Simon Powell

Said the following about Freightliner Crew VMF Team:

“Freightliner Crewe VMF Team

In November 2016, Freightliner opened a new facility at Crewe to bring the maintenance of its electric locomotive fleet in-house – Crewe Vehicle Maintenance Facility (VMF).

Since then, there has been a significant investment in the new facility and, in particular, its workforce including current staff, new starters and staff who came across under TUPE.

With a concentrated focus on safety, training and performance, a group of people from a variety of backgrounds, with varying degrees of experience have been moulded into an efficient and productive workforce. Its team of four depot supervisors and 20 loco technicians now hold competencies in over five different classes of AC and diesel locomotives. Many hold multiple competencies and additional skills such as MPI, brakes, bearings and in-depth fault finding. This investment in the team has resulted in an impressive availability improvement of 13% across both fleets.

Freightliner continues to invest in modifying its AC loco fleet to improve reliability. These modifications have been completed by the technicians in-house at Crewe to allow a quality and efficient turn around for the locomotives resulting in a reliability improvement of 29% for miles per significant incident with the number of all incidents/issues being reported be drivers improving by 44%.

The team have also quickly adapted to new, innovative ways of working using a new approach to optimising maintenance operations. In addition to their ‘day-jobs’, several members of the Crewe VMF team worked collaboratively with Unipart Rail colleagues to create, develop and implement a new supply-chain solution within a challenging nine-month deadline.

The Freightliner Crewe VMF team have been instrumental in delivering an improved and reliable service to its customers using the latest in innovative supply-chain technology and are very worthy nominees for the title’ Depot team of the year’.“