“We don’t know what will happen in any spending review. We haven’t even started our submission for CP6. Will investment in rail continue at the current rate? How will that be split across the major projects? There are a lot of unanswered questions.
“But certainly for the next couple of years we have a very clear view of the resources we need. And while it’s certainly demanding of the industry, we are also more open-minded about bringing people in from all sorts of other industries. As our sector is growing significantly, others are not in such a fortunate position. We’ve brought in a lot of people from the armed forces - very, very skilled people who come in with a great approach and a great work ethic who are very well trained. That’s been very good.
“Equally, people running large projects in defence, who again come in with a whole set of very complementary skills - myself included. I’ve spent most of my life in defence, and then moved into rail really through the major projects route through Bombardier to then come to Network Rail. It’s a really complementary set of skills. If there’s one thing that defence companies do, it’s that they run large projects that are the ultimate in low-volume manufacturing - huge projects that deliver maybe one big thing or a few slightly smaller things.
“We’re looking at UK industry as a whole, and bringing in the sort of resources that we think we need to deliver that. But what I would say is that it is a challenge. We’re delighted to have the investment in rail that we’ve seen.”
The uncertainty in future work beyond the next few years is particularly acute for signalling contractors - such as Signalling Solutions Ltd, the company responsible for Paddington’s work at Christmas. Paddington was also its second major overrun of 2014, the first having been at Poole in May. Having looked into the problems at both jobs, Paonessa and his team have concluded that they should proceed with a further job at West Slough this Easter.
Whether or not NR has sufficient signalling contractors for the work planned overall is open to question, and indeed is being questioned within NR itself. Paonessa explains: “It’s difficult. We ran a competition a few years ago to appoint our three framework contractors that do our signalling. They are by no means the only ones that can do signalling work for us, but they carry out the vast majority of the major signalling schemes that we have.
“There are some advantages in having more, and there are disadvantages in having more. Three is the number we have at the moment. It works. Should we go to the effort of bringing in a fourth? It’s a question we’re asking ourselves at the moment.
“The balancing element of that is: what demand is the digital railway going to bring? So we’re at the start of that journey. There will be very little point, I’d guess, in building up a conventional signalling capability just at the point at which we switch into our digital signalling deployment, if that’s the direction we’re going to go in.
“The best I can say is that we’re looking hard at that, we’re looking at the demand going out, and we’ve started the work on digital railway to see what we can accelerate within ERTMS deployment. As that work matures, as we work our way through the conventional signalling work bank, then probably in a year’s time we’ll have a better view of how that crossover will look. I think we’ll have a really clear view then of what we need to do. But I would hate to build up a whole load of signal testing capability, promising great careers in the railway, only to find that there aren’t any more signals.”
Taking Paonessa’s comments in the round, it seems that the Paddington and King’s Cross overruns were the eye-catching outliers of a process in which around 98% of all possessions are handed back on time. If there’s a flaw, it perhaps lies in the statistics fed into NR’s QSRA process.
There are flaws in contingency plans to restore train services. At Paddington there was little time to organise effective plans (made worse by the continually changing hand-back times), while at King’s Cross there was only a plan if the whole four-day job overran. There was no plan to cope with the first two days overrunning, even though it must surely have been obvious that a considerable number of passengers would be travelling.
If the railway is now to switch towards more major work on weekdays, it will have serious consequences for train operators and passengers. If it’s cheaper for NR, then it could reduce its draw on government money. This could be just as well, because (in turn) weekday disruption is likely to reduce the premium payments government receives from some of the train operators.
