking closely at journey timings on some routes. “The Cardiff to Nottingham service is timed at two hours seven minutes, but you can do the journey easily in one and three quarter hours.
“We are looking for adjustments in the timetable to allow better pathing.”
A major plus in CrossCountry winning the franchise is that the company is bringing back five of the ever popular HSTs – High Speed Trains – which will offer more seats on some of the longest distance services.
Three rakes of coaches are being refurbished by WabTec Rail in Doncaster and power cars will be fitted with energy efficient ‘green’ MTU power plants at Brush in Loughborough.
The return of HSTs, running in eight plus two formations, will add an extra 842 seats a day across the fleet and extra luggage space for long distance passengers.
The first complete set is due to enter service in September, although two non-refurbished sets will enter service between Edinburgh and Penzance from 17 May. All five should be in service by December.
“These trains will have more seats – 548 – than a jumbo jet,” says the CrossCountry boss. “They may be 30 years old but they will look fantastic, absolutely great. They are incredibly popular.”
The trains will be maintained at Craigentinny depot in Edinburgh, where Voyagers are also serviced.
The entire Voyager fleet, introduced some five years ago and the backbone of the CrossCountry services, are also facing major changes to increase seating capacity.
“The shops are being taken out to provide more seats and we want to get more staff to interact with more passengers more often.
“At the moment we have four people on a four-car Voyager – the driver and three other staff. We have a train manager, a person in first class and then one in the shop being desperately lonely. We want that person to get around the train, talk to people, have a bigger focus on customers.”
CrossCountry has some 1,650 staff, including 1,200 on-board people and staff at key stations such as Edinburgh and Birmingham.
Staff contact is vital for Cross-Country, with a disproportionate number of people needing assisted travel. Figures also show that more than half of all passengers break their journey to change trains.
Staff training and development is seen to be vital and Andy was delighted when, last Christmas, with fewer trains running, he was able to assemble a large number of on-board people to talk about the new franchise and gain feedback.
Harnessing new ticketing and information technology will also figure large in CrossCountry’s franchise time. Aware of the forward pace of technology, the commercial team is working on a number of initiatives.
Another aim is to harness information technology to make it easier for on-board staff to advise passengers about connections should their train be affected by disruption.
“We know how stressful this sort of thing can be, people who might have missed a connection ask ‘what about my connection, what about my reservation?’ We want to be able to tell them that we have them on the next available train, with a reservation.”
He also wants to see far better use of the seat reservation system generally, making it easier to make a reservation much closer to the time a train is departing. Staff will be issued with hand-held equipment so that reserved seats of ‘no shows’ can be issued to ‘walk up’ passengers.
Ticket sales are also a top-of-the- agenda item. A new website is planned to enable people to book tickets early and gain the cheaper ticket quotas with a ‘print tickets at home’ facility similar to that used on airlines.
Smart card technology is also being investigated, along with mobile phone ticket selling which will involve text messages and a bar code to be used at the station of departure.
“We are not just running trains but managing people’s journeys, and we have to make the technology work harder for us. We want to give better benefits to our passengers,” says Andy.