Great Western Coffee Shop

I'm going to share one of the items that get my hackles up.

It used to be that BR had it's own maintenance teams and every week we would have a visit from at least one member of the maintenance team based at the principal station up the line.
A simple request to the effect, "whilst you're here theres a light flashing in the ladies" and the job was done, no paperwork, no bill to pay, just a good service from staff who put the railway first, staff who had time to help the travelling public with any questions that were put to them, such as which platform for the Oxford train?

Today it's a culture of contractors, this alone raises questions on security, we used to known our in-house staff and if outside staff came in to work on railway projects it was always done under guideance of the in-house teams.

Now dozens of contractors seem to flood the railway, we have to sign them in, give a briefing and it's down to the station staff to ensure their safety, I'm not happy about this, we have our own job to do without being a nursemaid to contractors.

Now the real crunch, typically contractors do their work and come in with paperwork to be signed off, yet almost to a man, whilst  the paperwork has a description of work done and the arrival time, the rest is left blank, hours worked and departure time is blank.
I've challenged this before, just to be sworn at and called a job's worth.

Even worse I've had paperwork nicely filled in to sign, to find that the top copy is filled in with site times and leaving time but the copies underneath are blank.

To me this is fraud, I don't like seeing so called engineers claiming its taken 4 hours to change 3 light bulbs, cctv replay showed it took less than 1/2 an hour.

But then as it was put to me, under BR if a job took to long, question were asked and a dressing down would occur.
Under contract the longer a job takes the better, after all who is the Contractor looking after?

This has been raised at staff briefings but FGW seem to hold the view that "the contract is signed, their's nothing we can do"

Then why keep signing up with the same contractor?

Well it's early on a Saturday, whilst many have weekends off, the railway is 24/7 I'm just leaving to get to work. Good day.

I'm getting fed up with contractors in my job too. I work for a large bureaucratic financial services company. Recently there was a project to upgrade our monitors to lcd screens and we were all issued with standard 17" screens which couldn't go above a certain resolution. For most people this is fine but for myself and other two web designers the monitors clearly weren't big enough. After getting the nod from my boss I raised a request for 3 x 21" monitors. Looking at the costs the monitors in total were about ^600 which isn't brilliant but because we're buying them direct from Dell I understood the price. The part I disagree with is that because i'm not insured to plug monitors in we're paying ^172 (?!) to have a bloody contractor do it!!!

There are different types of contractor we at Taplow were very impressed with the contractors who upgraded our footbridge in summer 2006 Despite the project manager coming from Lllanlli he stayed during teh week in a local hotel. They also had somebody on site the whole time they were working which was mostly at night.

We are now having our toilets refurbished which is absolutely fine and good for FGW. However, it as Station Manager says there is absolutely no supervision. Now given Taplow is unmanned from 13:00. The staion clerk has had to give them the keys to lock up at night when they go,

Further a delivery turned up the other day of all the new sanitary ware and fittings, when the contractors were off site and the staion clerk off duty. Fortunately a member of the rail user group happened to be on site with a key to suitable storage location. Had he not been there the driver would have had to return to Bristol from whence he came.

However, the most interesting thing was the supplies came from a well known national building contractor who happen to have an outlet locally.

Mada is absolutely right teh contractor plague has spread everywhere. Basically it's all down to the accountants and management consultents saying concentrate on your core business anything else is irrelevant pay someone else to do it and don't wmploy your own staff because it's cheaper.

Now the problem is what is core business is ahving a blown light bulb replaced part of FGW core business and fitting flat screens part of Mada core business?

There is an Archer novel about rival hotel magnates, one of the magnates foilbles was that none of hotels would ever have a blown light bulb , it would be replaced immediately by the hotel electrician and if it wasn't the electrician was for the high jump.   In the novel he seemed to make  a success of the hotel business.

So I would suggest having properly lit stations is part of FGW core business and how any financial institution can work without computer screens I would like to see.

I fear this is the sort of thing (and add the other examples too) that has helped put the price of the railways up to around 5 billion pounds a year from around 1 billion about 15 years ago.  I'm not sure what the answer is within the current framework ... any ideas?

The Answer is simple, with a TOC as big as FGW, it's time to bring back In-House maintenance teams.

IIRC FGW have In-House painters as FGW top brass couldn't find painting contractors that did a GOOD ENOUGH job!!

There is room for Contractors on the Railway, large Jobs that go to tender, but under BR more often than not the In-House teams would put up a Price for large jobs very competitive to Contract price, in fact this is essential as when work is all out to tender, something Illegal often occurs, I've seen contractors brought in to price a job and a little meeting between contractors and it's agreed that all submited bids will carry a ^XX,XXX weighing.

To keep costs down, Contractors also employ staff on Draconian terms and conditions, I believe one of FGWs main contractors, employ staff on a 52 1/2 standard week (10 hours unpaid travel time).

How many hours do FGW staff work? 35?

Just one example, I believe all Water Bowser repairs for FGW are done from Bristol, hence it costs ^300 just to change a flat tyre on a Bowser at Plymouth, or Paddington...MADNESS.
There's plenty more of these examples.

I seen more than enough, so much so, that I went to CW with my concerns, he's got a large dossier on contractors.
On another coffee shop posts I said FGW ruined my life, they did,  because I was TUPE'd to a FGW contractor from BR, I had to pack in my JOB because all the values we had, Safety, (now the law says this, how do we get around that).
Doing Good work as cheap as possible, went out the window!

Don't do Maintenance it reduces breakdowns is the CONTRACTOR'S CRY!

Travel on FGW trains just look at station lighting, Bristol Temple Meads, Didcot, Exeter Central, Exeter St Davids, Reading and Taunton, and dozens of smaller stations the platform lighting stay on all day in daylight hours, why?



Railtrack was brought to it's Knees by contractors, Paying big money for work that was forever delayed or NOT done, hence Hadfield!