Elizabeth Line Developments
Presenter: Steve Murphy
Virtual Meeting via Zoom
As a BR graduate trainee 29 years ago, our speaker had been told, by an older hand, to keep his opinions to himself, until he had sufficient experience to utter them. On this occasion we benefited from Steve’s great knowledge of his subject. He had with him two of his assistants (Andy Bottom and Dave Hepper) who contributed from time to time during a lively discussion. Steve is now CEO of mtr Elizabeth Line, having been MD for the last 6 years of this part of the Hong Kong based international organisation. His company has a “concession” not a franchise and this equates to a management contract.
Organisational issues featured greatly in this talk. The set-up is on the face of it very complex – 4 infrastructure companies, 5 TOCs and 3 rolling stock groups. All of these have to work collaboratively to provide the Elizabeth Line. Steve spoke of “challenges”; one can only imagine what some of these might have been! The role of his company is operations. It is an ‘asset-light’ organisation with a principal function of providing and training drivers – over 400; and so his presentation focused mainly on these aspects, although he touched upon construction, signalling and rolling stock.
The vision of Steve’s company is as follows “We will set a new transport standard in the UK”. To deliver this to TfL, their client, the emphasis has been and will be on recruiting, retaining and training drivers to a very high standard. We were told that the aim was for a diverse workforce and recruits were mainly taken “off the street” rather than from existing companies. Steve stressed the very close working relationship with ASLEF and TSSA and the family-friendly employment policies, which may allow, for instance, the employment of working mothers. Great use is made of simulators to provide the necessary experience and all drivers have to have a route-knowledge of the whole system. The delay in delivering the train service has been treated as an opportunity for providing enhanced training. This is impressive.
Perhaps inevitably, the questions Steve fielded (with his aides) were mainly about the timescales for the introduction of the service. This is planned to occur in phases and it is hoped that some passenger services will start in September 2021. Also inevitable were the references to the well-documented delays. One questioner wondered if the baked-in complexity of the whole scheme worked against the securing of resilience and therefore reliability and punctuality. Marrying three main sections of railway, each with its own signalling hardware and software in addition to coping with freight in order to provide a state-of-the-art urban passenger system is a tall order. It was noted that freight from Felixstowe to the North and Midlands was still coming via Stratford (there being no electrified route via Bury St Edmunds yet) and no additional infrastructure (e.g. loops) had been provided. Also some amongst us forecast an overloading of the already very busy Stratford interchange station. Steve however remained sanguine and upbeat whilst acknowledging the numerous “challenges”.