Southeastern’s punctuality drops dramatically
Credit: @TerencePerrin
Southeastern’s punctuality performance has dropped dramatically, according to Network Rail’s latest national performance figures (archive) for the four weeks 10 January to 6 February. Barely half the trains arrive on time, and the number of trains not arriving within five minutes nearly doubled compared to the same period last year.
Southeastern’s “right-time” performance fell to 53.5%, from 65.2% for the same period last year. That means that nearly half of all Southeastern trains are a minute or more late. That’s still not quite as bad as Thameslink (49.3%) – and Thameslink, unlike Southeastern, did see an improvement compared to last year.
By the “Public Performance Measure” (PPM) preferred by the rail industry (which ignores delays up to 5 minutes for commuter services) Southeastern also did very badly. Nearly twice as many trains were late by this measure, which fell to 83.2% within 5 minutes from 91.3% for the same period last year. By comparison South West Trains, Thameslink and London Overground all improved their performance compared to last year.
Cancellation and Significant Lateness figures have nearly doubled too – from 2.4% last year to 4.3% this year. One of the criteria for this is that the train is 30 minutes or more late – the threshold at which some Delay-Repay compensation becomes payable. However this also shows that Delay-Repay still only applies to less than 1 in 10 of late trains.
These figures are important because they are the first set in which the London Bridge engineering works are in both this year’s figures and in last year’s as well (last year’s figures included three weeks of the new timetable). Indeed since last year’s figures include any teething problems in the first three weeks of the London Bridge timetable one would have expected an improvement comparing like with like. So the dramatic fall-off in performance cannot easily be explained by London Bridge factors.
We’re also surprised that the figures do not show an improvement due to Southeastern’s apparently more aggressive policy of skipping more stops in order to get trains back on time. This improves their PPM score (even if the missed stops are correctly entered into the performance database, which needs to be done manually), but often at the cost of greater passenger inconvenience.
One factor that may be affecting performance is the apparent increase in the number of delays reported as due to train crews being delayed. Because of the way Southeastern now arrange their train staffing to cut costs, the delay of one train can cause a knock-on delay on a seemingly unrelated service later. The staffing appears to be optimised on the basis that trains will be on time! Is this contributing to this big fall-off in performance?
These figures also do not include the disruptions last week.
What do you think please? Please let us know here.
Are they now so chronically short staffed that the delays are inevitable? Take last night as an example – a single broken down train on one line caused chaos on all other lines. This led to SE then using their favourite excuse of stopping a Sevenoaks train at Orpington to get things back on time and making everyone wait in the cold. However, the now empty train sat at Orpington for at least 20 minutes – it could nearly have got to Sevenoaks and back in that time. How does this get their timetable back on track?
They simply appear to have too few drivers so that any problem due to sickness or minor delays creates chaos.
I wonder if it’s possible to find figures as to what proportion of all these delays are Southeasterns and what proportion Network Rails, being as they’re different businesses? This would be a better comparison for all the train companies. It seems that sometimes delays on Southeastern lines are Network Rails fault, but Southeastern don’t do anything to defend themselves. For instance, I see a fair amount of freight trains go by, which I presume are not run by Southeastern, and I wouldn’t mind betting they have some impact in service outages. My thought is that we would have a clearer understanding of a passenger rail operators performance if Network Rails operations and performance were taken in to consideration. Does that make sense?
@Paul
Yes, Network Rail publish figures on how much of total minutes delay (over 3 minutes) were due to Network Rail, to the train operator itself, to other passenger train operators or to freight operators. They are on a different basis both from the Right-Time figures and from the PPM figures (both of which measure trains simply “late” or not). So they are not strictly comparable.
Nevertheless the figures for 10 January to 6 February show that 71% of total minutes delay was attributed to Network Rail, 26% to Southeastern, 1% to other passenger operators and 2% to freight. However the figures for other train operators are similar – for instance South West Trains 69% of total minutes delay was attributed to Network Rail in the same period.
You say that “Southeastern don’t do anything to defend themselves”. Actually they are starting to say quite stridently that it’s Network Rail’s fault. See, for instance, their stakeholder letter about last Friday’s disruption.
We don’t accept that Southeastern are blame-free in disruptions whose root cause is down to Network Rail:
No doubt Southeastern have realised that with the Metro services soon going over to TfL, it’s likely that a contractor with a much better record (such as MTR) will be appointed.
Similarly, with such a dismal record there must be little chance of Southeastern winning the mainline franchise starting in 2018.
Therefore, the bean counters’ logic would be to milk the remaining months of their franchise for all it’s worth, restricting spending to just above the level that would see them booted out early. Ominously, the number of people that have signed the e-petition to remove their franchise is over 16,600 and rising, so they know they’re on borrowed time.
I expect that Southeastern’s performance will go from worse to worst until that happy day arrives when they become just another bad memory like Connex (the predecessor company that was booted out early for financial mismanagement).
Roll on May 2018 !
Wow! Thank you so much for your explanation – that was very helpful! I thought I might have known a reasonable amount about all of this on a consumer level, but there’s obviously so much more to it than meets the eye.
On Friday I made a return from Gravesend to Croydon and had 2 cancellations on the way there, and a 50 minute delay on the way back. I tried to allow myself to believe that it wasn’t all Southeasterns fault, but at least the infuriation helped to keep me warm.
It does just seem that Southeastern have given up the ghost doesn’t it. I feel so sorry for the staff that we’ve pretty much given up complaining and indeed, as I may have mentioned before, we’re looking to move away from the area as it’s our only option as all this mess has such an impact on our lives. It’s only a matter of time before it starts harming property prices, so we’re getting out while the going is good.
Have you ever thought about running a railway company? With all your insight and knowledge I wouldn’t mind betting you’d make a pretty good job of it. But then I think even I’D make a better job of it right now….
Thank you again for imparting your knowledge.
Regarding staff delays, I was on a late SE train to Blackfriars some time ago and overheard the conductor on his phone. He was running late to make a connection to his next train at Victoria, and was frantically trying to figure out how to get there as quickly as possible. By the look of it, he stood no chance. So it is surprising why this task was up to him 5 minutes before the train arrived at Blackfriars. Would it not be sensible for someone to coordinate this in advance (and not at the last moment – the train was running late for over 30 minutes), so that by the time he got off at Blackfriars, there was a taxi waiting for him.