Wednesday 4 Sep 2013
Delays down at Birmingham New Street thanks to special engineering team
- Region & Route:
Passengers travelling through Birmingham’s New Street are experiencing fewer delays thanks to a dedicated team of engineers who have reduced the number of track faults at the station by 80% over the last 12 months.
The team was brought in specifically to reduce the number of points failures on what is one of the most intensively used sections of track anywhere on the rail network.
Network Rail route managing director Dyan Crowther explains: “With more trains and passengers using the network than ever before, the tracks at New Street are incredibly busy; however passengers rightly expect services through the station to be reliable. The number of points failures on the tracks around the station were unacceptably high so we brought in a specialist team of engineers to help cut delays at the station.
“Each shift, the team completely overhaul one set of points, checking screws, fittings, installations and joints. They troubleshoot faults and keep the points in good working order to minimise the chances of a failure. There is still more work to do but we are committed to reducing delays for passengers travelling through Birmingham”
London Midland managing director Patrick Verwer recently spent a night shift with the team and commented: “It was fascinating to see the team in action and learn more about New Streetmaintenance. It’s a bit of a hidden world down there, but really amazing to see how the team find faults, or predict them and correct them to prevent failures and subsequent delays, helping us to keep our trains running. I was impressed with the team’s dedication to improving reliability of the infrastructure for our customers.”
Notes to editors
The work at New Street sits alongside a package of projects worth nearly £40m, aimed at improving the reliability of the infrastructure and punctuality of train services on the West Coast Main Line.
Other projects being delivered this year include:
Overhead line improvements: A specialist team of engineers has walked the entire route between London and Rugby and recommended a series of improvements to improve the reliability of the infrastructure that are being delivered over and above regular maintenance and inspection activity.
To complement this work, Network Rail is changing the way it stores and analyses overhead line condition data which is captured by two specially adapted Pendolino trains. This change will enable the data to be analysed and essential maintenance work to be completed much more quickly.
Network Rail is also working with London Midland and Samaritans to put in place suicide prevention measures at London Midland stations between Watford and Milton Keynes.
The West Coast Main Line runs for 399 miles between London and Glasgow and connects many of Britain’s key cities including Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.
Information about current levels of performance on the West Coast Main Line (WCML) in comparison to other long distance routes is available at:http://www.networkrail.co.uk/about/performance/
Around 70% of delays to Virgin services are attributable to Network Rail – around 35% of which are down to infrastructure faults and around 25% to external factors such as cable theft, fatalities, trespass, vandalism and extreme weather. The remaining 10% are caused by operational issues.
In November 2012, following a six-month secondment to Network Rail, Chris Gibb, Gibb, Chief Operating Officer, Virgin Trains, published his recommendations http://www.rail-reg.gov.uk/upload/pdf/wcs-reliability-programme-191112.pdf for how Network Rail could improve the West Coast Main Line. Chris spent time with maintenance crews, mostly at night, and the recommendations were largely the ideas he heard from these experienced staff.
Network Rail accepted Chris’ recommendations in full. Network Rail’s London North Western route, which is responsible for operating, maintaining and upgrading the West Coast Main Line, has been focusing on meeting those recommendations, meeting with train and freight operating partners regularly to keep them updated.
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