The RailStaff Awards 2024

Nominations for Rail Manager of the Year

Sally Ralston

Said the following about Peter Glass - **HAS LEFT**:

“Pete is the Head of Performance Planning at Merseyrail. He has led the team is helping to deliver a PPM of 95.2% MAA (2018), defying national trends of deteriorating PPM. He has led the planning for major city events including Aintree races and the Giants Spectacular, both of which broke records for passengers carried and were huge successes commercially. The Giants Spectacular in particular saw 1.3 million people descend into Liverpool with PPM averaging 97.84%; this led to unprecedented levels of customer praise at a time when the railway’s reputation had been seriously tarnished. In July 2018, Merseyrail took the number one position nationally for PPM, a position it has maintained every period since.

Technically, you could say its Pete’s job, but it’s more than that. Pete has a passion and drive to deliver a high performing railway that means he is intrinsically motivated to exceed mediocrity and seek out the highest standards of performance. Pete’s ability to work closely with Network Rail in a challenging but collaborative manner has seen the NR relationship and performance improve. Pete gets NR to think innovatively in response to infrastructure issues and never relents on unresolved performance threats. Pete has become a trusted critic of NR and through that trust and respect has become someone they communicate with openly and listen to intently. Pete has been instrumental in driving constructive performance conversations, be that on the reactive conference calls when dealing with big incidents or during the routine governance of Joint Performance Review Group or weekly visualisation.

Pete has had many challenging projects since he has been with Merseyrail. 2017 and 2018 were the busiest period in terms of network engineering and work affecting our passengers. Pete has led on all these projects throughout this period with focus and professionalism at all times.

Without that openness, competence and trust between Pete and the NR team, they would not listen and heed Pete’s input as much as they do. An example of this is during an especially poor period of performance in the summer of 2018 when the Merseyrail network was plagued with telecoms issues affecting our most critical assets at Sandhills. Network Rail were lost for a cause and it was Pete that made the logical leap that it was connected to the Lime Street upgrade. Following Pete’s suggestion, the NR team did trace this issue to the Lime Street project and were able to complete repairs.

Pete clearly excels in superior partnership working, but he further embodies a continuous improvement culture and is a key player in leading innovation and change capability. He is constantly striving to get the best out of our most critical service partner and has been instrumental in driving constructive performance conversations, be that on the reactive conference calls when dealing with big incidents or during the routine governance of Joint Performance Review Group or weekly visualisation.

Pete has also taken on the new fleet planning responsibility, supporting our other critical partner and client Merseytravel. It’s fair to say Pete has become indispensable as they navigate through the many complexities delivering a new fleet and the associated infrastructure upgrades bring. He has been able to maximise integration of maintenance and new fleet work to minimise disruption to customers and offer a path through the project that was difficult for anyone else to see until Pete brought his simplified and visual roadmap of works to be completed.“