Richard Gibson of CrossCounty came down to Taunton (TravelWatch SouthWest) on Saturday (8th October) to tell us about the direct award. Well - that's what was billed, but he started by telling us there really wasn't all that much to tell and gave us a general flavour of CrossCountry for much of his time.
My notes from that first section:
XC▸ . Preface "why a bit different"
91 trains.
30 million to 37 millions journeys per annum
HST▸ have added seats
Others frachises have London income, have stations and ticket offices
Cover every Network Rail route not just a few
No one flow worth more than 1%
15% communiting 38% business 57% leisure
Average journey 60 miles / 60 minutes
Big flows
BMH -> PLY» 295th in flows
Demand - 1. BHM 6. BRI» 24. Exeter 36. Ply
118 stations served
Biggest competitor is motorway
86% satisfied
One of busiest trains - 16:44 BRI to TAU» . 5 car voyager. 31 mins; GW▸ behind takes 68.
Busy for just tiny part of the run; hard to extend for just the one part.
Infrastructure limits too. Could run sprinter for lots of runs.
Loosing time at stations. Constrants of new stations being added.
Infrastructure work at CP6▸ to make improvements?
He then moved on to speak about the new franchise
New franchise to autumn 2019
Investing £40 million
£160m to government
* Free WiFi (not capacity at present - so charges remain to supress demand)
* Dedicated point of contact for customers all day, every day through multiple channels
(Many tickets sold soon after opening at T12 in the early hours)
* Greater range of advacned fares / removal of £10 admin charge for change
* 38k seats "58th Voyager".
Taking on 2 power cars and cutting 2 5 car voyagers and making a 4 car. EDB -> PLY
* Better timetables and connections from 12.17; consultation seoon. Current is from 2006/2007 barely changed
* 340k community rail per annum to locally based community rail. Not known how it works yet.
* 1000 mamber "passenger panel" - passengers and stakeholder. Get more views on board.
"tough quality and delivery targets
"suite of measures to rduce fuel
"future proof HST to run beyond 2020
Then a handful of questions
QNS - Ivybridge. Problem - only 4 car can stop not 5 car. Also Ashchurch.
QNS - Add 2 extra carriages at peak? Problem of adding a voyager? "Timetableing is complicated".
QNS - replacement taxi and bus policy / disability. (from David Redgewell)
Prefer people on trains to rail replacement. Added stops for tunnel engineer.
We have a policy but "not sure if it's public"
Time was limited for questions; more wanted to ask than could be called. This was the final main presentation before lunch, but Richard had to dash off giving apologies "because my wife's away" and couldn't join us.
Comment
I get the feeling that Richard's talk was designed more to limit expectations and tell his audience why things couldn't be done rather than to herald any bright new future. His flow figures telling us that no one "flow" was responsible for more than 1% of their business, and that Bristol's 6th and Plymouth 29th in the their passenger numbers, and his presentation of train loading graphs showing why the 16:44 from Bristol to Taunton couldn't be made less crowded because it wasn't overcrowded on the rest of its journey from Scotland to the West Country.
Statistically I'm sure all his data was correct, but I question Richard's splitting up of flows - from what I could see - into individual station to station journeys. That way he could give the message "you're really not that important to us" to (say) Bristol Temple Meads to Taunton passengers, and also to Bristol Parkway to Taunton passengers, to Bristol Temple Meads to Tiverton Passengers, to Bristol Parkway to Tiverton Passengers, to passengers from the Bristol areas to Exeter and from Cheltenham Spa to Taunton.
I appreciate the honesty of saying that the current WiFi in the trains couldn't cope with all the traffic that would come if it were free, but I question whether it should really take 2 years to beef up the WiFi hubs / boxes to the level required; is it just possible that leaving the accountants rather like the idea of leaving the income-generating system in place as long as possible?
The lack of answers on how community rail is to be supported, on how the passenger panel is to work, and the bringing of the commnications with 24 hour service where others have done these things already gave the impression of an operator being pulled along rather than jumping at th eopportunities offered - opportunities (for example) to promote further the quieter sections of their routes working with people in communities along the way ("we don't look after stations" is a poor staring point for engaining with non-users of rail near those stations). And a need to dash off before the ability for us to ask any lunch time questions rather than paying the childminder for another hour (an educated guess) doesn't exactly shine in customer care terms.
Saying that "they have a whole new fleet of trains and we have one extra 2nd hand voyager" may be true in some of the comparisons with East Anglia. And I can understand a jealously. But I'll also point out the rather good work done on other parts of the network using cascaded rolling stock built in the last century, rather than this century's stock such as the Class 220/221. Richard was notably short on comment on the utilisation of the HSTs, and wasn't around at lunch to ask.
If the franchise is so wide that passenger groups in individual areas feel they're of little or no interest to the operator, might it be sensible to divide the franchise into operating divisions or if that's already done to pass more of the stratgy and customer relations to those divisions? Could there be some sense in splitting the franchise so that long distance service route groups are relocated into other franchises - taking (in each case) a franchise somewhere along the way and giving it tentacles out to new markets? I'm noting that
GWR▸ run to Brighton ... how about Virgin West Coast to Bournmouth, GWR to Manchester, East Midlands Trains to Cardiff and East Coast to Plymouth and Penzance? With this current franchise being a do-little, direct award, perhaps we'll see something that's far better in terms of progress for the customer in 2019?
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