Jan Chaudhry, Operations Director of South West Trains
BACK in 1999 Jan Chaudhry decided to leave the railway and move into a consultancy role. It was a decision he was to immediately regret and he wasted no time in rejoining the industry he had grown to love.
“I missed the railway environment, the hurly burly and contact with staff, and soon realised I had made a mistake,” says Jan.
“At the time, I had spent 10 years on the railway and when I was approached to join a consultancy I felt it was time for a change. But I hated it.”
After nine months he was back in the rail industry, as retail manager for what was then Thameslink.
Now, nearly 10 years later, Jan, 41, has just moved into one of the top train operating jobs as director of operations for South West Trains, the biggest of the south of England train companies.
And he has also got his old boss back, Stewart Palmer, who is now managing director of SWT.
They met in Jan’s early days as station manager at Elmers End, which came under the control of the London Bridge area manager – Stewart Palmer. “I have come full circle,” says Jan. “It’s good to be working for Stewart again.”
When we meet, Jan has had just five weeks with SWT and is realising the daunting but fulfilling role he has stepped into after switching from being commercial director for Southern.
SWT is one of the big boys – high on the list for numbers of trains run, numbers of passengers carried, size of revenue and size of staff. Its huge commuter market, both London suburban and long distance, requires an equally huge number of train services – more than 1,700 a day, operated by 554,365 trains a year and over 5,000 staff.
The SWT tentacles spread over 607 route miles to reach as far as Plymouth and Bristol, and services cover more than 23 million train miles a year. Some 200,000 commuters a day arrive into London Waterloo, making it one of the capital’s busiest stations.
To fulfil his considerable task, Jan has 1,000 drivers and 1,000 guards under his control and a top team of seven senior managers.
He has arrived at SWT’s London headquarters near Blackfriars at a time when the train company is experiencing high performance figures with trains chalking up a Moving Annual Average of over 90 per cent.
For Jan, the challenge is now to maintain and improve on the figures – and he is already relishing the task ahead.
His new role is in sharp contrast to his early days on the railway when he joined the British Rail general management training scheme at Norwich.
He had gained a physics degree at Birmingham University and wanted a career in transport, and the BR offer stood out from those of the shipping companies.
“I liked the sheer variety of the railways and the management training scheme had a good reputation. The first year was a real education for me.”
His first posting was at Elmers End station on the south eastern division of Southern Region.
“There were a lot of experienced railway people who were used to having to educate their boss,” he recalls, smiling. “This was my first real opportunity to get involved with everything from ticket office to platform work. There was also a train crew depot at Addiscombe and a signalbox.
“You got a mixed reception from the old hands. Some were only too pleased to show you how things worked but some had an attitude problem. You had to prove yourself.”
Later, with sectorisation of British Rail into businesses, Jan had a variety of jobs on Network SouthEast, from operations manager at Dartford to safety systems manager on the south eastern division.
After privatisation he was involved with Connex South Eastern, the French owned train company – not a particularly happy time – and later moved to Ashford as commercial manager, then to Brighton to work in operations.
Following his nine months sojourn from the railway, Jan rejoined with Thameslink, staying with the company for six years. “I was really glad to be back. It was a small company with a family atmosphere and a really good place to work.” He progressed to operations/retail manager.
In 2006, when Govia lost the Thameslink franchise, he was offered and took up an appointment with Southern, stepping from a former Govia company to a current one.
“We were really disappointed when Govia didn’t get shortlisted for the new Thameslink franchise – now First Capital Connect – because I believe the franchise had improved a great deal.”
Why did he decide to join South West Trains? “I thought this would be a really good opportunity to work in the largest TOC and get the experience that will go with that.”
His philosophy is to see a ‘right time’ railway. “If you work really hard to get trains arriving on time, naturally those arriving within five minutes will go up on the PPM – Passenger Performance Monitor.
“We have good groups in place to deliver right time. It’s all about staff involvement and good leadership. We have good drivers’ managers and guards’ managers – it’s a good team.
“What passengers really want is punctual and reliable trains, run safely. The rest does not really matter.
“Things go wrong in any TOC but we have to get better when things go wrong. We have to provide good information.”
Jan is confident that information about service disruption can already be received by guards on trains as text messages, but he is keen to look at other technologies that allow passengers to be kept up to date even more effectively. “There are many hand-held devices on the market which can provide up-to-the-minute information about train running.”
More importantly he wants to ensure that passengers can access their train guards easily. “I have worked for all my career on DOO – driver only operated – railways, where there are no guards at all. Here on SWT we have a guard on every train and it is really important for us to make good use of them.
“We have worked really hard to make sure our guards are visible, so that passengers know they are on the train and can access them easily.
“There are all sorts of benefits in having guards who are easily visible, and that includes safety and security. We want to say that our guards are easy to find and encourage passengers to speak to them.”
Another priority is to bring about even more joint working with Net-work Rail: “One of the real successes of this train company is its joint working with Network Rail on train operating performance and delay attribution.”
As part of the close working relationship with Network Rail, Jan meets regularly with senior NR route operations and maintenance people under the auspices of the Joint Performance Improvement Plan. SWT also involve fleet, traction and rolling stock people.
He has praise for the Wessex Integrated Control Centre – which was the first of many – on ‘the raft’ at Waterloo, where SWT controllers sit next to NR controllers to ensure speedy responses and solutions are found when delays occur.
“We had a major lightening strike in May which knocked out all signals and nothing could get into or out of Waterloo. That was a nightmare and close working was really, really important then.”
Jan is also a great believer in working closely with other SWT heads of department.
“One thing I have learned in my career is not to work in isolation but to create the right systems and processes which ensure you have the right people working in the same direction.”
In these early days with the company Jan is concentrating on getting out and about on his huge ‘patch’.
“This is a very healthy TOC, with a healthy level of performance.
“I have to make sure we maintain the momentum.”