Snow Hill route recovery plan - March 22

Living with Covid

There has been lots of talk in recent months about society “learning to live with covid” alongside our normal lives. At an industry level, the railway is learning to adapt to the new commuting patterns, increased demand for leisure journeys and rebuild itself after two years of interruptions to investment and development programmes. Within West Midlands Railway, we are particularly focused on the introduction of our brand-new trains which, were it not for the pandemic, would already be in service.

However, we have also learnt to react and adapt to the changing public health guidance and primarily how that impacts on our people. The most recent phase of the government’s plan has seen the removal of the statutory requirement to self-isolate for a defined period. From a positive perspective, this is a promising step towards something we would all recognise as “normal life.” In the short-term, though, we are still learning how this affects the number of staff we have available on any given day.

In this month’s update, we will explore the early indications of the impact of this latest phase of the pandemic and the short-term outlook ahead of the Easter holidays. We have also caught up with our Head of Drivers, who has been in the role for just over a year now, to get the inside track on the driver resource recovery plan.

Q&A with Sarah Higgins - Head of Drivers

What does the Head of Drivers do?

My job is to lead a team of nearly 900 people, making sure we are supporting our drivers to operate safely, to a high standard of customer service, all in a supportive environment. At the moment, my main focus is on rebuilding our ranks and enabling our 130 trainee drivers across the business to move through the various stages of training as efficiently as possible. This is a huge number of trainees for us to have and reflects the impact of the pandemic. As a department, we are also heavily involved in the entry into service works for our two new train fleets. We do all of this working collaboratively with our trade union partner ASLEF.

What was it like taking on the role in the middle of the covid pandemic?

Previously, I was Head of Stations for London Northwestern Railway , so I had experience of leading large teams from the very start of pandemic. My priorities were to make sure we did everything we could to keep our colleagues safe, so they could continue to deliver the train service for our passengers. With the spikes in viral transmission at certain points, notably the so-called ‘pingdemic’ in the summer of last year and the omicron spike around Christmas, it has been very challenging and we haven’t always been able to keep as many trains running as we would have liked.

Why do we have a shortage of train drivers?

Pre covid, we had a very ambitious recruitment and training plan, in line with forecasts of the number of crews we would need to operate our growing timetable. During the pandemic, all training was stopped for nine months because most driver instruction is delivered in the cab setting, which is a close quarters environment. Even when training restarted it was not business as usual.

We had a wide range of essential safety measures in place which reduced our academy capacity, so it was only fairly recently in the autumn of 2021 that our training programme has been able to return to pre-covid strength. Unfortunately, though, this means we have a large backlog which has built up over the last couple of years.

What are you and your team are doing to fix this?

We are constantly looking for ways to accelerate our driver training programme, we’ve increased the number of driver instructors and on the Snow Hill lines we now have so many trainees out with their mentors that they are often queuing up to take trains over key sections of the line. Every time you see two people in the front cab of a train, it means someone is in training.

Across West Midlands Trains, we have passed out 10 additional new drivers in the last four weeks, which is a record for our business. It’s important to note though that we are being very careful not to diminish our stringent safety standards in the process.

We have also proactively recruited fully qualified drivers, who only need to undertake familiarisation training for our routes and train types, from other areas of the country who have wanted to move to the West Midlands.

When do you hope our driver teams will be back to full strength on the route?

We have three driver depots at Leamington Spa, Snow Hill and Worcester, which operate all services on the Snow Hill route. Based on our current training plans, it’s predicted that Worcester will be the last depot to reach establishment, which is the number of drivers required to run the full timetable reliably, with standby and contingency capacity. We predict that this should happen in July based on our current timetable, and later on in October to recover the full establishment required for our pre-pandemic scale timetables.

The last few years have been obviously challenging, but have there been any encouraging moments for you as a leader?

I can’t overstate how proud I am of the entire workforce who have continued to come into work during a global pandemic to deliver the best service we can, not just drivers but our whole railway family. I am all too aware though that this hasn’t always translated into a reliable service for passengers and understand that when you just want to get to work, or more importantly want to go home, it can be incredibly frustrating when services are delayed and/or cancelled.

The railway network is a complex system and our aim is to make each part work as smoothly as possible. With the continued incremental progress we are making in addressing the covid legacy backlog, we are move ever closer to achieving this again.

Spring 2022. “Living with covid”

With the first quarter of 2022 behind us now, we've taken the opportunity to pause and take stock of how the latest phase of the pandemic response is affecting our daily operation, patronage on our services and progress with our recovery plan.

There are many reasons to be positive and optimistic about the short to medium term future for the route with passenger numbers recovering largely in line with predictions and even exceeding industry expectations at times, meaning there is a strong future for the line as a key transport corridor for the region.

The latest data suggests that approximately three quarters of pre-pandemic customer demand had returned by the last week of March, although with new commuting patterns this has spread to see significant changes to the traditionally busiest peak times.

We are seeing stronger recovery in leisure as opposed to business-related travel, including healthy weekend demand where the railway has traditionally offered scaled back timetables vs weekdays. This is a key focus for our timetable strategy team, who are looking for ways to open up new capacity and journey opportunities on the route, taking account of the changing travel patterns.

Due to the complexity and interwoven nature of the railway network, we cannot change a timetable unilaterally, even on an apparently ‘closed’ route such as the Snow Hill lines. This is because we share track paths and access to key stations with other operators such as Great Western Railway in Worcester, as well as Chiltern Railways & CrossCountry through the Birmingham core.

Along with freight trains, these services are knitted together between our own, on their journey through the region. As such, our ability to adapt and change our timetable can be limited by the availability of paths, which in turn could be determined by the further availability of paths for CrossCountry trains as far away as Newcastle, Chiltern Railways trains where they share tracks with tube trains in north London or even a freight train being loaded at an east coast seaport.

We are working collaboratively with the other train operators on the route, as well as Transport for West Midlands and other key stakeholders to design our post-pandemic timetables. We are hoping to start unlocking some of these developments, as our team numbers become more stable again, across the next planned industry wide timetable recasts in May and December this year, and ahead in May 2023.

On a less positive note, in the short term we are seeing covid infection numbers rise again within our workforce. While statutory isolation rules have been removed, official health guidance still states people should avoid mixing in groups or attending busy workplaces if they have symptoms of respiratory infection or indeed test positive for Covid-19.

Since the end of January when the impact of the Omicron variant had apparently waned, we had a period of relative stability with infection levels staying relatively low and manageable across our teams. However, just two months on the numbers of train drivers now absent due to Covid-19 has trebled again throughout March. With growing numbers of key operational colleagues including drivers, conductors and controllers absent from work, for on average of a week at a time, it is starting to impact our ability to deliver the service day-to-day.

It is worth noting though that thanks to the progress our teams have made catching up with delayed training and fleet maintenance, the real terms impact of the increased workforce absence levels is not yet as great as it was late last year when we had similar numbers of colleagues unable to attend work. As with all the previous phases of the pandemic, we just don’t know for certain how it will play out in the medium term. However, we will continue to closely monitor and mitigate for any impacts that we can as we move forward into the late spring and early summer months.

On the horizon: Easter holidays.

For some months now, the Easter school holidays, which in the West Midlands run from Saturday 9th to Sunday 24th April, has been a key period for us to plan for, with the knowledge that our pandemic legacy traincrew shortage often becomes more exposed during peak annual leave seasons for our crews.

With a week to go, our traincrew availability predictions are tight and on certain days it looks probable that we won’t have enough crews to run every timetabled service. Due to the annual roster patterns of early, late and night shifts and where standing vacancies fall within these, our resources team forecast it will be most challenging during the second half of both weeks on the Snow Hill lines.

We will continue to work on allocating traincrew for as many trains as possible. To help with this we have paused all non-essential training and meeting activities during the two weeks, to free up as many colleagues as possible and will continue to monitor rosters and protect services where we can. We are also proactively reviewing our rail replacement contingency plans and speaking to suppliers in advance to ensure vehicles will be available should we need to call on them.

However, there remains reason to be optimistic that the scale of disruption will be less than that seen in previous recent school holiday periods. On some days during the October 2021 half term, we were seeing circa 100+ services “at risk” across West Midlands Trains due to a lack of available traincrew. Our current forecast for the upcoming Easter holidays indicate this should be around two thirds lower, we are all too aware though that this comparatively better starting position could yet change subject to how the latest growth in covid-related absence tracks forward. As with industries like road haulage, aviation and hospitality, the unfortunate legacy of the last few years on staffing numbers, and therefore operational resilience, is continuing to pose challenges for the railway. However, as Sarah set out we are working around the clock to recover and rebuild our depleted teams. In the meantime, we understand that no cancellation, however unavoidable, is ever acceptable to our customers.

We want to continue to be open and honest about the journey we are on as we recover from the lockdown periods last year; acknowledging where we have come from, where we are now and where we hope to get to in the coming months.

In conclusion

Thanks again to those of you who take time to read our update, we are working really hard to get back on track and hope you have noticed some improvement in your train services since the latter half of 2021. We remain absolutely committed to the Snow Hill lines and making them a success for the region post-pandemic - thank you once again for your patience.

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