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Friday 8 Nov 2024

Network Rail and Southeastern alliance joins forces to get trains on the move quicker along the Hastings line

Region & Route:

Southern

| Southern: Kent

• Response times for Network Rail first responders on the Hastings line to be slashed by up to an hour during disruption
• George Graham House, at Robertsbridge station, will act as a new base for operations managers so that incidents can be responded to more quickly.

The time it takes Network Rail frontline teams to respond to incidents on the Hastings line will be slashed by up to an hour with the opening of a new base at Robertsbridge.

The new facility, based within the Robertsbridge station building, was opened in September and named after a long-serving and highly respected Network Rail colleague, George Graham, who sadly passed away last year. The opening ceremony was attended by many of George’s family, including George’s wife Lynn, and his former colleagues.

The operations base is yet another outcome of the unique alliance between Network Rail and Southeastern set up to deliver together for its customers, ensuring that everybody gets home safe every day.

Funding for the creation of George Graham House was partly provided by the Railway Heritage Trust (RHT), with the project delivered by Southeastern and its supplier, WPB Contractors.

David Davidson, Network Rail’s Kent Route Director, said: “We’ve opened up Robertsbridge Mobile Operations Manager (MOM) depot so we can respond more quickly to disruption on the line between Hastings and Tonbridge. Before the office opened, we had to deploy MOMs from Ashford or Paddock Wood, which takes significant time. This base allows us to respond faster when things go wrong on the railway so we can fix the railway more quickly and keep our customers on the move.

“It’s been a real honour to name this office after George Graham, one of our colleagues who sadly passed away last summer after spending a significant part of his career working on this line, but also managing the Kent Integrated Control Centre (KICC).”

Harry Stevens, Station Manager for Southeastern at Hastings, said: “The response times will be so much quicker. Now, MOMs can get down to Hastings in 20 minutes, whereas before it was anything up to an hour and a half.  So, customers will get to their destinations quicker.”

Lee Harris, Mobile Operations Manager for Network Rail, said: “Robertsbridge is basically right in the middle of our patch. Among other types of incident, we can get called out to things like points failures, and we need to be able to respond quickly so that customers can get on the move again. That means that our new base at Robertsbridge will make a huge difference.”