Reflections on a railway career

Network Rail Chief Executive John Armitt looked back over his railway career when he addressed the Fourth Friday Club in March 2007

 

John Armitt spent most of his career in the construction industry, coming to the railways quite late on. After 27 years with John Laing, ending with him holding the chairmanship of the company, his railway career began with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, where he was Chief Executive of Union Railways.

The CTRL in its present incarnation dates from the decision announced at the Conservative Party conference in October 1993 to accept the Ove Arup proposal to take an eastern approach to the capital and terminate at St Pancras. This was a defeat for British Rail, which had favoured a southern approach. It was politics which had dictated the change of tack, with the regeneration opportunities in the Thames Gateway corridor a major factor.

François Mitterrand, the French president, famously remarked that the opening of the Channel Tunnel made it possible to leave Paris and ‘speed across the plains of France on TGV Nord, before ambling through the apple orchards of Kent' en route to the British capital. This jibe is commonly thought to have spurred the British government into authorising the construction of the CTRL (now known as High Speed 1). Apocryphal or not, John Armitt is convinced of this: until you have both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer supporting a major rail project, it is not going to happen. The French president may just have swung it for Britain's first high-speed line by forging that unanimity.

High Speed 1 will be open throughout this November. Section One, opened in 2003, has proved so far to be very reliable: the technology used on it, largely the same as that used on the French high-speed lines, has been successful.

 

Railtrack got it wrong

At the helm of CTRL in the 1990s, John Armitt had dealings with the privatised railway infrastructure provider, Railtrack. He could see disaster looming in the way Railtrack did business. ‘They thought being in the private sector means you beat up everybody in sight. Wrong. Being in the private sector is all about survival, and you survive through compromise.'

As we all know, Railtrack did not survive - with fateful consequences for John Armitt. ‘I was sitting at home one night at about ten o'clock when the phone rang. It was the administrators, Ernst & Young, asking if I would be prepared to “help out” at Railtrack. I replied “help out”, what do you mean? At which they asked me to come and be Chief Executive.'

When he arrived at Railtrack House at the end of 2001 John Armitt found a railway in disarray. A series of accidents had led to the industry losing its nerve, punctuality had collapsed and costs had skyrocketed. Railtrack's flagship investment scheme, the West Coast Route Modernisation (WCRM), was in disarray.

The new team immediately set about stabilising the business, with the retention of key employees the first challenge. There were retention bonuses for the most valued - ‘but I suspect these made very little difference, these people would have stayed with the game' Mr Armitt told the Fourth Friday Club.

Personnel issues were also to the fore soon after not-for-profit Network Rail took over from Railtrack in October 2002. ‘Project Violet', which would reduce the headcount by 1,000, showed the staff that the new managers were serious about shaking up the railway.

With fresh focus on improving performance and driving costs down while maintaining safety, the next job was to secure a fair settlement from the Office of Rail Regulation. ‘I take my hat off to (former Rail Regulator) Tom Winsor,' said Mr Armitt, ‘as it was not good news to HM Government to be told that the railway would cost £7billion more than previously thought'.

The next landmark was bringing track maintenance in-house, a move which has delivered £100million in savings every year just by taking out the mark-ups in the old contracts. Also, Network Rail moved from seven regions into a single, national organisational structure. ‘It amazed me that for the simple job of keeping two bits of iron in place, there were seven different ways of doing it… if there is a task to be done, we have to decide what is the best way of doing it, and apply that nationally.'

 

Getting the West Coast under control

WCRM was arguably the project that brought down Railtrack. The company had gone into it with bucketfuls of optimism about what could be achieved, but there were technical problems, it was unclear who was taking on the role of the client, and the specification was ill-defined. On top of all this, the contract with Virgin was very one sided: ‘it was a nightmare, if a beautiful piece of work on the part of Richard (Bowker, then at Virgin) and Tom (Winsor, then in private practice working for Virgin)'.

The newly-formed Network Rail and the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) grasped WCRM by the scruff of the neck and set it back on track. The consulting engineers Bechtel were called in to advise on the project, Network Rail took on the client role and Richard Bowker, by then at the SRA, decided what outputs Virgin would get. These included tilt operation, but at 125mph rather than the 140mph first envisaged. The new tactics were successful, with ‘the South West Manchester resignalling being the only date that has been missed on WCRM in the past three or four years'.

 

Building relationships with the TOCs

Network Rail has been diligent about getting on better with the train operating companies (TOCs) than its predecessor. One sign of this is the joint control centres which have been set up around the country. The next step, argues Mr Armitt, should be to have joint staffing of these centres, rather than a Network Rail person and a TOC person shadowing one another. ‘Different TOCs have different levels of enthusiasm for that challenge.'

Joint Performance Improvement Plans (JPIPs) have been set up with the TOCs, with both sides working together to get the trains running on time. ‘The overall consequence has been that things are working better.'

 

Enhancement

The 2005 Railways Act gave Network Rail new responsibilities, with publication of Route Utilisation Strategies (RUS) one of the jobs transferred across from the SRA. The RUS that have been published under the aegis of Network Rail have been widely praised for not ducking the difficult questions about capacity on today's busy network.

With costs being brought under control, Network Rail is able to be more expansive than when first set up. ‘We have added the “E” for enhancement to OM&R (operations, mainenance and renewal)' said Mr Armitt. ‘We are now undertaking 2,500 projects every year, mostly on time and on budget.'

On budget maybe, but often very expensive budgets. ‘Recent price tags have included £24million for a new Parkway station, and £150million for 60km of route resignalling - that is an awful lot of money for a few signals.' Mr Armitt said that this means rail is in danger of appearing more expensive than other modes, ‘it becomes comparatively much cheaper to provide capacity on the road network - rail has to do lots of other things if it is to sustain its position'.

 

Safety conscious

Mr Armitt was speaking just a few weeks after the Grayrigg accident, when safety was at the forefront of everyone's minds. First and foremost, the Network Rail Chief Executive sought to point out that rail is a very safe mode of transport: on a sliding scale, if rail is 1, air is 1.5, bus is 1.8, car is 17 and motorbike a worrying 430.

Incidents like Grayrigg make the industry examine its procedures carefully. ‘There is enormous pressure on us in terms of follow-up, and by the time this is over we will have had such a close look at our inspection and maintenance procedures that hopefully we will end up with a better regime.'

Separately from Grayrigg, Network Rail has been keen to learn lessons from catastrophes in other industries such as the explosion at the BP plant in the USA. ‘We are keen that those on the shopfloor, so to speak, should be responsible for their own safety and that of their workmates and customers. So we are cutting the staffing of the central safety organisation from 150 to 30 and pushing responsibility for safety out from Euston down the line.'

 

Preparing for the future

The railway has come a long way since Network Rail was set up in 2002. Nearly £1.2billion of cost savings are being made in Control Period 3, at the same time as the railway is carrying more passengers and more freight. Delay minutes have come down by 30% and punctuality has risen from 78% to 88%. Performance has improved to the extent that the figures can now be heavily influenced by individual incidents: for example, the storm at the end of January registered the equivalent of ten days of delay in just one day, as lineside trees came down and other wind-related incidents hit the railway. The January storm was a major cause in the recent evaporation of two thirds of the 600,000 delay minutes improvement Network Rail was expecting in the financial year to April 2007; cable theft has been another significant factor.

But the performance nut has largely been cracked, and most people are now satisfied about levels of punctuality. The new priority is to build on the success story and grow the railway.

It is important to establish a seven-day railway, where weekend journeys are not constantly disrupted by engineering work. And the industry must continue its endeavours to build environmental and financial sustainability, in order to secure the continuing high levels of investment needed if future demand is to be met.

These are challenges that Network Rail must meet without John Armitt, as he steps down from the Chief Executive's post in favour of his deputy, Iain Coucher, at the end of July. ‘For me it has been good, I have had five years of constant challenge' he said of his time at Network Rail. ‘I can confidently say that Network Rail has the best senior team I have ever worked with.'

 

Attendees

 

Henry Hopkins, Accelerator Solutions

Dave Angove, Advantage Technical Consulting

Bill Brown, Alcatel-Lucent

William Wilson, Alstom Transport Information Solutions

David Felton, Alstom Transport Information Solutions/Balfour Beatty JV

David Arundale, Amey

Andrew Dicomites, Ansaldo Signalling

Adrian Sinfield, Argo Consulting Services

Stefan Sanders, Arup

John Dennis, Association of Train Operating Companies

Hassard Stacpoole, Association of Train Operating Companies

Douglas Chisholm, Atkins Rail

Mark Cowlard, Atkins Rail

Erica Collier, Autoglym

Guest of Autoglym

Andy Holt, Bailey Rail

David Bill, Balfour Beatty

Stuart Thomson, BDB

Ted Stephens, Bentley

David S. Berman, Berman Associates

Stuart Watson, Bingham Rail

Charles Burch

Peter Barber, Blake Lapthorn Tarlo Lyons

Alan Browning, Cambridgeshire County Council

Trevor Whelan, Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport

Dennis Ciborowski

Bill Clarke

Nick Comfort

Piers Connor

John Barnard, Corus Group

David Shipley, CSRE

Richard Stone, Cummins

Francis de Wilde, Data Display

Phil Holden, Delta Rail

Adam Perry, Delta Rail

Zara Skelton, Dentonwildesapte

Simon Wootton, Detica

Oliver Ueck, Deutsche Bahn

Paul Hirst, DLA Piper

Mark Elliott, E. C. Harris

Robert Lane, EDF Energy

Andrea Bennett, Edmund Nuttall

Andrew Hall, Ellis Fairbank

Jim Newsom, Ellis Fairbank

Mike Etwell

Jeremy Gardner, Faber Maunsell

Mike Horne, Fifth Dimension Associates

William Barter, First Class Partnerships

Phillip Armstrong, Gardiner & Theobald LLP

Phil Amos, GB Railfreight

Adam Street, GE Transportation

Tim Holmes, Gifford

Alex Hynes, Go-Ahead Rail

George Thompson, Grant Rail

David Watters, Halcrow

Steve Broadley, Hansen Information Technologies UK

Chris Heaps

Hirofumi Ojima, Hitachi

Alistair Dormer, Hitachi

Martin Lambert, Hoerbiger UK

Steve Parker, Hornagold & Hills

Andy Norris, Hornagold & Hills

Neil Howard

Paul Sheaf, HSBC

Tony Teague, Human Systems

Edmund Hutton

Robin Hirsch, Imperial College

Liz Bird, Interfleet Technology

James Drummond, Invensys Rail Group

Graham Roberts, Inova Multimedia (UK)

Peter Tomlinson, Iosis Associates

Richard Andrews, Jacobs

Leila Frances, Keolis

Alison Stansfield, Laser Rail

Andrew Allum, L.E.K.

John Seaston, L.E.K.

David Bishop, Lloyd's Register Rail

Mark Hopwood, London Lines

Paul Vellacott, London Underground

Adrian Gould, May Gurney

Chris Meakin

Dorcas Ariyo-Francis, Metronet

Richard Turner, Metronet

Barry Woodgett, Mid-Norfolk Railway

John Woods, Mid-Norfolk Railway

David Pepper, MM Partnership

James Abbott, Modern Railways

Ken Cordner, Modern Railways

Paul Edwards, Modern Railways

Roger Ford, Modern Railways

Tony Miles, Modern Railways

James Martin, Mott MacDonald

David Straw, Mouchel Parkman

David Franks, National Express

Jeremy Long, MTR Corporation

John Segal, MVA

Richard Talbot, National Car Parks

Berry Sas, Ned Railways

John Armitt, Network Rail

Mike Christelow, Network Rail

Clive David Smith, Norton Rose

Paul Hadley, Office of Rail Regulation

John Orchard, Orchard Consulting

Guest of John Orchard

Richard King, Osborne Rail

Chris Rowe, Osborne Rail

John Parker

Greg Goodman, Parsons Brinckerhoff

Duncan Murray, Parsons Brinckerhoff

Geoff Ingham,  Passenger Transport Networks

Tony Small, Pell Frischmann

Gordon Pettitt

Stan Price, Price Project Services

Mohamed Bechir, Rail Gourmet

Rupert Brennan-Brown, Rail PR

Gaynor Anderson, Rail Systems & Standards Board

Steve Holmes, Railtech

Andy Parsons, Railtech

Chris Green, Railway Forum

Mark James, Railway Forum

Paul Martin, Railway Forum

Graham Coombs, Railway Industry Association

Richard Malins, Railway Study Association

Graham Ransome, Ransome Engineering

Murray Farrant, Ridge & Partners

Noel Aspill, Renoir Group

Michael Hedley, Saft Batteries

Ian Stelfox, Scott Wilson Railways

John Self OBE

Mike North, Serco Assurance

John Ellard, Shearman & Sterling (London) LLP

Andrew Lister, Siemens

Martin Leeks, Siemens

Erol Baduna, Southern

Peter Staveley

Mary Bonar, Stephenson Harwood

Michael Hornsby, St Paul Travelers Insurance

Tim Fitch, Taylor Woodrow

Tony Telford

David Taylor, Thales

Peter Bulman, Transport for London

Phil Crook, Transys Projects

Anthony Cuming, Up + Cuming

Tony Isaacs, Variable Message Signs

Roger Everest, Voith

Paul Soor, Volo

Roland Albert, Vossloh

Tom Winsor, White & Case LLP

Steve Wright, White Young Green

Iain Court, White Young Green