IAGY (I agree with you). Significant need to update our acronyms page which is due heavy maintenance. AND a request to posters to fill in what things stand for the first time they use them!
I don't know who TARA▸ is. To me, that's Tara Street Station ...
I wonder why. I defined or explained all that was needed for the sense to be there - often an official name doesn't help, and the original words that were initialised can be worse.
KPI (key performance indicator) is quite common in the rail industry and elsewhere. In any case, simply leaving it out doesn't really alter the meaning of what I wrote.
TSP▸ (train service provider) might or might not be the train provider to
GWR▸ - but we know Hitachi is, and that was used in the post I quoted. Strictly speaking, the TSP is Agility Trains West Limited, with Hitachi as majority owner and the only active one in management terms now that John Laing have sold out to others.
TARA is the label for the contract between the TSP and the "Relevant Operator" - GWR. I though I implied that clearly enough. In full that's the Train Availability and Reliability Agreement, but does that really say more than "GWR's contract with Hitachi"? We have had the TARA and its big brother the
MARA▸ (Master Availability and Reliability Agreement) between
DfT» and Agility mentioned here before, though not often.
They are published on line, but you may be a bit put off reading them by their size (as IndustryInsider pointed out when he posted that link originally) - 368 pages of TARA and 731 of MARA. Those copies are still the ones signed in 2014; they may have survived the coming of EMAs or they may just not have been kept up to date.
A lot of initials get used as labels even when the original full wording is no longer appropriate, and a definition or explanation of what the thing is would be better.
IEP▸ was Intercity Express Programme, so hardly a good label for a train. GWR's switch to
IET▸ was the minimum they could do - calling a train a train. Other examples include GPS: it may have been the only Global Positioning System originally; it isn't now. So if you find those words in a glossary and expect to drop them into the text as a replacement and get the right meaning, you'd be disappointed. It would have to be "the USA's national GNSS" - that term (Global Navigation Satellite System) is now preferred to avoid the ambiguity of GPS, itself now just a label.
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