This means that if local councils want rail projects, there will be an expectation that the money for them is local, too. Whether that’s taxpayers’ money or private money, it will come from local sources.
None of these important ideas will see light if NR doesn’t get to grips with day-to-day running. Latest statistics for NR’s share of delays for key operators on the route show 70% for Virgin Trains East Coast and 55% for Northern. This needs to improve, as McIntosh is acutely aware.
“We’ve spent the best part of an hour now talking about how we want to move forward as an industry, and I think there are some really exciting things we can do. I’m here because I really want to change the industry. I came to work for Network Rail because I could really see an opportunity at a time when we can really modernise how things are done. But you don’t get to do any of that unless you’re running the train services as they should be.
“So if I wake up in the morning and everything’s red… …and last week was a particularly red week, then that’s where you have to put your effort and your energy. You have to get it to a place where you can sustainably and safely deliver a reliable railway before you do any of this stuff.”
How does he plan to keep on top of the vital area?
“System thinking. The railway asset is a system. Where there’s a great opportunity is… that system has within it a number of single points of failure, and at any one time we need to be making sure that we understand the system status of any one of those single points of failure. Whether it’s fully robust and as it should be, or whether it’s partially degraded, or whether it’s in a quite difficult state, and therefore what mitigations we put around it to keep it going. We tend to manage the railway at a component or discipline level rather than at a system level. We don’t manage the asset as a system.
“I have a group of my engineers in with me on Wednesday, where we’re going to really make that concept come to life. There are four area directors that work for me - East Coast North, South, Central and East Midlands. Those guys don’t have a flight engineer beside them. We don’t have them anymore in aeroplanes because they’re far too advanced, but if you go back 20 years there was a flight engineer in the cockpit whose job was to monitor that aeroplane. If it was having bother, then he’d do something about it. Our area directors don’t have that. They don’t have that flight engineer’s panel. So we’ve got to do a piece of work that really brings that to life.”
He cautions: “It’s not about a person, it’s about a process and the way you manage that asset. You would have had a person with the right mindset to understand the importance of that, but our processes in the business don’t take us there. Our processes take us to manage the asset at the component level, not at the system level. Processes are there because you can’t rely on people to be consistent. We don’t have a process that does this at a system level.”
Area directors feature in another area that McIntosh is determined to change. That area involves money and the split between operational and capital budget. Noting that NR’s finances are “the most complicated thing I’ve ever seen in my career”, he goes on to explain: “An area director doesn’t have any capital budget to spend on the asset they maintain. They have an OPEX budget, so they have a people budget that they manage. And you have asset managers who sit on top of the CAPEX budget and wait for area directors to come and ask to spend that on certain parts of the asset.”
He plans to make his area directors accountable for renewals CAPEX budgets because he reckons they understand their tracks better than the asset managers. This should give the asset managers more time to take a longer view and work more closely with enhancement teams, he reckons.
This seems as obvious as checking that projects are fit to proceed. It’s a wonder that NR hasn’t done this years ago. Yet McIntosh can only speak as he finds. That he has done so in a company that has retreated from engagement with specialist media over recent years is good news.
With our time in York almost done, it’s obvious that McIntosh relishes his role. He finishes with a cracking summary of his situation.
“There’s no job quite like it. Every TOC MD has said to me ‘I wouldn’t want your job’, but I’m here because I want to make a difference. There’s never been an opportunity like we have at the moment. Everything is aligned for us to really make the changes. It’s hard, bloody hell it’s hard, but everything’s aligned.”
