Railway Magazine 1424 - November 2019 Back Issue

When you operate in the service sector, you are expected to provide the service advertised. In the case of railways, passengers rightly expect trains to turn up, on time, so they can plan their day and go about their business. In order to run the advertised timetabled services, one of the key components is to have a full complement of staff to cover all the diagrams, along with contingency to cover sickness, holidays, staff training and refresher courses.

Of course, full staff cover should be embodied in the requirements of the franchise, yet several train operators that have never properly tackled the issue are guilty of cancelling trains at short notice because of ‘lack of train crew’. Passengers are fed up with arriving at a station for a train that has been or will be cancelled because no crew are available – a situation not helped by occasional abysmal communications.

Some lines are getting more than a fair share of cancellations, too. Given we are 25 years into franchising, it may surprise you to learn several train operators are still reliant on the goodwill of rest days and overtime to manage daily train diagrams. It’s a practice that stems from BR days as contracts have rolled forward with successive franchise awards. Some franchisees bit the bullet and bought out the archaic contracts, others didn’t for a variety of reasons, which is part of why we are, where we are. Whatever your view, it’s a shabby way to treat customers.