The UK’s big rail industry shake-up

It’s “squeaky bum time” as the rail industry prepares to put a new timetable live across Britain this weekend.

After “billions of pounds of investment” and “years of engineering works”, Sunday will be the “moment of truth” for the new system, said The Guardian. But a ghost from the past is haunting the sector.

What is planned?

LNER, the main inter-city train operator from London to Scotland, will add 60,000 extra seats a week, cut the fastest journey time from London to Edinburgh to just over four hours, and to Leeds to just over two. There will also be six trains an hour out of King’s Cross, up from five.

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There will be more trains running north of Newcastle, between Nottingham and Lincoln, and from Middlesbrough. There will also be a new hourly fast service between Leeds and Sheffield.

Rail passengers are being reminded to check their journeys ahead of the imminent timetable changes.

Why are people worried?

It’s “squeaky bum time”, said industry expert Tony Miles, because the new timetable is “pushing everything to the limits of perfection”. An industry insider said there have been some “heroic assumptions about performance”.

But with the timetable “so long in the planning”, and “key operators under direct state control”, the “anxiety owes more to lingering trauma” from the last time the timetable was shaken up to this extent.

What happened then?

On 20 May 2018, a new timetable was introduced that was the “largest revision in living memory”, with changes to 46% of train times, said Rail Technology Magazine.

But it “plunged” passengers in two parts of the country into “weeks of disruption and suffering”. This was because there were "well-intentioned but counterproductive late adjustments” to the plan that “introduced unmanageable risks” as timetables “slipped” and the process became “overwhelmed”.

It was “the most chaotic, fundamental and humiliating failure it has been my misfortune to witness in 40 years as a rail journalist”, Nigel Harris, editor of trade magazine Rail, told The Guardian.

The “spectre” of 2018 “looms large”, said The Guardian. The railway “still bears the scars” from when “no one pulled the alarm cord” before that “similarly sweeping timetable change”.

Seven years ago, the railway was “unprepared and ill-equipped” to “deliver the new services”. It was “grim” for the industry and “worse for passengers”, with “widespread cancellations and delays over a calamitous few weeks”. There followed a “full review of the whole industry”, which itself led to the changes that are due to be introduced on Sunday.