Railways: First Great Western and Franchises

(Sorry the attached link is the only on-line news article I could find, obviously the media are bored of First Great Western and commuter woes.)

Following a meeting between Thames Valley MP's and the Secretary of State for Transport it has been announced that Network Rail and FGW have come up with a 40 point recovery plan.

I heard on BBC breakfast this morning that they plan to revise the timetable in May and that the Secretary of State has made unsubtle suggestions that if they don't get their act together the franchise can always be taken away.

Finally Teresa May does something, only four months after it all started with the December timetable.

FGW is not well liked since the December changes, just look at all the websites and news stories about them since December 2006. Ever since the new franchise came into play it has gone down hill and opinion is divided on who to blame, the government for micromanaging the franchise agreement into a completely unworkable plan or FGW putting profits before passengers.

Either way it was past time for the government to take action.

I think that the government should go further with franchise agreements. Franchises should include annual capacity enhancement targets. After all the idea is for rail passenger growth so why not target it. Both Franchise Holders and Network Rail should be set annual targets and then the partnership between the operator and the infrastructure can work together to improve capacity.

Option1 : % annual increase in passenger seat kilometres.

A multiplier of the previous years passenger seat kilometres. i.e. if passenger seat kilometres in previous year was 1000 and the multiplier was set at 5% then the passenger seat kilometres target in the coming year should be 1050 passenger seat kilometres and trains should be planned appropriately.

Option 2: Maximum seat utilisation.

This is a simple percentage like 75%. which would mean that 75% of a trains seats would be taken with 25% being free. Of course this would not apply to just one train but over a group of trains.

For example trains for these options might be grouped as follows and could be sub divided by a line or region:

• Morning peak
• Afternoon peak
• Week day (Mon-Thurs)
• Friday
• Saturday
• Sunday
• Evenings
• Overnight

Both options would work well in conjunction with each other and could be used to push franchise holders to grow traffic.

Network rail would also have its own target of capacity enhancements and route availability. These might be number of trains per hour over any given line or area or maximum capacity targets for freight and passenger trains could be set or specific bottlenecks could be targeted. There could also be targets about the kilometres of new track laid or new route availability.

Not only do these targets need to be measured and set but I would also like to see action plans laid out by the companies on how they intend to achieve these growth targets and a genuine consultation period with their stakeholders.

In reality the government needs to find a way to build in capacity enhancements to the rail industry so that the industry is challenged to grow capacity, not to manage capacity to maximise profits.

First Great Western have shown what can happen when such regulation is not present, companies will happily put profits before passengers.