UK: Train operator Southeastern and Network Rail’s Kent Route have joined forces under a unified management team as part of the government’s ongoing railway reform programme.
The combined team will operate as the South Eastern Railway, led by Managing Director Steve White. The Department for Transport said the streamlined structure would allow for a more responsive railway with a common purpose and clear accountability for railway performance across the network.
The partners have been working more closely together since Southeastern was brought into the government’s Operator of Last Resort business in October 2021. DfT said that ‘this collaborative approach has resulted in greater efficiency with better, faster decisions for customers and taxpayers, leading to an improved railway’. It cited ‘consistently low levels of cancellations, customer satisfaction at 86%, and subsidy required to operate Southeastern expected to reduce by £50m year on year’.
Not an alliance
Joint management teams made up of operator and Network Rail representatives have been set up before under the alliancing model, notably in Scotland, where ScotRail and Network Rail Scotland work together as ‘Scotland’s Railway’. On NR’s Wessex Route radiating from London Waterloo, former franchisee South West Trains and NR undertook a ‘deep alliance’ in 2012-15.
Speaking to the Chartered Institute of Railway Operators 25th anniversary celebrations on June 11, Rail Minister Lord Peter Hendy of Richmond Hill dismissed the term ‘alliance’, insisting that ‘it’s not an alliance, there’s just one railway’. A key goal of the government’s reform programme, he explained, was to make individual people responsible for their section of the rail network, ‘and if it goes wrong, they know they need to fix it’. He then told the audience that he had struck the term out of White’s job description ‘that morning’.
Welcoming the formal announcement on June 18, White said ‘we know that for our customers, what matters most is a railway they can depend on, is reliable and responsive when things go wrong. By joining together track and train under a single leadership team, with accountability for the whole railway instead of different parts, we can remove friction and make better, faster decisions to deliver a better service. This new way of working puts customer needs front and centre, and will deliver a more joined up, responsive and sustainable railway.’
