Snow Hill route recovery plan – November 21

Friday, 9 June 2023
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November 2021 issue

25,000 driver training days lost due to the pandemic, 8,000 missed on the Snow Hill lines alone.

While it could be said that the entire railway network suffered during the pandemic, the impacts on our Snow Hill route have been much more profound and long-lasting due to the significant delays to our new driver recruitment and training programme.

We know passengers on the route are suffering too many delayed and cancelled trains, we know that this is not acceptable, and we appreciate it could make coming back to travel by train less attractive, so we want to let you know what we’re doing to get back on track.

In recognition of the scale of the recent issues in the area, we have developed a comprehensive route recovery plan. This is made up of 50 individual workstreams and has three overarching objectives:

  • Make incremental improvements to our performance and service provision whilst we continue to train our new drivers.
  • Make it easier for our customers when things go wrong.
  • Use the post-pandemic recovery to lay robust foundations for more resilience in the long term.

We now have a dedicated route service delivery manager, responsible for coordinating the recovery plan, as well as supporting the delivery of the 50 workstreams mentioned above and our communications and customer engagement activities, including this very blog.

“Since taking up the role in the autumn I’ve been focused on understanding what’s happening and the impact it's having on our customers on the Snow Hill Lines. We have seen a high number of delays and cancellations due to the impact of the pandemic on our training programme. While there’s no quick fix, I want you to know that everyone is working hard to manage our rosters and help passengers as best we can.” “Some of my main priorities include improving the information we provide to you when things go wrong, how we best use road replacement transport and making sure we continue to work ever closer with rail industry partners to make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction for customers.” - Cameron Bliss, Service Delivery Manager.

Cam Bliss at Worcester Foregate Street station.

On these pages, we’ll share the latest behind the scenes updates as well as explore some of the complexities that can sometimes hold us back from being able to act and adapt more quickly, such as how our services fit between other trains which also use the route.

Before we look into the detail of what we’re doing to put things right, let's address a few fundamental questions…

How did we get here?

Just like thousands of others, our business was turned upside down by Covid19. The real-time impacts of the pandemic were clear for us all to see; we delivered eight timetable changes, introduced social distancing measures across our stations and on trains as well as more regular cleaning regimes, only allowed essential travel, contended with high levels of workforce absence and all while our team of key workers became responsible for keeping other key workers like NHS staff on the move safely.

West Midlands Railway cleaner

Behind the scenes, we also had to make changes to keep our people safe. From training and mess rooms to more complex environments like workshop inspection pits and train cabs, we had to consider how to implement social distancing. Where this wasn’t possible, we had to find new ways of doing some critical tasks safely or suspend certain activities altogether if there was no safe alternative. From March 2020, this included stopping all training for new drivers, due to the limited size and enclosed nature of train cabs. With safety a top priority, this was the same for all train operators across the country but the timing was particularly impactful for us as we were at the very start of a large scale driver recruitment and training programme.

With our new recruits stood down and existing drivers not able to train on additional routes or new fleets, we knew this would limit traincrew deployment when restrictions eventually eased.

During the same period, as would be expected in normal times, many drivers have also retired or left the local depots, but due to the age profile of the local teams, the number of recent retirements has been higher than the average seen across other areas of the country. Had the pandemic not delayed our training programme, we would have expected to welcome 30 (approximately 20% of our team) newly qualified drivers to the Snow Hill lines since March 2020 to replace those due to retire.

The overall reduction in the size of our team, coupled with the delay to our training activities, has meant we have had to reduce the number of trains we run each day. The issue can also be compounded during disruption and by short-term sickness as we have fewer standby shifts built into our rosters.

Is anything else contributing to the problem?

In addition to the delays to our training programmes, the pandemic has also had a big impact on our new trains and fleet upgrade project. Over the last two years, we had expected to introduce 80 brand-new class 196 carriages and transfer many of our older class 170 diesel carriages to East Midlands Railway (EMR) & CrossCountry (XC) as part of a wider industry fleet allocation plan.

West midlands railway Class 196

All of these moves were affected by the pandemic, as the factories building new trains closed and traincrew across the industry couldn’t learn on the trains being transferred to their areas. We have worked with EMR, XC and Chiltern Railways as well as the Department for Transport (DfT) to make the best use of available carriages across all four operators. This has allowed us to retain the bulk of our class 170 fleet and take on additional class 172 units for the West Midlands, while we await our new trains being ready to hit the tracks.

Ensuring that we ran the longest trains possible throughout the pandemic meant that we had to re-plan fleet maintenance schedules and programmed inspections. Unfortunately, we were not always able to keep enough trains in service through the summer of 2021 during the height of the “pingdemic” which led to services running with fewer carriages than they should. With the various fleets in question now settled in their respective temporary homes, these issues have reduced during the autumn and the vast majority of services are now running with the full number of carriages as planned.

The combined effects of not enough drivers and carriages being available, as well as reduced numbers of commuters travelling has meant our timetable has had to change regularly. This means calling patterns, direct journeys and frequencies have all been affected and remain subject to change far more often than we, or our customers, are used to. With so many variables in play, we may still see short notice changes as the recovery plan takes effect, but the good news is the risk of this decreases with every week that passes and every new driver who qualifies.

So, what are we doing about it?

Training, training and more training

From the early stages of the first lockdown in the spring of 2020, it began to become clear that public health restrictions would go on for longer than first expected. We quickly started to discuss with our trade union colleagues and other train operators to see if and how training could take place with restrictions in place. As national testing capacity increased, we implemented a bubble system where a single trainee would be paired with a single instructor along with strict covid-19 testing. While this model proved to be safe and allowed us to bring our eager new recruits back to work, it represented a vast reduction in overall capacity. Following national guidelines, and our own risk assessments, this remained the only safe and practicable model until well into 2021, by which time the effects on our teams’ availability were significant.

Boy at West Midlands Railway training academy

To be best placed to start to fix the issues as soon as possible, we spent a lot of time planning for how we could quickly ramp up capacity in our academy as soon as it became safe to do so. A major element of this saw us recruit additional driver instructors for the local depots on the Snow Hill lines, enabling us to deliver three times our pre-pandemic training capacity to try and beat the backlog. Unfortunately, this is a double-edged sword as instructors must be qualified to drive the specific train and route they are teaching on, so we can only recruit from within our own teams. This means we have to balance the demands for extra trainers, without reducing the number of colleagues who are available each day to drive trains.

Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, the scale of the backlog means our teams are unlikely to be back up to full strength until summer 2022. Between now and then we will see incremental improvements in the number of available drivers and improvements in the train service performance & reliability.

Contingency planning

In our recovery plan, we’ve specifically acknowledged our increased vulnerability to short-notice disruption while we have less capacity in our rosters for standby crews. To address this, we have been regularly reviewing and developing our contingency plans.

When trains can’t run, our priority is to provide road replacement transport as quickly as possible. In the more urban areas of the route, it is usually faster for us to organise for your tickets to be accepted on local bus services. This is because these buses are already on the road and therefore there is less delay getting you on the move.

For more rural stations where public service buses often don’t operate close by or as frequently, we book dedicated coaches. We have hundreds of local coach operators signed up to provide vehicles in these circumstances. However, this can often take longer than we’d like to mobilise and depends on which operator has drivers and vehicles available on the day. The national HGV driver shortages are also having a notable effect on the availability of many of our road transport partners, with many operators seeing their driver, maintenance & planning teams being recruited by the road haulage industry over recent months.

To help mitigate these issues, our road replacement team have been signing up new companies to expand the pool of both service bus and coach operators we work with. This has seen some really helpful new agreements with the likes of First Bus in Worcester whose services cover areas of our network where emergency road replacement options have often been limited.

Again recognising our increased vulnerability to the effects of disruption, we’ve also looked at how we operate some of the busiest parts of the route in collaboration with Network Rail and Chiltern Railways. At Snow Hill station, we have a project underway that would allow us to split and join trains in the station. This will allow us to speed up the process for getting trains with faults back to our maintenance depot, as well as speed up the process of getting additional carriages back into service from the depot when they’ve been fixed. Ultimately it should mean fewer trains cancelled and quicker turnaround times for our engineering team.

Since the start of the autumn school term and heading into the festive season, we’ve also been working closely with schools and event organisers to put targeted plans in place to make sure we can look after these large groups of customers, despite the laid-out challenges we are facing. We now have relationships with many schools and colleges on the route and communicate directly with them about protecting trains around start and finish times. We have also brought in extra support at stations, including our head office team hitting the shop (or station) floor to help keep Christmas visitors safe, informed and on the move.

Thank you for taking the time to read this far, hopefully, these blogs will continue to explain our progress as we move into the new year - we want you to know that we are working really hard to put things right. We’d like to again acknowledge and apologise for the recent issues affecting your journeys and we hope you start to notice improvements in our service over the coming weeks and months as the recovery plan continues.

Check back next month for an update about Christmas plans and how our recovery plan is evolving as we head into the new year.

Find out more

If you’d like to speak to a member of the management team in person, we run a series of Whistle Stop Tour ‘meet the manager’ events throughout the year.

We run an online passenger panel to give you the chance to feedback your experiences and shape the future of your local rail service. To apply to be on our Customer Panel, you’ll need to fill out a short questionnaire .

You can claim Delay Repay compensation for any journey where you are delayed by 15 minutes or more. It’s easy to apply online . Or you can pick up a Freepost Delay Repay form at the station.