Recruitment
“Preparing to operate a brand new railway which will increase London’s overall passenger capacity by 10% and one which carries such a high profile requires a certain attention to detail and desire to be industry-leading, one that the MTR Crossrail Driver Training Team possesses in spades and should be recognised for.
Since being named as the operator for the Elizabeth line back in August 2014, MTR Crossrail has been delivering industry-leading levels of service and achieving very ambitious self-set targets to ensure the Elizabeth line is both ready to run and a mode of transport that delivers a fantastic end-to-end journey for the millions of customers who will use it.
Driver Training
When the Elizabeth line is full open in 2019, the service requires over 400 train drivers in order to achieve the advertised levels of service. Starting with just a handful of employees prior to the first service in May 2015, MTR Crossrail had to create an innovative recruitment strategy to attract a high number of both skilled drivers and new trainee drivers to the business, leaving our Driver Training Team to teach them the necessary competencies. What makes MTR Crossrail different is the way in which these drivers are trained.
Moving away from the traditional lecture-based learning approach was important to attract and develop drivers with the necessary competencies to operate such a new, exciting railway line.
MTR Crossrail uses simulation through two state-of-the-art simulators (which are scale models built to replicate the new Class 345 train cab) to recreate scenarios that cannot be achieved on a real train to enable drivers to be comfortable and confident in their abilities in a safe training environment prior to needing to do this in real life. This supports MTR Crossrail’s training ethos of experiential learning to give people a far greater understanding of the railway principles and procedures.
This style of training allows each trainee driver to move at their own pace with a tailored training programme.
All the more impressive is to date, MTR Crossrail’s Driver Training Team have trained over 300 drivers to operate the Elizabeth line, a number that is industry-leading in such a short space of time.
Add to this the challenge of having to train drivers on both the older existing Class 315 train fleet which were inherited and the brand new Class 345 trains which were launched in June 2017 and you can really appreciate the levels of commitment and knowledge that have to be possessed by each and every member of the Driver Training Team.
Driver Apprentices
As so many drivers were needed, MTR Crossrail quickly recognised that in addition to learning skills needed to be a train driver, they could offer another qualification in the form of a Level 2 Train Driver Apprenticeship.
In doing this, MTR Crossrail led the way in the rail industry as the first train operating company included on the register of apprenticeship training providers (RoATP) and approved to deliver apprenticeship training to employees through the ‘employer provider’ route, managed by the Driver Training Team.
In January 2018, MTR Crossrail celebrated it’s 200th apprentice to join the programme and to date (June 2018) has seen more than 270 driver apprentices move through the ranks, an industry-leading figure.
Driver Announcement Work / Performance Results
Having the right number of drivers is essential to ensuring the service runs as it is advertised but what about achieving the goal MTR Crossrail has set for itself: to provide an industry-leading service to its customers.
With this in mind, the Driver Training Team has also created a bespoke driver announcement programme, which encourages all drivers - whether they are 30 year veterans or newly-qualified drivers – to make quality announcements whilst driving in order to keep customers up to date with the latest service information when on our services. This work has included creating a special video for drivers, various collateral to remind them to make announcements and fantastic ongoing one-to-one training.
On the back of this work, MTR Crossrail has seen the benefits through various industry performance measurements such as the recent National Railway Passenger Survey which showed the score for ‘Information provided whilst on board’ to be 73%, a strong score as well as How the ‘Train Company Dealt with Delays’ where MTR Crossrail scored 62% compared to 35% nationally.
In addition to this, MTR Crossrail has also seen a marked improvement to the overall performance of the railway since taking over operations in May 2015. The main performance indicator, Public Performance Measure (PPM) Moving Annual Average (MAA) has risen from 91.2% (end of Period 2 2015/16) to 93.8%(Period 3 2018/19), an increase of 2.6%. An impressive result in light of numerous station and infrastructure upgrade works.
Opening New Depots / Familiarisation
The Driver Training Team were tasked with managing the large scale of driver training and maintenance across a wide geographical spread, with driver depots at Shenfield, Gidea Park and Ilford in East London, training occurring at MTR Crossrail’s Head Office near Liverpool Street as well as the newly opened Old Oak Common Depot in North West London.“
“The Driver Team Managers (DTM) at MTR Crossrail are continuing to do a fantastic job with the relentless amount of assessments that they are currently doing as the company expands on a monthly basis.
For this grade although assessments are part of their day job, the vast number of assessments / interviews which are needed in order for the company to be able to provide competent drivers in time for each stage of our operation is a testament to careful planning of work load, flexibility, all whilst having to be trained on three different signalling systems themselves!
This cannot be achieved working in silos, and this team communicate extremely well resulting in over 160 newly qualified drivers currently in operation helping to bring communities and local business closer together.
On the East the DTM team have continued their steady assessments of numerous trainee drivers who are due to work in West depots, but are awaiting their depots to open, therefore increasing their workload. They are cracking on with this as well as interviewing of QD drivers and training themselves, all whilst managing their own teams of qualified drivers.
On the West as it ramps up rapidly since the launch of stage 2 on the 20th May, the guys despite being short of bodies due to ongoing recruitment in the role are juggling numerous activities such as passing out of trainee driver groups (newly qualified driver mainline final assessments), East to West conversions (for those drivers competent on the East transferring over to the West), qualified external drivers joining us for West operations. All whilst multi-tasking to cover the day job.
One thing that stands out to me, was the team’s idea of appointing one DTM (on the West) who will look after all the CMS assessments of everyone else. This then frees up the other 3 to carry out the additional assessments. That in a nutshell is team work, and shows the enterprising spirit within the team!“
“The category Signalling and Telecommunications Engineer of the year is special to us as this is the main discipline within Rail that uses our products and services for their Critical Data Communications Infrastructure. So having faith in the robustness, ease of use and low maintenance of our systems is important to us and in return we as a key supplier to the Rail Industry need to recognise this. So this year and for the 4th year running Westermo are proud to be part of the Railstaff awards 2016.”
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