Some of the numbers implict in the Alliance are staggering. Waterloo station handles around 95 million passengers a year. The Up Fast line approaching the station handles 24 trains per hour in the peak. Passenger revenue is £1 billion a year. By 1100 each morning, SWT has run nearly 440 trains, with Waterloo handling all but a score of them.
This is a railway that’s ‘running hot’. It’s also a railway that’s almost paralysed by its own success. Shoveller accepts this description, and contends that there’s a forecast for the rest of Britain’s network: “It’s an advance warning of what’s going to happen over the rest of the country. I’ve done 23 years on the railway. I’ve done all sorts of jobs and worked in all sorts of wonderful places. I started here as a guard in Guildford. I have never ever seen anything like this in terms of the level of crowding, the level of complexity.
“The whole country is getting busier. A lot of the things we are seeing - the explosion in sub-threshold delay, the inability to renew the assets as fast as they need to be - those things will become common elsewhere.” That’s quite a prophesy.
He’s reminded that since SWT peak performance in 2011, passenger figures have grown 10%, and he exclaims: “That’s during a recession… on a railway that was already busting! I used to work 12-car trains into Waterloo as a guard. They were 12-car VEPs. Now they are 12-car Desiros. But they are still 12-cars, and they were full as 12-car VEPs. We run 24 trains per hour on the Up Fast alone in the morning peak. That’s what Thameslink will only do after £5 billion and cab signalling.”
He asks why the trains are still only as long today as they were during his time as a guard 23 years ago. Why has one of the most valuable railways in the country seen no strategic capacity interventions?
A suggestion that it’s just too difficult has Shoveller almost leaping from his chair: “Got it! Absolutely right! I love talking to you. You’re halfway there! I tell you, there’s lots of other people in the railway who ask why is that.
“Politicians will say ‘it’s because it’s a Labour government’ or ‘it’s a Tory government’. ‘It’s because it’s too difficult’. There was a scheme in CP4 to extend Platforms 1-4 at Waterloo and introduce ten-car operation on the suburban lines. It was agreed by all parties before the Alliance concluded that it was too difficult - the consequence of extending the platforms at Waterloo would have been that the trains would have required to run out of five platforms not four, because the switches and crossings that would be removed would have meant that the layout was less efficient.
“You can’t get the same reoccupation times because you then have to go further out to cross, and you lose capacity. You won’t find anything else anywhere that operates at this level of intensity with these constraints.”
At the heart of the problem lies the classic tension between track and train operators. One wants to run trains, the other wants to maintain track. They can’t be done at the same time. As Shoveller puts it: “At the start there was this mutual suspicion around the organisation. People in NR genuinely felt that they couldn’t deliver the reliability they wanted for the railway because the TOC wouldn’t give them the access they needed. And the TOC genuinely felt it couldn’t run the service it wanted to because the railway wasn’t reliable.
“When you then break it down, unfortunately it wasn’t the case that you can have a simple solution where the answer clearly is ‘do that’ and ‘ding’ - everyone’s really happy. Because, actually, both parties were right. There isn’t enough access to do the work we need to do. I can say that because I’m responsible for granting access. I have an ‘access wand’, as I describe it from time to time.
He recounts how he told his train planners that they could no longer refuse requests for access. They could either grant requests, or refer them upwards to the executive team for a decision.
However, he admits that waving his ‘access wand’ did not solve the problem. Even with access, time remained challenging. Taking electrical isolations of the third rail eats into access time, maybe cutting an hour’s working time from a four-hour possession.
Money was pushed towards this problem, but the team also looked at how they might extend their four-hour windows. The easy option might have been to take out the last train of the night, the 0105 from Waterloo. But this is often a 12-car train, and it’s often full and standing. “You can’t put that number of people on buses,” Shoveller remarks. He’s right. But the problem remains.
Even if that train didn’t run, or if it ran a diesel, the problem remains. As Shoveller notes: “What about the empty stocks that arrive into Waterloo up until about 0100 and berth in Waterloo overnight? Where do they go? Wimbledon is full. Guildford’s full. Woking’s full. Basingstoke’s full. They have to come to Waterloo. So we then understood that it wasn’t this simple thing of cancelling a few trains to solve this problem and make four hours into six hours.
“The thing is so constrained that Waterloo is actually an enormous carriage-servicing base overnight. If the empty stock can’t get in from Epsom and other locations, where do they go? Because there’s nowhere else to take them, and then there’s the train crew to get in.”
“Perhaps we haven’t built as many carriage sidings as we should have done. Perhaps we never understood that we needed carriage sidings. Was it the case that we couldn’t be bothered to build carriage sidings? No, it wasn’t. Was it the case that we didn’t understand that that was our root cause of a big problem? Yes, it was. So, we’re building lots of carriage sidings. Does that save us money now? No. Does that help the train service tonight? No. Does that mean that we can start putting the right measures in place for the future? Absolutely!”
