Northern franchise to end 1 March 2020 with Operator of Last Resort to take over

[Killingworth]

I'd point out that Northern's fleet improvement programme, lengthening of trains, and additional services are all adding to their Track and Station Access charges. It's beyond me to work out how big a percentage of their operating costs this is likely to be, but others may be able to make sense of the tables of data linked from this Network Rail page; CP6 access charges

I understand that in addition to running more rolling stock the newer trains have more equipment that requires more power and consumes more diesel than Pacers. Arriva had challenging targets to reduce diesel and electricity consumption. They'll be glad to escape from them.

 

[TUC]

Still Northern haven't fixed some of the basics on the new trains, such as them incorrectly announcing at Halifax that the train is too long for the platform and so some doors will not open. That just causes needless anxiety and last minute movement around the train. It underlines that they seem incapable of paying attention to detail.

 

[SteveM70]

Still Northern haven't fixed some of the basics on the new trains, such as them incorrectly announcing at Halifax that the train is too long for the platform and so some doors will not open. That just causes needless anxiety and last minute movement around the train. It underlines that they seem incapable of paying attention to detail.

To me it’s one of two things:

- the problem is so deeply embedded in the on-train system that it can’t readily be fixed

- they don’t care

Neither of them is good

 

[Roast Veg]

Grant Shapps' announcement, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/a-passenger-focused-railway, explicitly stated:

So the main reason for the OLR takeover at this time is financial, not punctuality or reliability. It follows that DfT will have to increase the Northern subsidy levels above those agreed with ARN, and go cap in hand to the Treasury to obtain the increased funding. Although not stated publicly, it would be highly surprising if DfT did not set OLR the objective of increasing revenue and reducing costs, to drive down the subsidy year on year as Arriva originally promised.

The stuff in the announcement about improving services for passengers appears to be largely spin, re-announcing things that ARN was doing/planning anyway (rollout of new trains, withdrawing Pacers, cascading 323s from WMT, ASLEF agreement to improve the reliability of Sunday services). The only new things mentioned are deep-cleaning the trains and a review of cleaning patterns - hardly major expenditure!

This is very much my understanding - any stability from service reduction will come from other operators reducing their operations. OLR are simply trying to balance the books internally, and how they go about that is up to them.

 

[Clip]

‘WE CARE ABOUT THE NORTH SO WE WILL TAKE NORTHERN BACK INTO PUBLIC OWNERSHIP”

Now that that’s over with, we will cut their train services too.

Anyone else hear the lead balloon?

Its the metro mayor of Manchester who has been pushing for this

 

[Clip]

To me it’s one of two things:

- the problem is so deeply embedded in the on-train system that it can’t readily be fixed

- they don’t care

Neither of them is good

Im sure they do but it would appear to be CAF who would be the ones to sort that out

 

[Mathew S]

The only new things mentioned are deep-cleaning the trains and a review of cleaning patterns - hardly major expenditure!

They may not need major expenditure but they're exactly the kind of little things that need to be got right. Passengers - and I include myself here - will put up with a lot IF the basics are right. Better cleaning, fixing broken seats, accurate communication and good customer service are all cheap, but make a huge difference to passengers' experience.

 

[CaptainHaddock]

But did Monty Python ever need a direct train from Lincoln to Kings Cross?

The Pythons knew a fair bit about train timetables....

http://www.montypython.net/scripts/railway.php

 

[WesternLancer]

The Pythons knew a fair bit about train timetables....

http://www.montypython.net/scripts/railway.php

Good point!

 

[HSTEd]

If the objective was to where possible, eliminate diesel trains running on electrified track, by providing "relay" connections.
How much of the diesel fleet could be rendered surplus to requirements?

 

[TUC]

Its the metro mayor of Manchester who has been pushing for this

The problem is, it runs the risk of adding to the misconception too often in government that 'the North' means Manchester (And yes, I'm well aware of how the capacity issues on a couple of lines within Manchester have wider effect, but I do still think there's a risk that we'll end up with a timetable built around Manchester's needs.)

 

[Mathew S]

The problem is, it runs the risk of adding to the misconception too often in government that 'the North' means Manchester (And yes, I'm well aware of how the capacity issues on a couple of lines within Manchester have wider effect, but I do still think there's a risk that we'll end up with a timetable built around Manchester's needs.)

It's the nature of the rail network in the north though isn't it. Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, York, and Newcastle are the big centres that will be well served. Anything else is a bit silly, really, because ultimately that's where the tracks go.

 

[WesternLancer]

The problem is, it runs the risk of adding to the misconception too often in government that 'the North' means Manchester (And yes, I'm well aware of how the capacity issues on a couple of lines within Manchester have wider effect, but I do still think there's a risk that we'll end up with a timetable built around Manchester's needs.)

I assumed the Government thought 'The North' was High Barnet....

 

[TUC]

It's the nature of the rail network in the north though isn't it. Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, York, and Newcastle are the big centres that will be well served. Anything else is a bit silly, really, because ultimately that's where the tracks go.

If only those other big centres will get equal al attention. It all seems to be about Manchester.

 

[Mathew S]

If only those other big centres will get equal al attention. It all seems to be about Manchester.

To be honest, I disagree. Nothing like enough attention, money, or resource goes into the rail network in/around Manchester. Not saying that isn't also true of other cities, but it's 100% true for Manchester.

 

[CHAPS2034]

If only those other big centres will get equal al attention. It all seems to be about Manchester.

Have you watched the video of the last TfN meeting in Leeds?

There was agreement from all parties that the problems in Manchester were causing issues across the North and therefore the priority should be to sort these out, which would immediately have benefits across the network in other cities.

They agreed that initially some trains should be withdrawn from Castlefield and went away to agree what these should be. From other threads on here, it is suggested that the changes will come in at the December 2020 timetable change.

 

[bobbyrail]

It's the nature of the rail network in the north though isn't it. Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, York, and Newcastle are the big centres that will be well served. Anything else is a bit silly, really, because ultimately that's where the tracks go.

Oh and there is Carlisle, Preston, Lancaster, Blackpool and some may say Crewe as the north west as well (north of Watford anyway).

To be honest, I disagree. Nothing like enough attention, money, or resource goes into the rail network in/around Manchester. Not saying that isn't also true of other cities, but it's 100% true for Manchester.

You must have missed the electrification of the Chat moss line then!

 

[CHAPS2034]

You must have missed the electrification of the Chat moss line then!

If you read Mathew S's post properly you will see he said

Nothing like enough attention, money, or resource goes into the rail network in/around Manchester. [/QUOTE]

 

[Bletchleyite]

If the objective was to where possible, eliminate diesel trains running on electrified track, by providing "relay" connections.
How much of the diesel fleet could be rendered surplus to requirements?

Not as much as you might think, to be honest, unless you go to extremes e.g. Buxton truncated to Hazel Grove Ormskirk-style which would be highly unpopular.

 

[Mathew S]

If you read Mathew S's post properly you will see he said

Indeed.

You must have missed the electrification of the Chat moss line then!

That's a fabulous example of the problem though isn't it. Electrifying one line while doing nothing to increase capacity through the bottleneck at the end of it helps nobody, and just causes more problems and is partly why Northern - and TPE - are in the state they are. As others have said, spending the money on solving the Manchester (Castlefield Corridor) problem will benefit passengers from Liverpool to Newcastle to Glasgow to Sheffield to York to Edinburgh because it takes away one of the huge causes of delay.

Is any of that going to be solved by changing the franchise? Is it fairy cakes. But, the point is that the Arriva franchise was bid for on the basis that the infrastructure improvements would happen, and that's a big part of the reason why it turned out not to be financially viable.

No franchise, or other system of running the railway, can run the service passengers demand without enormous infrastructure investment. It can't happen. There's been too much cutting of corners over too many years and the network is operating at breaking point, or even beyond it. Of course that needs to happen across the country but, right now, for Northern, the biggest single problem is Manchester, so that's got to be first in the queue.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

That's a fabulous example of the problem though isn't it. Electrifying one line while doing nothing to increase capacity through the bottleneck at the end of it helps nobody, and just causes more problems and is partly why Northern - and TPE - are in the state they are. As others have said, spending the money on solving the Manchester (Castlefield Corridor) problem will benefit passengers from Liverpool to Newcastle to Glasgow to Sheffield to York to Edinburgh because it takes away one of the huge causes of delay.

On the Chat Moss route, on top of the electrification, NR resignalled both ends with the latest ROC kit, quadrupled Roby-Huyton, remodelled Ordsall Lane Jn at the same time as installing the Chord, and rebuilt the approach to Lime St.
So there's been no lack of infrastructure investment costing megabucks.
Like the rest of the Northern Hub plan in Manchester, it just hasn't worked.
Cutting back on the Stalybridge electrification, after running out of CP5 money, didn't help with Victoria's problems.
None of that is anything to do with the TOCs.

 

[Starmill]

To me it’s one of two things:

- the problem is so deeply embedded in the on-train system that it can’t readily be fixed

- they don’t care

Neither of them is good

I think that a combination of both is fairly likely.

 

[ainsworth74]

I think that a combination of both is fairly likely.

Personally I'm not sure that it's that they don't care but more that they don't have time to care. I've long felt that Northern's main managerial problem is that since probably shortly before the May 18 timetable change and certainly afterwards they've been in near constant firefighting mode and just not able to get on top of the situation.

You had the May 18 timetable collapse which took months to get back to a state of even vague equilibrium. You had the late running delivery of their new trains and the their PRM compliance works (which was itself quite chaotic seemingly in part because of different ROSCOs having different ideas about how to go about it). You had the RMT dispute. You had issues with ASLEF and working Sunday's on the west side. You had driver training issues on the new stock on the west side. You had the new trains arrive and not do so fault free. Etc etc. I personally doubt that Northern's management don't care. I just don't think that they have the time nor ability to worry about the basics whilst the roof is on fire.

Indeed I think you could have had Chris Green, Bob Reid and Gerard Fiennes or whatever other railway management supremo you care to mention in charge at Northern and it would have been fraught. Perhaps such a "dream team" might have been able to handle things well enough that the OLR wouldn't have been required but I doubt it would be a shining beacon of excellence.

 

[Djgr]

Personally I'm not sure that it's that they don't care but more that they don't have time to care. I've long felt that Northern's main managerial problem is that since probably shortly before the May 18 timetable change and certainly afterwards they've been in near constant firefighting mode and just not able to get on top of the situation.

You had the May 18 timetable collapse which took months to get back to a state of even vague equilibrium. You had the late running delivery of their new trains and the their PRM compliance works (which was itself quite chaotic seemingly in part because of different ROSCOs having different ideas about how to go about it). You had the RMT dispute. You had issues with ASLEF and working Sunday's on the west side. You had driver training issues on the new stock on the west side. You had the new trains arrive and not do so fault free. Etc etc. I personally doubt that Northern's management don't care. I just don't think that they have the time nor ability to worry about the basics whilst the roof is on fire.

Indeed I think you could have had Chris Green, Bob Reid and Gerard Fiennes or whatever other railway management supremo you care to mention in charge at Northern and it would have been fraught. Perhaps such a "dream team" might have been able to handle things well enough that the OLR wouldn't have been required but I doubt it would be a shining beacon of excellence.

Whilst a valid argument, Northern could have chosen to operate with additional resource at managerial level to address these and all the other "minor" issues but instead they appear to opted to attempt to do this all on a shoestring.

 

[HH]

Might not have been a steamimg pile of ordure though. Shame it wasn't a First TOC; they could have parachuted in Mark Hopwood (again).

 

[hwl]

Personally I'm not sure that it's that they don't care but more that they don't have time to care. I've long felt that Northern's main managerial problem is that since probably shortly before the May 18 timetable change and certainly afterwards they've been in near constant firefighting mode and just not able to get on top of the situation.

You had the May 18 timetable collapse which took months to get back to a state of even vague equilibrium. You had the late running delivery of their new trains and the their PRM compliance works (which was itself quite chaotic seemingly in part because of different ROSCOs having different ideas about how to go about it). You had the RMT dispute. You had issues with ASLEF and working Sunday's on the west side. You had driver training issues on the new stock on the west side. You had the new trains arrive and not do so fault free. Etc etc. I personally doubt that Northern's management don't care. I just don't think that they have the time nor ability to worry about the basics whilst the roof is on fire.

Indeed I think you could have had Chris Green, Bob Reid and Gerard Fiennes or whatever other railway management supremo you care to mention in charge at Northern and it would have been fraught. Perhaps such a "dream team" might have been able to handle things well enough that the OLR wouldn't have been required but I doubt it would be a shining beacon of excellence.

Northern went from a no growth (effectively no change) franchise to a big change one but change requires significant extra resource above. business as usual levels which just wasn't budgeted for properly in their bid thinking.

 

[ainsworth74]

Whilst a valid argument, Northern could have chosen to operate with additional resource at managerial level to address these and all the other "minor" issues but instead they appear to opted to attempt to do this all on a shoestring.

Is it a Northern decision? Would it not be Arriva (or possible even DB) to decide how to resource Northern management? Does the DfT need to sign off on such a change (they do after all have a large role to play in train crew establishment levels for instance)?

Northern went from a no growth (effectively no change) franchise to a big change one but change requires significant extra resource above. business as usual levels which just wasn't budgeted for properly in their bid thinking.

Perhaps but I'd argue that we don't know if they prepared for change properly or not as the change went so wrong that I don't think anyone would have predicated back in 2016 (or at least done so and be taken seriously) that it would have gone as badly as it did! If you told someone in April 2016 when the franchise was awarded that the May 2018 timetable change would be a catastrophic failure, that the Bolton corridor electrification would be years behind schedule, that the PRM works and new trains would be months late, that there would be over a year of industrial action from the RMT, that there would be massive training backlogs for drivers in the North West, etc I don't think they'd believe you. Northern probably could have withstood one of them maybe even two of them but to have that litany of things go wrong (many of which weren't even fully within their control)? I'm not sure anyone could budget the necessary resources for that.

 

[Robertj21a]

Is it a Northern decision? Would it not be Arriva (or possible even DB) to decide how to resource Northern management? Does the DfT need to sign off on such a change (they do after all have a large role to play in train crew establishment levels for instance)?



Perhaps but I'd argue that we don't know if they prepared for change properly or not as the change went so wrong that I don't think anyone would have predicated back in 2016 (or at least done so and be taken seriously) that it would have gone as badly as it did! If you told someone in April 2016 when the franchise was awarded that the May 2018 timetable change would be a catastrophic failure, that the Bolton corridor electrification would be years behind schedule, that the PRM works and new trains would be months late, that there would be over a year of industrial action from the RMT, that there would be massive training backlogs for drivers in the North West, etc I don't think they'd believe you. Northern probably could have withstood one of them maybe even two of them but to have that litany of things go wrong (many of which weren't even fully within their control)? I'm not sure anyone could budget the necessary resources for that.

I fear that you are wasting your breath. There's a hard core of Northern/Arriva haters who will never accept anything that doesn't align with their agenda.

 

[hwl]

Is it a Northern decision? Would it not be Arriva (or possible even DB) to decide how to resource Northern management? Does the DfT need to sign off on such a change (they do after all have a large role to play in train crew establishment levels for instance)?



Perhaps but I'd argue that we don't know if they prepared for change properly or not as the change went so wrong that I don't think anyone would have predicated back in 2016 (or at least done so and be taken seriously) that it would have gone as badly as it did! If you told someone in April 2016 when the franchise was awarded that the May 2018 timetable change would be a catastrophic failure, that the Bolton corridor electrification would be years behind schedule, that the PRM works and new trains would be months late, that there would be over a year of industrial action from the RMT, that there would be massive training backlogs for drivers in the North West, etc I don't think they'd believe you. Northern probably could have withstood one of them maybe even two of them but to have that litany of things go wrong (many of which weren't even fully within their control)? I'm not sure anyone could budget the necessary resources for that.

Plenty of other franchises (I see the hidden side of many currently) are significantly under resourced for change too it isn't just Northern. TPE/ Abellio Anglia /TfW are similar to Northern. Abellio Scotrail was/is noticeably better but still under resourced. Too early to tell on EMR.
Arriva Rail London seems noticeably better resourced than other Arriva TOCs for change but that may be TfL influence. Abellio are generally under resourced for change but EMR looks a bit better than Anglia / Scotrail / LM so lesson might have been learned for the first 3 attempts.
Rumsfeld had something useful to say on this matter, some owning groups are just resourced for known knowns in change terms.

Northern has lots of excellent staff - they are just spread to thinly

 

[hwl]

I fear that you are wasting your breath. There's a hard core of Northern/Arriva haters who will never accept anything that doesn't align with their agenda.

I'm not a Northern/Arriva hater, just pointing out they didn't have enough resources to implement change - it would still be problematic even if there had been far fewer problems. This isn't the only franchise or owning group affected.