Traditional Rail Timetables No Longer Work

Edward Morley leads PA Consulting’s strategic asset management capability in the transport sector, and is a driven and proven business leader with a history of successful strategy development and capability change. Edward has worked in the rail and road sectors, helping organisations transform their performance and drive improved delivery through simple business processes, better use of information and a powerful narrative.

The post-Covid era is presenting the rail sector with a number of challenges around staffing and changing travelling patterns, Edward Morley, rail expert at PA Consulting dives into the data

But perhaps more interesting, are the emerging indications that patterns of travel have changed permanently. There have been demonstrable changes in the Friday to Monday long distance services that are seeing more leisure traffic and are full, and a changing dynamic in the urban / commuter services that are (relatively) empty on Fridays and Mondays with an upturn in mid-week use when these trains are too full for the carriages provided.

It is having to deal with a fragile labour market for drivers and other staff meaning that for some train operators there is simply not currently the level of driver supply to meet demand. That is caused both by some people leaving the sector and by historical commercial choices on how drivers were trained and entered the profession.

With little available weekday data in the public domain, we have undertaken a creative analysis of the annual data from the Office of Rail and Road’s ‘Station Entry’ 2600 station dataset to illustrate what is happening.

The data in the map (using data compiled by ORR) shows how a sample of the station data can, when grouped together, highlight some of the new trends.

The dataset uses average pre-pandemic growth and is consistent across the data sample. The early pandemic impacts were seen more quickly in commuter stations with slower growth 2018-19 into 2019-20 than at other stations, reflecting the early 2020 lockdown measures.

Commuter stations saw an 80 per cent reduction in footfall, and this recovered to only 56 per cent of the pre-Covid baseline in 2021-22. In comparison there were stations that saw post-Covid recovery to 63 per cent of previous footfall in the year 2020-21 which then increased to 120 per cent of the pre-Covid baseline in 2021-22.

What does this change in commuter numbers tell us? And where are these largest movers? To consider this, we identified the non-commuter stations in the sample (already known to have recovered best) as ‘Holidays’, ‘Some new commuters’, and ‘New commuters’.

The results were:

• Two locations saw no growth in season ticket holders, but more journeys, suggesting increased holiday travel.

• A further eleven have not increased traffic to pre-Covid numbers but perform better than the baseline ‘commuter’ stations, suggesting some kind of new season ticket traffic.

• And for 15 locations there is a clear increase in season tickets, suggesting that, for this relatively small number of stations, commuter travel has increased.

Traditional commuter stations have seen a drop in the number of season tickets as a share of the total whilst the ‘New commuter stations’ group are the only ones who have seen an increase in full fare tickets. Both have seen more travel in the week, but not on all days. Those in the ‘Some new commuters’ group have seen a mixed picture of the extent of the reduction in season ticket share.

There are, however, some clear overall messages to be drawn. The first is that there has not yet been a return to the preCovid levels of rail travel. In areas where commuting was the norm and which had a high proportion of season ticket use, traffic remains lower. Yet there are locations where the entry-exit data shows traffic has increased, suggesting the emergence of both new commuter traffic and greater leisure travel, particularly given that these stations are in coastal or National Park areas.

Train operators and the government who fund (and specify) the length of train units, now need to resolve this mismatch between demand and supply. That will require a more dynamic approach both in the timetabling and the configuration of trains.

Whilst we do not yet have a fully digital railway to enable a dynamic timetable, that opportunity is coming. In the meantime, a simpler flow control dynamic of differential pricing should be considered to smooth out demand on commuter services as this is more feasible than on longer distance travel. This is already starting to be seen with staggered peak time pricing on some commuter routes, and that could quickly evolve to additional price variances by day of the week. This can both generate new custom and maximise the necessary revenues from those who continue to travel by train.

Finally, the sector should actively recognise this as the new norm and start activities with longer lead times to enable the diversification of train paths and drivers. This should include changing the timetable for different days of the week to reflect the fact that the current seven-day timetable of five and two no longer works.

More significantly there will need to be movement of drivers between operators (enabled by the transition to more government control rail system through rail reform) to meet the new mix of driver demand on the network as a result of long term changes in short and long distance travel.

These are challenging times for the rail sector but there are potentially exciting opportunities for operators to innovate to meet this new, more dynamic demand profile.