Sir David Higgins has been chief executive of Network Rail for just over two years. In early March, he invited our very own Nigel Wordsworth to his office in Kings Place, overlooking the Regent’s Canal in London. Over the next couple of issues, Nigel’s in-depth interview will cover how Sir David got to grips with the industry from a standing start and his views on the important strategic issues that affect the industry.
The first thing I noticed when I moved into the rail industry was the scale and complexity of the operation.
There are so many different disciplines. There is everything from track to power to structures to signalling. It’s just so complex…. and then there are all the multiple stakeholders.
I think the other thing you realise is that you might wish to talk about strategy, but if you’ve just had an overhead line down on East Coast, no one wants to talk about anything other than rectifying the train service!
It’s relentlessly operational, it’s complex and it’s fragmented. Having come from outside the railway industry, I just never realised how fragmented it is. There are so many other parties involved or approvals that are needed. And everywhere there’s an interface, there’s a cost.
The other surprise is the age of technology. We have a range of technology going from stuff that is a hundred years old to the latest traffic control systems in our new operating centres – but there’s just a huge variation. We still have track workers with red flags and a hooter, you know, it’s like the Railway Children!
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Photo: shutterstock.com.
Until we brought in GSM-R, the way that a train driver would report an accident was to stop the train, get off, walk along the track, find a signal phone, ring up, and say “Guess where I am. I think I’m somewhere so many chains from such and such a mile post”. You think, “Really! It can’t be like that, can it?” So the railway has survived on tried and true technologies and a failsafe, fingers crossed, system for a long, long time. And unlike every other infrastructure in this country, it’s growing at a dramatically high rate.
So you sat down on day one having landed in this hugely complex business. How on earth did you decide what you needed to do first?
There was absolutely no point in trying to second guess our experts in the industry or, for that matter, in our suppliers and our train operating companies.
No, the first thing I did was to listen for the first three or four months. I had that white flip chart over there and I just had people come and sit and talk to me for an hour. I would sit here and listen, and whenever they said something I would scribble it up on the board and ask them. “Is this what you’re saying?” All I was trying to do was listen and translate what they were saying, trying to understand where there were common threads.
And from that I eventually came down to the conclusion it’s about getting more productivity out of our industry and our organisation, and the only way we can do that is to take away the conflict ridden system to try and create more joined up-thinking.
We have got to try and overcome the fragmentation by getting people to work together. So let’s combine everything at route level and take away the barriers.
The next obvious thing was setting up alliances. Rather than fighting with each other, let’s try working at other things that make us stronger because ultimately the public really doesn’t give a damn about all these different, complicated companies. They don’t see the fragmentation, they just see frustration.
Does the greater world, then, see you as a maintainer of Victorian infrastructure rather than a builder of new railways?
Perhaps they do, but the irony is that every year we do two and a half billion pounds of new work, enhancements, rather than just maintaining and renewals. So although we do a huge amount of new work, people just don’t see it.
I’m amazed at the complexity of the work we are doing. I mean, changing over an existing signalling control system, like we are just doing at Western for example, on a very densely used operational railway – one of the most densely used railway networks in Europe – is an incredibly complex thing to do.
But reliability must be almost your top priority isn’t it?
I think it was day three after I arrived when I went to a Select Committee and I said there is
a trade-off between capacity and performance. That was said intuitively, but now the industry accepts the principle.
The more and more trains you put on the tracks will ultimately affect performance. I am quite convinced of that and we have had one or two international experts who have come in and looked at our routes, modelled them and come to the same conclusion. There is not enough resilience in the timetables. Some of these timetables are now so old they’ve lost their value and therefore they need to be re- planned.
As for resilience we have 22,000 sets of switches, all with the potential to fail. I would love that they didn’t fail, but they can – although such incidents are fewer. But a feature emerging over the last three years is that the recovery from an incident is now more disruptive than the original issue. So you have an incident at Croydon in the morning peak that takes six or seven hours for the service to recover.
I would like to have fewer and fewer incidents which is why remote condition monitoring is so important. We are able to pre-empt a problem and solve it before a service failure.
If you go back 10 years, the scourge of the industry was defective rails. Nowadays, with ultrasonic testing and measurement trains, we can predict failure risk. It’s not failsafe, but certainly a huge![A006_C012_0226H7_S000.0000000 [online]](http://www.therailengineer.com/wp-content/uploads/A006_C012_0226H7_S000.0000000-online-300x158.jpg)
amount is picked up showing where intervention is needed. So there’s a move to condition-based monitoring; a move to risk-based intervention on the railway line so we can intervene, repair or replace rather than having a disruptive failure. Remote condition monitoring of switches has allowed us to intervene and replace, maintain or repair them before they fail.
But some of our signalling systems are old and the best thing you can do is to leave them alone because inevitably, when you do touch them, some time now or in the future a fault is going to occur because of
old cabling. So, what can we do about that? Replace the lot? Well, we’d like to, but realistically we can’t replace or upgrade all that Victorian infrastructure completely. But we can get smarter about how we manage it, although we are never going to eliminate every incident.
And all the while there are pressures from all around?
To reduce disruption when a failure does occur means a much closer co-operation with the key passenger train operators. Now that’s complicated on West Coast when the biggest operator only has 15% of the route capacity, but we’ve got to have recovery plans that everyone
is trained on and is happy to use so that we change the timetable at short notice.
Despite the pressures and the lobbying, what we have to do is say there is not the money in the country to solve these issues all
at once. For example, we’ve got 300 signal boxes that are over 100 years old. I mean, some of them run crucial parts of the West coast. It’s bizarre isn’t it? 125 mph Pendolino depending on levers, but that’s where we are.
Ultimately, we would like to have state of the art traffic management systems to get the most effective use of our capacity. We’ve done it in East Midlands. Fabulous, great! We would like to bring everything into the twenty-first century but, realistically, it’s going to take 20-25 years.
There are just not the resources, and the other thing we’ve got to stop doing is turning the tap on and then turning it off again. We lost all the electrification skills in the whole industry, everything from front line troops to design. We did the same
