O L Leigh
Established Member
Where i agree with you is that one driver to cover a whole journey (eg Plymouth to London) is far more productive and therfore saves the railway money, compared with using 3 different drivers to cover the one trip.
It is small savings like this, that , if multiplied throughout the UK would translate into decent savings.
But even this approach doesn't make a huge difference. There is still a trade-off.
The three drivers that might have otherwise covered that one London service are still required, even if it now only needs one of them to take that particular train up to town. If the Plymouth driver had previously only taken the train as far as, say, Exeter, there would have been a requirement for them to do it more than once in a shift. If he/she is now on the way up to London there still needs to be someone else to work the other trips that would otherwise have formed their job.
I'm not sure I've explained it very well, I'll admit. The point being that it looks quite marginal from where I'm sitting. I'm sure you're aware that having one driver taking the train all the way to London doesn't save the railway two drivers. All it does is make individual jobs a little bit more productive than would be the case if the driver was having to constantly swap trains as the shift unfolds. Whether this translates into savings due to a reduction in driver establishment depends on a lot of other things, most notably the diagramming of jobs at individual depots. Maybe it would be enough to make this happen, but then again maybe not. Without the various train planning departments sitting down and having a proper look at it there is no way to know for certain. This thread contains so much spit-balling and back-of-a-fag-packet calculations, and this fits right in with that.
As I mentioned before, my crowd had a go at trying to squeeze more productivity out of us a few years back and, if I recall correctly, it reduced the driver establishment across the entire company by something like two. If this is the sort of savings that we'd be looking at realising then I wonder if it really is worth all the bother given that I'm sure we could save more than that much by other means.
But at the same time you remove the ability to cross cover and require more spares.
No you don’t. As I’ve explained already today, the number of spare drivers is not dependent on route or traction knowledge but is set by the depot establishment calculation which takes the number of diagrams as it’s starting point.
It also doesn’t necessarily preclude cross-cover, as it is extremely rare for neighbouring depots not to have overlapping route cards. Indeed it is frequently the case that two or more depot’s staff will sign a single route in it’s entirety making it very possible to provide cross-cover.
Apart from that we’re broadly in agreement.
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