The RailStaff Awards 2024

Nominations for Rail Team of the Year

William Murchison

Said the following about TPE Train Planning:

“The TPE Train Planning Team has had a year of extreme challenges, however all team members have worked together to overcome every hurdle.

The team had planned for a timetable change in May 2018. However 2018 opened with the news that the Bolton electrification was going to be delayed. The team rallied round to re-plan and re-route the affected trains. A total of 190 trains were involved. This was successfully done in record time, and in conjunction with many negotiations with other Operators. The team had recently introduced a new 'Spot Bid' form which reduced schedule irregularities by 32%.

As this hurdle was being faced by the LTP section of Train Planning, the STP section was grappling with the news that the Electrification Project team required substantial additional possession access at very short notice. This blocked one of the key junctions in central Manchester. The Train Planners worked extremely fast to re-plan these weekends. This involved 57 trains and 21 set diagrams each day which had to be overlaid on changes which had already been made. The team coordinated with the rest of the Business to minimise the effects to the customers. A particular achievement was to divert some trains via Crewe using Route Conductors from another company with the relevant route knowledge. These short notice plans were delivered with no attributable delay minutes.

As the May 2018 timetable change date approached, it became clear that the usual Informed Traveller timescales were not going to be met across the whole Industry. This meant that the team had to undertake the work in extremely reduced timescales, with all members of the team going above and beyond to meet the revised dates. This has carried on for the rest of the year and the team have successfully achieved each of the milestones.

Despite the shifting sands of the base timetable owing to the late electrification, the team set about planning for the ten week blockade of Liverpool Lime Street - one of TPE's key destinations. The team had to cope with planning this blockade upon a brand new timetable with two trains an hour via the Chat Moss. This blockade isolated a train crew depot which presented the train crew diagrammers with a challenge.

Whilst all this was going on, the Operations team negotiated new terms and conditions for our Driver colleagues. This brought deadlines forward for Train Planning to issue diagrams whilst at the same time the Offers from Network Rail continued to be behind the Informed Traveller timescales owing to the national STP recovery plan. Three members of the Train Planning team worked tirelessly to meet these deadlines, in some weeks processing four times the number of diagram alterations compared to normal.

The LTP section was meanwhile pulling out all the stops to process the Timetable Offer for December 2018, when at the last minute this was cancelled by Network Rail who were attempting to arrest some of the issues that led to the May 2018 timetable change being less robust than planned.

The TPE Train Planners used this time to put together a number of initiatives to improve performance and these were evaluated with a view to implementing in December 2018. This involved 212 trains and changes to 83 individual set diagrams. Against the odds, the LTP team produced the details of these revised plans in a matter of days and then visited the Milton Keynes NR train planning office in order to help process the revised bid into TPS.

With all of these slipping deadlines, it was now inevitable that the Offer for Dec 18 and the bid for May 19 would now overlap, and again the train planning team worked together to process both of these activities simultaneously.

During this time, the team has also been planning test trains and training trains for the new fleet of CAF coaching stock that is being delivered. These plans have changed at short notice frequently to accommodate issues within the Training programme. In total the team have planned up to 36 separate train paths on a total of 175 days so far.

The team works together exceptionally well and regularly go above and beyond to get the job done.“