The Friends of the Far North Line
Cairdean Na Loine Tuath
the campaign group for rail north of
Inverness - lobbying for improved services for the local user, tourist and freight
operator
ScotRail was required by Transport Scotland to produce a Remedial Plan in February due to performance being below contracted levels. Here are three extracts relevant to the Far North Line:
3 - Steps proposed for remedying the cancellations Breach
3.1.2
Recruiting additional traincrew to deliver a reliable service
As identified in section 2.1, there has been a shortfall in traincrew numbers to operate a reliable service. The main reason for this is losing more drivers than forecast to other train operators. To address this, we will undertake a further recruitment campaign to bring 55 new drivers and 30 new conductors to work on Scotland's Railway, in addition to the hundreds who are already recruited and in training.
These new drivers and conductors will fill vacancies at our key depots to enable full coverage of all timetabled services.
3.2.3
Reducing class 158 and 170 technical cancellations
ScotRail's engineering team has identified specific actions to make sure that class 170 and class 158 train reliability is sufficient to operate the required diagrams. The following is taking place:
Class 158
5 - Steps proposed for remedying the PPM (Public Performance Measure) Breach
5.1
Integrated Control Centre
The ScotRail Alliance Integrated Control Centre - a partnership between Network Rail Scotland and ScotRail - at Springburn, Glasgow is where we manage Scotland's Railway on a day-to-day basis. Decisions made at the centre impact passengers across Scotland. As we continue to run more trains on the network to provide a better service to customers it becomes ever more difficult to recover from incidents on Scotland's railway network.
We will recruit three additional train running controllers - train running controllers currently manage every service across Scotland. Following a workload review, we will be increasing the number of controllers by three, to allow for dedicated teams for the East of Scotland and the North of Scotland - these areas were previously combined into one role. By doing this we can achieve extra focus on punctual train running.