Monthly Archives: May 2006

For a while there’s been a lot of evidence that there’s an awful lot money being wasted through incompetent project management in the railway industry. Now this Guardian article on idle jobs shows just how bad things have got.

Two of these jobs are on the railways, and it seems that in this particular sector, old 1970s-style jobs with lots of tea breaks and standing around in groups looking at bits of metal are still very much alive, despite today’s weaker trade unions.

Our first reader, who we shall keep anonymous, lovingly describes the progress of a typical shift.

“I was rostered to be on site from 4pm till 4am. When we arrived, the boss didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing, and nor did we. We sat in our van drinking coffee till 11.30pm.

“By that time, you have lost the will to work, it is cold, you are in a nice warm van swapping stories and watching silly video clips on phones. We had to get out of the van for 20 minutes and then the boss let us go.”

Our reader says that he does one or two shifts each weekend, which leaves the rest of his week free to be idle. Another railway worker says that he gets paid for an eight-hour shift even though the work is usually done in three or four hours.

Furthermore, he adds: “Because of massive amounts of bureaucracy, I reckon that about a quarter of all shifts are cancelled as soon as we turn up on site. So, we get paid for doing eight hours’ work for doing bugger all.”

As a rail user and taxpayer, I’m footing the bill for this nonsense. I once counted 43 people in orange safety hats wandering around Alderley Edge, and not one of them actually seemed to be doing anything.

However, I don’t agree with the author that this sort of practice is a holdover from the 1970s. I think it’s got very much worse after privatisation, when the railway was fragmented into a million pieces. Privatisation was supposed to bring greater efficiency through the ‘disclipline of the market’, or so the crackpot ideologues told us. What rot!

Looks like my rail replacement bus nightmare is going to last a lot longer than I’d originally hoped. As reported on the North Wales Railway notice board, things are going from bad to worse.

As already rumoured in some quarters, reliable reports indicate that the Cheadle Hulme – Crewe line, which has been closed to all traffic since December 2005, will not be opening in June 2006 (already delayed from March for ‘software testing’ as has been publicly promised. It seems that some sort of temporary service might now be in place by August, with a full timetable not restored until December 2006.

This shambolic situation has been brought about by the attempt to re-signal this line with Ansaldo equipment from Italy, intended to be controlled from the existing signal centre at Stockport which has already proved unequal to the task of dealing with the Stockport station area and has so far been confined to a small area around Cheadle Hulme.

The Cheadle Hulme – Crewe line has been controlled from power signalboxes at Wilmslow and Sandbach, built about fifty years ago and featuring large numbers of electro-mechanical relays (suffering from metal migration in their contacts) and miles of wiring whose insulation had deteriorated to such an extent that anyone disturbing it for maintenance was in danger of causing a short-circuit with potentially fatal results. We imagine that it was decided that the re-signalling project had to go ahead with the only design available, even though engineers were sceptical about the results. The two signalboxes contained asbestos, and both were dismantled and taken away at the beginning of the current project.

Any further comments we could make here would not be suitable for a family audience

This is getting more and more like a ‘heads need to roll’ situation. An unnamed source within the rail industry has told me there were a lot of screwups in the early stages, such as severing the track despite needing access for engineering trains on other parts of the line. I wondered why they took out the old pointwork at Alderley Edge and replaced it with plan line, and spliced in the new pointwork a few weeks later. I hadn’t heard of the contractors putting a crane jib through the overhead catenery (ouch!). But the real problem seems to the fundamental incompatability of the software interlocking with the existing signalling at each end of the line. As Chadders has said, quoting The Daily WTF, it’s not sufficiently Enterprise

It’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that this fiasco is ultimately a consequence of the fragementation of the railway resulting from botched privatisation pursuded by the lamentably clueless administration of John Major. I can’t imagine a fiasco on this scale happening in the days of British Rail.

When the trains will finally return is anyone’s guess. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they never do return to the smaller stations on the rural southern end of the line. The slow and meandering rail replacement bus usually runs empty south of Alderley Edge, the 90+ minute journey time (compared with the 25 minutes of the train) mean that most passengers have found other ways to travel.