Brian Loughlin

Said the following about Seat Reservations Improvement Project Group:

“In 2013, CrossCountry introduced a brand new ticketing product, Advance Purchase on the Day (APOD). As a result, there was an increased demand for seat reservations across the network, which highlighted a growing problem on-board CrossCountry’s Voyager-class trains. With the Voyager trains making up a large percentage of the overall fleet and with over 50% of the Voyagers in any one day having issues displaying reservations CrossCountry had a major issue.

The difficulty was that many of the problems with the seat reservation system were historic and had been there since the reservation system was put it. It is fair to say that a lot of the problems were felt to be so deep in the system that it was hard for those maintaining the fleet to know where to start.

To try to rectify the situation and ensure that the seat reservation system would become more reliable one Train Manager started to look at the problems. Brian Loughlin a Train Manager based in Bournemouth was determined to make the system work, both from a customer service point of view but also because it is extremely frustrating for a Train Manager to have to either ticket all the seats with reservations or speak to customers who are sitting in booked seats that they have not booked.

He persuaded a number of Train Managers to work with him so that they could help him to identify when a fault with the reservation system occurred, often with the reservation system, problems were not evident when the train went back to the Depot. The group that Brian set up kept records of when the faults occurred, what they had done to try to rectify the problem and if this had made any difference. This was then complied into an email report which was forwarded to our Voyager Fleet Maintenance Company, Bombardier.

The group that Brian set up has now grown to over 140 Train Managers across all of our centres from Edinburgh through to Bournemouth.

The success of the Seat Reservation project has been because the team of Train Managers, Bombardier and teams based in Head Office have collaborated. It is worth noting that there should be special recognition for Brian Loughlin Train Manager based in Bournemouth, Gail Warburton Train Manager based at Manchester, Craig Waggott Train Manager based in Newcastle, Richard Lebelinski, Technician for Bombardier, based in Central Rivers and the Defect Control Team at Head Office.

In addition a major finding with one of the problems that were causing a fault with the seat reservation system was when the Driver had his key in. This was one of the major findings that the team were able to establish was causing a large percentage of the faults with the system. Although this was discovered by Brian the help that he received from his colleagues made the discovery easier to prove and to ensure that Train Managers could fix a large percentage of the faults with the reservation system themselves. This meant that Train Managers had the power to solve the problems with the system without the need to call for specialist support. As an added bonus by allocating trips this way even the most heavily reserved trains take around 2 - 3 minutes to fully download. This is now being communicated to all Train Managers that work across the Voyager fleet.

The reason why this is such a team effort is because although the Train Managers can identify when a problem occurs with the system and can record all that they did prior to the fault showing, they are unable to fix all the faults. This is where credit has to go to Bombardier who were prepared to allocate a technician to work with the Train Managers on a secondment basis to work through the faults that were not corrected by the Driver Key that has previously being mentioned. Richard Lebelinski Bombardier Support Technician was able to discover that some of the faults with the seat reservation system were caused by the luggage rack wiring and reducing high resistance in the cabling that has made a phenomenal improvement on the SRD/Res system. It is a work in progress but there's no doubt, the improvement is there.

As the Train Managers are able to give detailed information about any faults that are occurring on the train, this then enabled the technician to work when the train was next in for heavy maintenance. This has meant that some of the deep routed problems were able to be rectified without the need to take the train out of service longer than necessary.

The Voyager Seat Reservations Project has delivered transformative changes which have led to an increase in download reliability from 80% to +95%. Prior to the start of the project the faults with the system went on to four pages of faults. Recently the amount of faults that have been reported at any one time have being four across the entire Voyagers fleet. These faults are only ever likely to be repaired when a major overhaul of the fleet is carried out as the fault is so interlinked with the workings of the train that it is unfeasible to carry out as a repair.

The Team working on the Seat Reservation System have really demonstrated true collaboration, without all of the different parties working closely together then the aim of improving the customer experience would not have been realised.“