bramling
Veteran Member
The structure at present has a lot of duplication and if you were to have some sensible sectorisation/collaboration it doesn't take a brain surgeon to see where savings could be made.
Take a station I am fairly familiar with, Liverpool Lime Street (exclude Merseyrail).
3 train crew depots with their own supervisory and management structure - Northern, TPE and Avanti. Some have centralised resource functions, some are local.
2 dispatch teams, Northern, who look after most services, and Avanti, who deal with an arrival and departure per hour with team leaders and managers each. On top of that there are booking office staff and gateline staff employed by the TOCs, numerous contractors for cleaning and catering from different companies (some of whom work for 20 minutes per hour because they only deal with "their" trains) and the Network Rail station staff as well for security, passenger assistance and the station management team to boot.
All of these different silos have their own chains of command.
What would be the clever person's job would be to work out a better way going forward but the whole web is full of inefficiencies and that is replicated across the network.
The trouble is it is likely to be difficult to do much about all that, without pretty much abandoning the whole structure of the 1990s privatisation. I’m not sure the government has the stomach to take that task on, and even if they did is now really the time?
Completely agree with the point though, just I don’t think it’s something we’re going to see change in the foreseeable future.