Andy O’Donnell’s evening commute along the Preston to Manchester airport railway line from his office near Buckshaw Parkway, a station in Chorley, to home in Heald Green, a suburb of Stockport, should take around an hour and a half.
“I’ve been travelling on the line for about 14 months,” the 22-year-old application support worker explains. “When I first started travelling on it it was okay, honestly.”
But now things have changed. Last week, it took him more than three hours to get home, thanks to a confusing combination of cancelled, delayed and poorly running trains. The day after we speak, O’Donnell is meeting with his manager to see what can be done about his working hours to avoid relying on the unreliable trains operated by Northern rail, one of a number of companies that run rail franchises across the country. “Work are very accepting,” O’Donnell admits. “However, it is at a point where I’ll promise to be in at a certain time and can’t guarantee it. I miss meetings. I miss appointments.”
It’s even affected his personality, he believes. “Initially I was a very relaxed person,” he says. “It’s now at the point where it’s clear to my colleagues I’m a lot more stressed. I’m on edge. It’s because I don’t have any downtime anymore. I’m delayed; I’m cancelled. I have no time to relax.”
O’Donnell is just one of a number of commuters on the Northern rail network who have struggled as the system has ground to a halt, leaving passengers out of pocket, struggling to get home, and with significantly affected personal lives and professional careers. More than 2,000 trains have been cancelled across the Northern network since May 18. Hundreds more are scrapped daily.
Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has called Northern’s total breakdown “nothing short of a scandal”, while UK transport secretary Chris Grayling said it was “wholly unsatisfactory”.
But how did we get to the point where the trains don’t run at all, never mind run on time? What’s going wrong at Northern?
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On April 1, 94.5 per cent of Northern trains running around the north of England ran to time. Two months to the day later, just 57.5 per cent of trains did. On the Lancashire to Cumbria inter-urban route, just over one in four trains were on time; less than a third in north Manchester; and just over half in Merseyside.
Britain’s rail system – particularly in the underloved north, which hasn’t benefited from the massive amounts of money poured into the Crossrail project, and where average investment per person of £1,600 is 2.6 times less than in London – has been creaking for a halt for years.
Underinvestment is just one of a plethora of issues, including chaotic, last-minute redrafting of timetables, serious understaffing and delayed refurbishment of railway lines, that has been pinpointed as the root cause of Northern’s great problems.
“I’ve got contacts on the [Northern] Windermere branch and they’ve been saying they’ve been cancelling around 20 per cent of the trains for the last couple of months,” says Christian Wolmar, a rail expert and author. “It’s not new. It’s happening around the network.”
Train operating companies are benchmarked by the Department for Transport for what’s called “public performance measure” (PPM): the punctuality of train journeys. Nationally, punctuality was around 91.5 per cent around 2010; two years later, it started to decline. The national PPM score in the third quarter of the 2016/17 year was 87.7 per cent - a near-four percentage point drop from its peak.
But the national decline belies significant regional variations – some of which are far worse. PPM on the Northern-operated Manchester to Liverpool route was around 90 per cent at the beginning of 2017. One ex-industry source said it had “fallen off a cliff in the past year”, dropping to around 84.5 per cent earlier this year. On a route around Cumbria, the drop has been more significant, and more prolonged: from just under 90 per cent PPM two-and-a-half years ago to nearer 82 per cent.
“It’s a combination of lots of things: lack of diesel trains, an over-optimistic timetable, delays in electrification and a slight staffing shortage because of relying on drivers covering rest days,” says one Northern conductor working on lines around Manchester, who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions. “They have known about this for two years,” they explain.
It’s a catalogue of errors, they believe. “Network Rail aren’t keeping to a schedule so we can train staff up,” the conductor explains. Before a driver can work on any individual train line, they need to be trained on that specific line, riding the route on a train without any passengers. On busy tracks, where infrastructure work by Network Rail overruns – such as on the Blackpool to Preston line, which is being upgraded – that can mean train operators are short of drivers. Until recently, many Northern drivers have been working their rest days to make up the shortfall; they’ve recently stopped doing so.
“But Northern aren’t hiring enough staff quickly enough.” Those that are trained up often move on to other train operating companies offering better pay and working conditions. “It takes a year to train a driver, and six months for them to leave,” they explain – and many are leaving, making the driver shortage even more acute. “Morale is rock bottom.”
“It’s a perfect storm,” says David Sidebottom of Transport Focus, a passenger watchdog.
The conductor isn’t hopeful about the future of their employer, which took over control of the franchise on April Fool’s Day 2016. “They are running this franchise into the ground in the hope that the Department for Transport will take it back without financial penalty.” Northern declined a request for an interview.
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Christmas came two days early for Arriva Rail North, a subsidiary of German state rail company Deutsche Bahn, in 2015 when it won the contract to run the Northern rail franchise from April 2016 onwards. “We promised passengers a world class rail service that would make the Northern Powerhouse a reality – and I’m delighted,” said Patrick McLoughlin, then transport secretary, announcing the news. The new franchisee would “bring the Northern Powerhouse to life.”
The list of promises for the Northern rail franchise over the course of the contract until March 2025 was long and plentiful: £400 million investment in air-conditioned carriages and the replacement of the Pacer trains (literally buses previously destined for the scrapheap converted into trains) that had become a symbol of the underinvestment in the north’s rail network. The contract was worth £7.2 billion, according to reports at the time.
Chris Burchell, managing director of Arriva UK’s trains division, heralded the victory. “We will be investing more than £1 billion to deliver a step-change in quality for customers and dramatically improving services, stations, information and ticketing,” he said. “Our aim is to be the communities’ local railway and to leave a positive lasting legacy for the north of England.”
Arriva’s operation of Northern may well leave a lasting legacy. Whether it’s positive seems less certain.
On May 20 this year, a new train timetable came into force across the country. It was called the largest in living memory, with seven times the normal number of services being affected. In all, four million train schedules saw changes across the UK. For some, including commuters in the south, the timetable changes have improved services. But for Northern, it proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The timetable change was not a small shift for Northern: nine in ten of its 2,600 daily train services were altered in some way – a significant number of them by many minutes. It was, the company admitted in a statement when it became apparent that the timetable change had caused issues, “the biggest change to local rail for many years” and “a significant operational challenge”. Northern, already creaking under the weight of staff shortages, a dearth of management (the franchising system for UK rail encourages companies to compete on price, rather than services offered, and the cheapest way to lop off a few zeroes from your bid is to winnow out middle-managers), appeared to collapse.
The problems first manifested themselves several months before the change to the new timetable. Part of Northern’s bold plans for the future of the service relied on a section of the railway between Preston, Bolton and Manchester being electrified. The new trains Northern (through Arriva North) had promised to introduce on services would run on the route. “A lot hinged on that,” explains Sidebottom.
By the end of 2017 it became apparent that Network Rail would not be able to complete the line in time for timetables and training to be completed comfortably. “Northern had to rip up its timetable and issue one at reasonably short notice,” says Sidebottom. “Normally it takes eight or nine months; this one was done in eight or nine weeks. I think Northern weren’t 100 per cent confident the new timetable would be that robust.” Internal predictions of problems turned out to be accurate.
Five days after the new timetable came into place, Northern and Network Rail recognised something had to be done. Together, they announced an independent report into “the preparations and processes leading up to the implementation of the recent timetable change”.
The investigators would do well to look at the changes to timetabling staffing at Network Rail, which creates train timetables across the country, reckons Wolmar. “I’ve spoken to a couple of timetable planning managers and they say a lot of expertise was lost when they moved operations to Milton Keynes,” he says. Local outposts staffed by expert train timetablers who had local knowledge of train routes and potential kinks in the system were gutted and all centralised in 2012 to a single location on the site of a former hockey arena hundreds of miles away from the northernmost routes.
“They took people off the streets to do timetable planning management, which is a skilled and difficult job,” says Wolmar. “They put in timetables that aren’t workable, that someone experienced in timetabling would realise isn’t achievable.
“In the old days, there’d be people who’d go from working for an operator then maybe an infrastructure piece of the network, then go and work in head office. People moved around and now that doesn’t happen. Someone hired off the streets to do a timetabling job may have no idea of the rest of the network,” he laments. “I think we’ve just lost the skills.”
The sclerotic signs have been there for years. Wolmar reads out an email he received in July 2016 from an anonymous source. “Thought you might be interested to learn about the approach being taken by Network Rail and certain north east-based operators and how this could impact negatively on the travelling customer,” he dictates.
“So far as the timetables are concerned,” Wolmar reads, “I feel a sheer and remaining loss of experience in Network Rail’s train planning function both at a staff and management level as a result of relocating their regional planning offices to Milton Keynes.”
Now the timetable has been demonstrated to be unachievable, Northern is looking to significantly cut services. From this week, Northern has introduced “amended services” to trains that remove a staggering 165 services each day. Andy Burnham has – perhaps more accurately – called it an emergency timetable. Were 165 trains a day removed from service in the south, there’d be national uproar. But because many of the passengers affected are hundreds of miles away from the capital and its media and government, commuters will be expected to suck it up and carry on regardless.
“They need to get back to the basics,” says Sidebottom. “It really is about trying to find a way of running a timetable that passengers can trust and they can deliver. Unpalatable as it may be for a time, it’s better that Northern runs a timetable which is not as frequent as the current one is.”
Even that is easier said than done. “If it had been easy to do, it’d have been done last week,” he adds. “If anything, the situation is getting worse.”
Amidst the chaos and confusion, the shredded timetables and the howls of angry commuters on social media, an inquiry (of course), has been announced.
“There is urgent work to do to fully understand what did and didn’t work on all aspects of planning and delivery of the new timetable,” said David Brown, Northern’s managing director. The urgency isn’t just because of the way the new timetable has crocked the current rail network in the north – on May 29 alone more than 250 Northern trains were cancelled entirely – but because of what’s coming down the tracks.
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In December another significant change to train timetables will happen. “The independent report will ensure lessons are learned and that there are no repeats of current problems as we prepare for the next major timetable change in December,” explained Martin Frobisher, the managing director of the north western stretch of Network Rail’s route.
The issue is that even when December comes around, things will be no better. The train timetabling system is broken. Journey timetables are meant to be published months – sometimes up to six – in advance. It’s how eager, well-prepared travellers can bag a bargain on popular routes, and how those working on railway infrastructure can ensure everything goes to plan. But going forward, things are going to be worse. Some timetables now are only finalised four weeks in advance. Come December, we’re likely to be in exactly the same situation again.
“It’s not a short-term issue, that’s the trouble,” says Christian Wolmar of the chaos that has befallen Northern – and the broader rail network. “The only thing they can do is pour staff in.”
Training up drivers, however, takes time – and when the problems are more deep-rooted, applying sticking plasters by flooding the franchise with staff likely won’t work. Northern managing director David Brown has admitted that stablising services “is likely to take a number of weeks to deliver lasting improvements”. However, people still have to go to work, to doctor’s appointments, to the shops.
Andy O’Donnell spends around £300 per month on train travel across the Northern service area. “The cost is fine,” he says. “I understand: it’s not going to be cheap. But when they bring in penalty fares, when fares increase, and they bring in all this legislation that’s costing us more at the end of the day and don’t improve the service, it’s an insult. It’s an insult for people who pay so much to get so little.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
