Latest Rail News

25.11.13

Network Rail ‘sorry’ for infrastructure delays as performance plunges

PPM has fallen to 86.2% during period 8 – and Network Rail has apologised to East Coast for huge delays caused by infrastructure problems.

The data covers 13 October to 9 November and compares to 88.9% last year and 92.1% in period 7. The Moving Annual Average (MAA) is now at 90.5%.

East Coast was the worst performing franchise yet again, with a PPM of just 77%, way below target, with an MAA of 82.2%. Network Rail said the major impacts on performance were infrastructure related, comprising 49% of delays. It said it “apologises” for these delays.

External factors accounted for a further 21%, with East Coast itself only responsible for 18% of delays.

Overall, delays attributable to Network Rail accounted for 60% of delays nationally during the period. External factors such as fatalities and trespass made up around 20%.

The best performing franchise was c2c, with 96.6% and MAA at 97.1%. The operator’s managing director, Julian Drury, said: “This has been a tough month for all train operators, c2c included. We know our customers understand the exceptional effect of the St Jude storm, and I’m pleased our punctuality has otherwise been pretty resilient over the last four weeks. Our aim now is to keep performance at a high level and continue to run more trains on time for customers next month.”

Network Rail originally published the statistics a week ago, but then withdrew them for re-checking following the impact of the stormy weather during the period.

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Comments

Andy Oddie   26/11/2013 at 10:04

During the 90's when we had really bad PPM on the Southern part of the WCML, Virgin Trains and GTRM (Maintainer) got together and created a task force called WARP (West Coast Accelerated Reliability Programme) under a banner called Target 90 - this was hugely successful and turned around performance to acheive 90% PPM in under a year. It seems to me there is an opportunity to make massive improvements in Performance across the Network based on the WARP approach.

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