Suffolk-based television presenter Paul Heiney was among a group of passengers left fuming as their London-bound train pulled out of Ipswich station without allowing them time to make a connection.
Eighth successive award for Cumbria-based Direct Rail Services
A Cumbria-based business is celebrating an eighth successive national award.
Now in its 12th year, the Golden Whistle Awards, organised by the Institute of Railway Operators and in conjunction with Modern Railways Magazine, celebrate operational excellence across the rail industry.
The prestigious Golden Whistles are awarded on the basis of operating statistics and Direct Rail Services (DRS) has again recognised as the UK’s most reliable freight operator.
In April, DRS joined forces with their fellow Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) transport subsidiaries, International Nuclear Services and Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd, to create Nuclear Transport Solutions (NTS), bringing together its transport expertise and capabilities into a single transport division.
Planning an operational railway is a series of trade-offs
As a railway operator, I often felt that on different sorts of railway, different sorts of engineer are your best friend. On a cash-strapped rural or freight railway, it’s the permanent way – you can do without most things but not track. On an InterCity line, it’s the rolling stock engineer, who turns out trains each morning that will earn hundreds of thousands of pounds that day. On a suburban railway, it’s the signal engineer, who provides line capacity.
What of high speed? It’s all of them. Everyone, and the interactions between them, are crucial. This includes engineers I’d never met before – those making decisions on tunnel ventilation are in fact the most critical, as spacing of ventilation shafts in tunnels turns out to be the binding constraint on High Speed 2 (HS2) capacity. (Note to anyone designing Northern Powerhouse Rail – space your shafts equally in train running times, not distance. You know,