'National Dispute' at Network Rail regarding maintenance

[OxtedL]

The low hanging fruit is NR management which has been top heavy in well paid individuals, not just the CEO and associated directors, with 425 employees have a base salary over 100k and thats before performance related pay. Another 861 have a salary between 80-100k.

All from NR staff salary breakdown 2020/21

If you're trying to save serious money on internal payroll in an organisation that's the shape of NR, it has to come out of lower pay bands.

From that spreadsheet:
89% of NR staff are on salaries between £20k and £60k, representing 83% of the wages bill.
0.4% of NR staff are on salaries over £120k, representing somewhere around 1%-2% of the wages bill.

To save 1% of your payroll bill you can either lose more than half of your senior management. Or about 1% headcount from the bottom pay bands, often achievable without any redundancies by just slightly reducing recruitment. If you want to save any more than that 1% then it isn't feasible to take it just out of top pay bands.

Middle management is often a better place to look for cuts than senior leadership. (In practice you do both at the same time.)
And in most organisations, losing e.g. a third of middle management represents a decent saving.

NR look reasonably lean here already from that spreadsheet but I'd be surprised if the type of thing from the RMT press release was going on and management weren't also about to be hit by some kind of restructuring, even a modest one.

 

[Starmill]

With the enhancement budget gutted

This has already been questioned, and seems not to be as straightforward as this?

 

[Mag_seven]

Middle management is often a better place to look for cuts than senior leadership.

Middle management layers always seems to be subject to culls every so often but the culled posts then just tend reappear again shortly afterwards.

 

[Exscrew]

I've just been offered a job as in signalling .. with the current news would it be best to avoid ?

 

[Class360/1]

This was posted earlier today by the RMT Union's Press Office:



www.rmt.org.uk/news/rmt-set-for-nationwide-rail-dispute

I fear there will be a massive increase in rail accidents if this goes ahead- hopefully the cuts won’t affect too many people

 

[The Planner]

I've just been offered a job as in signalling .. with the current news would it be best to avoid ?

Signaller or something different?

 

[Exscrew]

Signaller or something different?

Signaller

 

[The Planner]

Signaller

I wouldn't be too worried on that side of things personally.

 

[Exscrew]

I wouldn't be too worried on that side of things personally.

Thank you for your reply.
Just panicking on seeing news today.

 

[Ships]

My understanding is DfT/Network Rail has been hiding renewals in the enhancement budget for years, with the effect of making the railway's operational deficit look smaller than it is.
Lots of enhancements only get funded because the thing they are "enhancing" would need to be replaced anyway.

So a tiny increase in capability is used to write the entire cost off as an enhancement.
With the enhancement budget gutted, necessary renewals go up because renewals by enhancement don't happen.

You would be completely wrong.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

I fear there will be a massive increase in rail accidents if this goes ahead- hopefully the cuts won’t affect too many people

There won't be todays railway is inherently much safer now than it was 40 years ago when BR was constantly cutting jobs.

 

[Annetts key]

There won't be todays railway is inherently much safer now than it was 40 years ago when BR was constantly cutting jobs.

Unfortunately no one knows one way or another if a reduction in maintenance will be the cause of another accident or incident. But I would say that the risk level is very likely to go up rather than stay the same. The lifetime of equipment has not significantly changed in the last ten years.

What is likely, is that there will, in time, be more TSRs and more signalling equipment failures, with the resulting train delays and possible cancellations. This is unlikely to be seen immediately, but will be seen more over the coming years.

Why do I say this? Because the problem of cuts to maintenance and then eventually the consequences of insufficient maintenance causing problems has happened before. In fact, many, many times... It’s one of those reoccurring things that true engineers hate, but which is overlooked by politicians.

And by the time that the powers that be notice that there is a large problem, it’s far too late for a ‘quick fix’. So it takes lots of time and money to get back to normal.

 

[NoRoute]

For some time I worked in access planning producing the engineering works plan and later for Infrastructure Projects.
A few observations
...
3) Cutting time interval maintenance eventually costs more. Just an example - If point noses wear too far they need to be replaced, they can't be welded back to a reasonable profile. So the choice is a couple of nights overnight possession every few months with welders and grinders or a couple of months of a TSR and consequential delays plus the unplanned cost of a new or refurbished point nose. The point nose will eventually need replacement but judicious welded repairs will keep it in use for some years.
4) Certain preventative maintenance must be done at a specific time interval. Another example - automatic half barriers need an annual exam and maintenance. I'm not certain what the rules were if they didn't have have an annual exam, possibly degraded working and trains cautioned with all the associated delays. To ensure they don't go over the 52 week limit, at least one area signal manager programmed the annual exams on a 48 week cycle to give a degree of resilience if the exam was missed due to emergency repair works elsewhere.

Really interesting examples, coming at this from the perspective of another industry, are you doing this work purely based on calendar time? A lot of industries are moving or have moved away from that approach because it's not always very efficient, with simple calendar time you can be going out and doing maintenance work when actually the condition of the equipment you are maintaining is still ok. Many are trying to move to maintenance based on the condition of the equipment, using measurements like the amount of operations or operating hours its seen, or carrying out inspections, checks, measurements and monitoring of the equipment and triggering work once there's some observable deterioration in condition which needs addressing.

For your example of the point noses, presumably there's some engineering and operational factors which cause the damage, be operations or axles crossing the points, so would you adjust the interval based on the traffic they've seen. Or, do an inspection at a set interval and trigger the maintenance if the condition has reached the level at which they need the re-welding?

Similarly with the automatic barriers, I can see they'd need regular visual inspections to check for damage, test operation, check drive systems but would you always maintain, or would you adjust the maintenance for the number of operations they've done, or in response to some measurements? Presumably the number of operations will vary depending on the track they're protecting, some barriers might have far more operations in a 12 month period than some on a quiet line, maintaining on a simple time basis you could be over-maintaining some and under-maintaining others.

 

[Tw99]

What action can the RMT take that will actually have a significant effect in the next few months ? Inconveniencing office commuters is a thing of the past.

 

[Bald Rick]

4) Certain preventative maintenance must be done at a specific time interval. Another example - automatic half barriers need an annual exam and maintenance. I'm not certain what the rules were if they didn't have have an annual exam, possibly degraded working and trains cautioned with all the associated delays.

Picking up this one (purely as an example) - why annual? Why not every 9 months, or 15, or 36? Given the standard of (most of) the signalling / Level crossing kit installed in the last 20 years, you would hope it lasts longer than its predecessors. Especially now there is so much remote monitoring equipment. I know from experience that some kit simply does not need checking at the frequency it currently is, and also that a not insignificant % of faults are caused during the maintenance process.

5) Pensions are the elephant in the room. Unfortunately NR has fiddled and faffed around with the conditions so there area number of schemes which all costs more in administration and have not created the savings they want. Whatever, the RPS is still better than most external pensions.

RPS is indeed good - but not as good as it was. Since 2012, new NR staff can only enter the RPS scheme after 5 years of service, and the clock restarts then. Also, those joining since 2012 have reduced benefits compared to those who joined before then (on a like for like basis). Then in 2016 there were further changes for everyone in the NR section of RPS, and from that point on it effectively became a career average earning scheme for future service.

The scheme has also done very well in investment returns, so it’s in relatively good shape.

A large amount.
Don't be fooled into thinking that the 'Orange Army' are all directly employed by Network Rail even though they may be wearing orange HV kit branded Network Rail.

It is a requirement that your HV has the name of the Sentinel Sponsor of the individual visible on the back of the best / jacket. If you don’t work for NR, you shouldn’t be wearing NR HV.

 

[Romsey]

I can't quite be bothered to extract all the questions raised above, so I'll put together some answers to the best of my slightly out of date knowledge from things beyond my regular work.

As far as I know, the lifetime and inspection regime of track components is calculated on the number of axles and their loading passing over a given location or components. Axle hung traction motors cause more wear than non powered axles exerting the same load. Not something that I was involved with, but the track engineers got upset when stone trains were diverted onto a route which rarely saw heavy axle weight traffic. The loadings combined with the number of axles passing are then reflected in the track access charges. ( Which means a 5 car voyager used to be charged as much as an HST.)

As for the servicing interval for ahb's and other level crossings, I think it was based on bitter experience as different equipment was introduced. Plus a certain level of caution. If the installation has relays, they need to be checked for silver migration ( I think that is the term) on the contact points on relays. If that isn't sorted out, the result is a damaging arcing across the relay.

Hi Viz clothing should have the owners name printed on the label. My last NWR tabard - now used when cycling - certainly does.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

Really interesting examples, coming at this from the perspective of another industry, are you doing this work purely based on calendar time? A lot of industries are moving or have moved away from that approach because it's not always very efficient, with simple calendar time you can be going out and doing maintenance work when actually the condition of the equipment you are maintaining is still ok. Many are trying to move to maintenance based on the condition of the equipment, using measurements like the amount of operations or operating hours its seen, or carrying out inspections, checks, measurements and monitoring of the equipment and triggering work once there's some observable deterioration in condition which needs addressing.

For your example of the point noses, presumably there's some engineering and operational factors which cause the damage, be operations or axles crossing the points, so would you adjust the interval based on the traffic they've seen. Or, do an inspection at a set interval and trigger the maintenance if the condition has reached the level at which they need the re-welding?

Similarly with the automatic barriers, I can see they'd need regular visual inspections to check for damage, test operation, check drive systems but would you always maintain, or would you adjust the maintenance for the number of operations they've done, or in response to some measurements? Presumably the number of operations will vary depending on the track they're protecting, some barriers might have far more operations in a 12 month period than some on a quiet line, maintaining on a simple time basis you could be over-maintaining some and under-maintaining others.

A lot of signalling equipment has moved to condition based monitoring although the monitoring is used to identify imminent failures rather then reduce maintenance frequencies. Track maintenance regimes are driven by tonnage over the route so the higher tonnage the higher the track category also the higher the speed the tighter the tolerances that are required to be maintained so to a degree they already are led by usage. Furthermore the track measurement trains are constantly looking at condition.

The real issue with the cost of railways has been the relentless pursuit of safety over last two decades following on from the catastrophic accidents under Railtracks control. In particular staff safety has grown a huge overhead in safety requirements overlaid with a compliance regime that consumes vast amounts of time and paperwork. Furthermore every accident results in more roles being created with an armlet whereby you stand on site watching someone else doing a job. Yet even with this the staff tragedies we've seen over the last 18months have shown it still hasn't eradicated the risks. Winding this back won't be easy and absolutely we mustn't undermine staff safety but the relevance of many of these roles is debateable like Machine Controller.

However, its not maintenance resources that need cutting but the overheads in undertaking maintenance that need to be targeted and I would suggest possession management is an easy win. The Victorian approach of putting out detonators and stop boards needs to be modernised we put our faith in drivers to stop at red signals but as soon as a possession is involved we then deploy people to wonder about the infrastructure largely in darkness to do these roles.

 

[Class 170101]

Really interesting examples, coming at this from the perspective of another industry, are you doing this work purely based on calendar time? A lot of industries are moving or have moved away from that approach because it's not always very efficient, with simple calendar time you can be going out and doing maintenance work when actually the condition of the equipment you are maintaining is still ok. Many are trying to move to maintenance based on the condition of the equipment, using measurements like the amount of operations or operating hours its seen, or carrying out inspections, checks, measurements and monitoring of the equipment and triggering work once there's some observable deterioration in condition which needs addressing.

The problem with maintenance based on condition is that not everything deteriorates at the same rate or even the same items at the same given rate. That would mean in emperical terms to the railway a possession to fix a clip another to fix a point blade, another to do some welding, this equals three possessions in this example all of which could be disruptive to passengers three times over given today's safety Standards, indeed in Scotland red zone working I believe is now banned, rather than all the tasks being done at the same time even if the assets aren't quite in need of replacement but only one possession and one set of disruptive possessions to the passenger.

Picking up this one (purely as an example) - why annual? Why not every 9 months, or 15, or 36? Given the standard of (most of) the signalling / Level crossing kit installed in the last 20 years, you would hope it lasts longer than its predecessors. Especially now there is so much remote monitoring equipment. I know from experience that some kit simply does not need checking at the frequency it currently is, and also that a not insignificant % of faults are caused during the maintenance process.


RPS is indeed good - but not as good as it was. Since 2012, new NR staff can only enter the RPS scheme after 5 years of service, and the clock restarts then. Also, those joining since 2012 have reduced benefits compared to those who joined before then (on a like for like basis). Then in 2016 there were further changes for everyone in the NR section of RPS, and from that point on it effectively became a career average earning scheme for future service.

The scheme has also done very well in investment returns, so it’s in relatively good shape.

Whilst I agree with your point about stuff lasting longer than before,were we not more tolerant of failures and the methods used to work around those failures, say 20 years ago as a society compared to now, so in fact it gets maintained more often than needed to avoid difficult questions if it should fail and an incident happen in failure mode? In reference to the Level Crossings specifically just look at the kit installed between Norwich and Sheringham and the near miss that happened there in the last 18 months?

Your pension remarks are depressing to be honest in that what are we storing up for the future - pensioners in poverty, stuck at home and potentially health problems all to be picked up by the Health and Social care system of the future - inevitably will cost more in the long run for taxpayers compared to better pensions where people go out and about and don't become sick in their retirement.

 

[Annetts key]

All level crossings that are provided with signalling equipment require an annual inspection and various tests to confirm that all the control systems are working as designed. It’s a very comprehensive check list, including the state of the road markings and the signage. As far as the railway is concerned, this interface between it and the public has to proven to be working correctly. Because of the high profile and because of the possible consequences of what could happen in the event that it failed in an unsafe manner and a road vehicle ended up on the crossing as a train passed over the crossing. Think of it as a MOT for level crossings.

There are other three monthly minor services, such as checking the road lights and the boom lights, checking hydraulic oil level, plus various other checks. But the detail depends on which type of crossing and the type of crossing equipment that is installed.

Remote condition monitoring is being hailed as such a wonderful thing. But in the real world, it does not always work as well as people think. It’s only practical to monitor some things. For example, there is no remote condition monitoring system that can tell when a treadle arm needs renewing due to wear.

 

[Highlandspring]

indeed in Scotland red zone working I believe is now banned

Scotland Route banned unassisted red zone working in June 2013. After that only Motherwell DU was allowed to use assisted red zone working (with LOWS) for track patrolling on the West Coast Main Line but this was banned in 2019 following a series of nasty near miss events.

 

[Class360/1]

What does red zone working mean?

 

[Annetts key]

LOWS is the worst thing I have ever seen.

What does red zone working mean?

Trains run as normal. The safety of the staff on or near the line relies on a person acting as a lookout. It is this persons job to shout, blow a whistle or horn to warn the staff to get clear of the line before the train arrives.

The railway actually dropped the terms ‘red zone’ and ‘green zone’ some time ago, but the old terms live on.

 

[Leicester_Loya]

We've not used 'red zone' for over a year now, ever since the Port Talbot fatalities. I know other areas and depots still use it, but it's becoming less and less frequent and I believe it'll no longer be used at all nationwide soon.

 

[Class360/1]

LOWS is the worst thing I have ever seen.


Trains run as normal. The safety of the staff on or near the line relies on a person acting as a lookout. It is this persons job to shout, blow a whistle or horn to warn the staff to get clear of the line before the train arrives.

The railway actually dropped the terms ‘red zone’ and ‘green zone’ some time ago, but the old terms live on.

We've not used 'red zone' for over a year now, ever since the Port Talbot fatalities. I know other areas and depots still use it, but it's becoming less and less frequent and I believe it'll no longer be used at all nationwide soon.

Thanks

 

[Bald Rick]

We've not used 'red zone' for over a year now, ever since the Port Talbot fatalities. I know other areas and depots still use it, but it's becoming less and less frequent and I believe it'll no longer be used at all nationwide soon.

Recently suspended in Southern too, I’ve heard. I’m not 100% sure.

In reference to the Level Crossings specifically just look at the kit installed between Norwich and Sheringham and the near miss that happened there in the last 18 months?

That was a design / installation issue, not a maintenance issue.

Your pension remarks are depressing to be honest in that what are we storing up for the future - pensioners in poverty, stuck at home and potentially health problems all to be picked up by the Health and Social care system of the future - inevitably will cost more in the long run for taxpayers compared to better pensions where people go out and about and don't become sick in their retirement.

It’s still a good pension scheme. Someone joining as a signaller now at, say, the age of 22, getting a couple of promotions to reach, say, a Grade 8 post from the age of 30, and working until retirement age of 65, will still finish with a pension of about £30k pa at today’s prices.

 

[eldomtom2]

We've not used 'red zone' for over a year now, ever since the Port Talbot fatalities. I know other areas and depots still use it, but it's becoming less and less frequent and I believe it'll no longer be used at all nationwide soon.

The term or the working practice? From context I assume the latter.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

Recently suspended in Southern too, I’ve heard. I’m not 100% sure.

Inevitable outcome given recent accidents but now pushes majority of maintenance into possession working which drives the costs up further under current arrangements. There's probably no way back from this position so the industry will need to organise itself to run the railway on this basis but that will need changes to working practices and an access regime that balances running the railway for what its therefore but keeping it safe and efficient. London Underground has been run this way for decades so must experience that can be shared.

 

[david1212]

How much of NR's work is contracted out?

A large amount.
Don't be fooled into thinking that the 'Orange Army' are all directly employed by Network Rail even though they may be wearing orange HV kit branded Network Rail.

Many former in house (BR, RT & NR) rail staff now work for agencies etc eg as Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers eg for such firms as US owned Aecom.

There are several firms supplying labourers for NR, often carting them long distances eg from S. Wales Valleys to and from NR work sites; they are not paid for the journey time.

While contracts for routine work were in place I can understand NR letting them run to expiry rather than seeking early termination to bring in house.

What generally I do not understand is why then they were re-tendered not brought in-house. There must be a huge cost to both sides in issuing the requirements, submitting the tenders, reviewing them, writing the contracts not least as where split the need to ensure that everything is covered but nothing is duplicated then the ongoing additional tier of management and the financial money-go-round.

I saw the overall additional costs to the main customer of moving from in-house to outsourcing at a simple level where I was working around 15 years ago. The direct objective of reducing one budget was achieved but added together the increase to others was greater.
One factor was requiring a fixed price so the supplier bases their costings on the worst case scenario. Here specifically equipment used 24 hours per day when overall 15 hours was typical.

 

[SilentGrade]

If you're trying to save serious money on internal payroll in an organisation that's the shape of NR, it has to come out of lower pay bands.

From that spreadsheet:
89% of NR staff are on salaries between £20k and £60k, representing 83% of the wages bill.
0.4% of NR staff are on salaries over £120k, representing somewhere around 1%-2% of the wages bill.

To save 1% of your payroll bill you can either lose more than half of your senior management. Or about 1% headcount from the bottom pay bands, often achievable without any redundancies by just slightly reducing recruitment. If you want to save any more than that 1% then it isn't feasible to take it just out of top pay bands.

Middle management is often a better place to look for cuts than senior leadership. (In practice you do both at the same time.)
And in most organisations, losing e.g. a third of middle management represents a decent saving.

NR look reasonably lean here already from that spreadsheet but I'd be surprised if the type of thing from the RMT press release was going on and management weren't also about to be hit by some kind of restructuring, even a modest one.

The real elephant in the room on this one is the recent PPF restructure which, in some areas at least, led to at least a doubling in the number of Bands 1-2 management posts.

Rightly or wrongly it has led to jobs that were once done by 1 person now being done by 2 or 3 all on the same 80-100k salary and it just looks unsustainable now that COVID has hit.

In hindsight it would seem that pressing ahead with it through the pandemic (although granted most of the groundwork had been done before hand) seems like the wrong call, and I know amongst many front line staff it’s already being used as a stick to beat the company with now all the talk of ‘efficiencies’ and ‘leaner working’ is coming out.

 

[LAX54]

Should patrolling on foot be the way we 'maintain' the railway in the 21st Century? Surely a train is the way to be doing this now?

Sitting on a train, in the cab at 100mph, or even 75mph, lots of things could be / will be missed.

Signaller

Unless it's down for resignalling, then you will always be needed, and even if you are resignalled, odds on you will be able to move to the new location.