“The Guildford example wasn’t so much for SWT passengers, it was to allow the Southern ten-car programme to be completed. So the Alliance, even though it’s very much concentrated on SWT and NR, in the Guildford example did that work and inconvenienced SWT passengers by closing the car park (and train crew, by the way, because we closed the train crew car park - that’s really radical, and has real logistical issues, where do you park at three o’clock in the morning?) for the benefit of the Southern train-lengthening programme.”
Ageing track remains a worsening problem across Shoveller’s patch, so much so that in summer 2013 the route between Overton and Salisbury (on the diesel route to Exeter) had speed restrictions placed on it to reduce the risk of buckling, even under moderate temperatures.
Shoveller takes up the story: “I didn’t see track like that when I was at West Coast or East Midlands, so why are we in this position? There’s a long and complicated view of why, but ‘we are where we are’. So, for the first time and with the fantastic support of NR’s high-output team, we brought in the High Output Renewals Train - it’s never worked on the Southern Region before, at all, ever. It wasn’t even gauge-cleared, because it can’t work on the third rail. But Overton to Whitchurch isn’t third rail, so - a hop, skip and a jump - let’s put it to work.
“With the fantastic support of that team we used it, and we broke a huge number of records both in terms of output and efficiency, because we built the train plan around the renewals train. This allowed us to do some quite radical things with the service, but what it meant was some 53km of track, that last year had heat-related speed restrictions on it, and caused delays to all of our passengers, has this year been replaced.
“There’s no way we could ever have done that with conventional methods. If you’d just taken a conventional approach between a TOC and a Route, you would never have done it. Because, as much as anything, had the case been made, I’m sure any TOC would have acted reasonably, but I’m not sure we would have understood the root-cause of the problem.
“Again, funnily enough, it comes back to car parks. One of the key things to making the machine efficient, apart from rebuilding the train plan, was in identifying what some of the key risks to the programme were. One of the key things was making sure that the people working the train had somewhere to park their cars. Without that, we’d have lost productivity and we’d have lost jobs. As it was, the thing operated perfectly. It’s out again doing ballast cleaning with that bit of track, and it is breaking all sorts of records.”
