Steve Butcher presented his talk to 14 members and guests at York East Coast Academy about how the Northern franchise from December 2004 was not expected to grow for it’s duration. The franchise was a big and complex railway with 2,500 trains per day, 85m passenger journeys and an old and diverse fleet of 13 types of trains with poor reliability. But from the start, passengers numbers were growing and improvements were required for the franchise to be a success, therefore several initiatives had to be developed and worked through. These included funding for additional trains and services, a train service operating performance improvement campaign, Smart Thinking groups across the business looking for efficiencies, facilities on stations improved, Centres of Excellence for fleet maintenance to improve reliability and availability, a strong partnership with Network Rail for infrastructure improvements, the building of a single safety management system, creating a proactive safety culture with key safety principles of Leadership, Process and People.
With these improvements Northern have delivered 34% more passengers but only with 11% increase in train capacity, PPM has risen from 83% MAA to 91% MAA. The rising passenger demand and over crowding is a major source of complaint and the lack of capacity risks future demand growth.
For innovation Northern received funding for a bike’n’ride scheme including the Leeds cycle point and funding to replace the run down Accrington station with an eco-station.
Looking forward investment is required in stations, sustainability initiatives, customer service including information using a low cost GPS system and additional trains.
60 additional vehicles will be provided in December 2011, which require an additional fleet maintenance depot to be opened at Allerton in Liverpool.
Finally Steve following questions from members regarding what more could be done to enhance services, following a debate on the funding of future schemes, the conclusion was it would need to be included in the next franchise.
We are grateful to Steve for the talk, and to East Coast once again for use of the Academy.