'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 11

Quality & Reliability management

So I knew more about failure than anyone else, did I? I discovered that my appointment owed much to pressure from non-executive Board Members who came from industries where reliability and quality management was accepted as routine and a basic management concern. Apart from the application of reliability management techniques in some technical design departments, most BR management was not conversant with the latest thinking on these issues and it became apparent very quickly that I was being left to discover for myself what might be relevant and of value to the industry. Go to France and Germany, I was urged. Find out what they do!

It was strange to move from the responsibility for an annual budget of £35 million and a constant series of events and pressures to which I had to respond, to a situation where I had a part time secretary only, an empty office with no files and the ball in my court to determine how to fill my days. In fact it was suggested that as I would be travelling extensively, I could work from home using the Euston House office as a ‘pied à terre’ and postal point.

So I acted on the suggestion given to me by David Kirby and made arrangements to meet up with operations and engineering managers in the SNCF and DB. Arrangements were made for me to ride in the cab of an electric locomotive from the Belgian border to Paris and then to travel in the cab of a DB locomotive on the left bank of the Rhine to observe the impact of cab radio. The SNCF loco was one of the ten quadruple system Co-Co electrics, 40110, described by the inspector as ‘très fragile’, but we performed perfectly with the strict adherence to absolute punctuality that SNCF was known for at that time. I tried in vain to establish the techniques SNCF management used to ensure their punctuality performance, but my question did not seem to be understood. It was apparently self-evident that trains had to run to time, but SNCF managers could point to no analyses or justification of reliability investment. It was just taken as a ‘given’ without question. As I stepped from the cab of 40110 at the Gare du Nord, the Inspector asked if I was free the following day.

As I was not returning to the UK until the Flèche d’Or the following afternoon, he suggested I showed up at the Gare de Lyon at 07.00 and he accompanied me in the cab of a TGV to Lyons and back with a one hour coffee break in a city café there. I was back in Paris by midday! This precision was exemplified by his statement that there were six seconds of recovery time between each signalling section, which allowed the TGV to run on less than full power for over 50% of the journey if there were no delays.

I had an enjoyable trip in the cab of Co-Co electric 103.128-5 from Mainz to Cologne and the value of the radio system was shown when we received a message about the failure of level crossing gates approaching Bonn. As a result, we were not stopped to be warned, but acknowledged the message and proceeded over the crossing at 5 mph losing only a couple of minutes in consequence. However, I found little supporting evidence of calculated justification in the DB for their quality policy, which seemed to be based on building in substantial spare capacity regardless of cost. As well as the provision of spare stock and locomotives to cover unforeseen incidents, equipment was utilized way below its capacity or over-engineered.

As an example, I was told that the V200 diesel hydraulics built in 1953 were normally only run by drivers in notch 4 (of a 7 notch controller) except on an InterCity or EuroCity train running late. As a comparison with the British culture, the WR ‘Warships’ based on the DB design spent most of their journeys from Paddington to the West of England being worked to their limit in notch 7. Although there are no V200s still in service on the DB, examples can still be found – sold to the Swiss, Greek and Saudi Arabian railways. In contrast, the British examples were all withdrawn from service by the early 1970s, even though they were built four years later than their German precursors. The British were famed at getting a ‘quart out of a pint pot’ and this was exemplified in the lesser subsidy that BR received from the taxpayer compared with its continental neighbours, and the passenger business wanted to extort the maximum advantage from its new resources to boost revenue, but BR paid the price in significantly reduced reliability and lack of standby cover.

An interesting and novel interlude occurred in May 1988, which was the 250th anniversary of the conversion of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Although Methodism was still strong in the UK, most global adherents were in the USA and some 1,000 or more were coming over for a special commemorative service at St Paul’s Cathedral to be attended by the Queen. Their tour company wanted to take these ‘pilgrims’ to Wesley associated sites in the UK - his father’s rectory in Epworth, near Doncaster, Lincoln College at Oxford where he was an undergraduate, and the New Room at Bristol, one of the earliest Methodist chapels.

A proposal was made to run a couple of special trains for the American tourists over three days and two nights to these sites and I was asked as a person wearing two hats (a Methodist and Train Planner) to join the committee planning the event to liaise with BR and the Travel Company. It gradually became more and more ambitious, until we’d planned two trains travelling round the London - Doncaster - York - Leeds - Bristol - Oxford - London circuit in opposite directions, meeting for a service in Gloucester Cathedral on the second day. Then the BBC ‘Songs of Praise’ team got involved, with choirs singing hymns on the two trains, the Methodist Youth Association put 500 youngsters on an HST from St Pancras to Bedford and back, with a Methodist Lay Preacher who was a Crewe engine-driver naming one power car ‘Charles Wesley’ (John’s brother and a prolific hymn writer) and the President of the Methodist Church naming the other, ‘John Wesley’.

There were several ‘interesting’ meetings with the BBC culminating in one at St Pancras with the BBC Programme Producer, the three ‘Songs of Praise’ presenters - Sally Magnussen, Cliff Michelmore and Roger Royal - joining BR staff and demonstrating moves required with coffee cups and sugar bowls while Sally breast fed her baby around the meeting table. I finally put my foot down at one request - to photograph one USA special passing the HST on the four track section just south of Bedford, while a John Wesley look-alike rode a horse parallel in an adjoining field! We did get the two trains running parallel, however, and Sally shouting the next hymn request across the track to the moving special with Cliff.

A further opportunity to look overseas at reliability and quality management came in the latter part of 1986 when I was invited as BR’s representative to a Quality conference being hosted by the Swedish national railway, SJ, in Malmö. This put me in touch with Professor Ăke Claesson of Stockholm University who invited me a couple of years later to lecture to students at the Stockholm Technical Institute on the value of reliability, the work I had commenced with Cyril Bleasdale on the LMR and developed further during the three years at the Board. The work undertaken by Cranfield College had established the value of reduced journey times but we had researched with them further how passengers viewed punctuality in comparison with the planned journey time. The conclusion from the research and surveys conducted indicated a value between two and three times greater than the same number of minutes planned time which had enabled us to put a rough value - or rather, cost - to the delays and their cause. This now gave us estimated figures that could be postulated to justify investment to remove those causes of delay.

This approach came into its own when the 1987 East Coast timetable began to fall apart and I was asked by John Prideaux, InterCity Director, and John Nelson, ER General Manager, to assess whether the plan or its implementation was at fault. The conclusion I came to was that acceleration in the schedules had removed unnecessary ‘recovery time’, but the completion of the electrification work early the previous year meant that the ECML timetable had luxuriated in surplus recovery time for several months and that a miscellany of lost time for operating and engineering reasons had been hidden – only to be revealed as this time was stripped out. We identified some 25 reasons for regular lost time and began the task of analysing each and counting the cost of correcting them, to establish priorities we could plan and budget for.

This led to a request for me to be the main speaker at the German Railways Operating Conference in Bamberg in 1988, when I was asked to address their Board Member and senior colleagues for three 45 minute sessions on the system I had developed on the West Coast Main Line in 1986 and refined for the ECML study. An interesting aside is that I prepared three 45 minute presentations in English and had them professionally translated for me to deliver in German. On my first run through rehearsal I found each of my talks took a full 70 minutes to say the same thing in German and I had to be ruthless in using the blue pencil. The end result was satisfying, however, and DB adopted my ‘punctuality budget’ system for its whole EuroCity and InterCity timetable two weeks later. I dined out for years ‘on telling the German Railways how to run their trains on time’! Despite my success there and on the East Coast, I never did succeed in persuading my successor on the West Coast to adopt the system also!

I guessed that there was a balance between the continental obsession with quality at any cost (or the cost of this not even quantified) and the British culture of paring everything to the bone under the pressure of successive governments. I decided that I’d have to look at other industries for guidance and spent a more useful time exchanging ideas with British Airways and the oil industry and being introduced to the concept of TQM (Total Quality Management) the philosophy of which was the value of spending more time in planning to get it right first time, to avoid the greater cost of correcting error.

My attention was drawn to the TQM philosophy as outlined by the American management guru, Phil Crosby, and I discussed this at length with David Rayner who’d replaced David Kirby as Board Member with special oversight of the production functions. He suggested that I write a paper to the Board outlining the philosophy and proposing some pilot studies. The proposal was approved and I was delegated to contact a number of consultancy companies with experience in quality management, including Phil Crosby, Brooks International, and Cooper Lybrand. I then spent time looking for Business Sector backing to identify suitable opportunities for trials.

One pilot project set up involved looking at track renewal standards in the Grantham - Stoke Summit - Peterborough high speed section on the East Coast Main Line, to test whether higher standards (and costs) at implementation would result in lower maintenance costs and fewer infrastructure failures in the long run. The problem with this pilot was that it would take several years before its success could be proven and there were no conclusive results before I was overtaken by greater priorities. Another pilot project embraced by the Scottish Region Provincial Services management was to look at the diagrams for train crews at Yoker depot and work with the staff there to involve them in quality improvement discussions and proposals.

Of greater impact in the short term was the study we set up at the InterCity maintenance depot at Willesden where electric locomotives of class 86 and 87 were serviced and maintained. Brooks were represented by a larger than life affable and very competent American, John Herter - I can still feel his iron handshake now - who quickly got to grips with the way that the depot planned its maintenance to keep the functional costs low but which ignored the wider impact on the business. By replanning the maintenance to fit the slack times when the locos were not required, at a higher cost in shift work by the maintenance staff, the Brooks team was able to demonstrate the saving of four a/c mainline electric locomotives, a huge payback for this investment in TQM processes. They also came up with quality assurance recommendations which would improve the reliability of these locomotives giving a further locomotive as surplus and available for other duties. This was impressive and drew the attention at Board level in several departments.

There then developed pressures to adopt TQM philosophies in a number of departments and these divided themselves quickly into two quite different schools of thought. The Chief Mechanical & Electrical Engineer and the Chief Signal & Telecommunications Engineer both decided to adopt the British Standards approach, known as Quality System B.S.5750, which later became International Standard I.S. 9000. This involved a rigorous review of procedures in the installation and maintenance activities and written detailed instructions to be followed and audited to ensure compliance.

An alternative approach was championed by the Chief Personnel Manager who saw training in quality thinking, philosophy and methodologies as key to TQM. The Board decided to back both approaches and while the engineering functions got on with implementing B.S. 5750, the Personnel function employed consultants to work with me to run a series of courses for the top 500 managers of BR, called inevitably ‘Leadership 500’. This was a much broader education of senior management into the values of quality - essential after the previous thirty years of indoctrination of management into cost-cutting to meet government budget cuts and targets. Ultimately 800 senior managers went through this course and a similar course at an appropriate level was developed for the middle rung of managers and senior supervision.

I began to notice a new direction, especially in the InterCity business where growth was taking place and the cost-cutting priority of previous years was being replaced by a more positive approach and a willingness to invest in quality. My contribution was being recognised - in 1987 I was one of the select few who were sent on a course of short high level seminars at Templeton College, Oxford, attended by such lecturer luminaries as Denis Healey covering our exposure to business and politics. Then in 1989 there was the 25th World Congress of Railways in Moscow with Sir Bob Reid leading a team of eight BR officers, where I was to be scheduled to make a presentation on the application of TQM to the rail industry and to highlight in particular the ascribing of value to train quality aspects such as train reliability and punctuality.

One lighter moment during the conference occurred when we discovered that it was Deputy Chairman John Welsby’s birthday. The BR team decided to celebrate with a special meal in our hotel (the giant 6,000 bedded ‘Rossiya’) and we had a spread consisting mainly of sturgeon, caviar, tomatoes and cucumber - about the only food which they seemed to have a supply of - accompanied by bottles of champagne. The bill for the 14 of us (conference participants plus partners) came to just over 200 roubles (the official exchange rate was £1 = 1 Rouble) but the waiter asked if we had dollars. We rustled up 49 between us which the waiter accepted in lieu of roubles with great delight. Apparently the system was for the waiter to purchase our food from the kitchen, then obtain what he could from the customers. As roubles had virtually no purchasing power and he could use hard currency to buy luxury goods in the Moscow diplomats’ and officials’ shop that only accepted dollars and sterling, he was well content with his ‘bargain’ - as were we. In due course, I duly went and made my presentation, but then something else happened in December 1988, which shifted my career yet again….