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Except for the actual process of privatisation, Chris Green has shown the rare knack during his long railway career of finding interesting jobs where he could make things happen and, what is more, do it his way.
His first big command was Scottish Region. With head office 400 miles away, Green continued with direct action, risking the occasional rap over the knuckles from the BR Board when it was too late for a successful initiative to be reversed.
His invention of ScotRail was the prototype for his greatest achievement, the creation of one Network for London – Network SouthEast. The signature red lamp posts and the new livery appeared just six months after his return from Scotland .
After this golden summer of Sir Robert Reid's business led railway came the recession of the early 1990s and Green took over at InterCity.
With the onset of privatisation, Green was pencilled in to oversee half of the newly created Train Operating Companies until they were franchised. It was a non-job in railway terms and Green left after spending a year preparing ScotRail for privatisation.
And then, in February 1999, he returned, tasked with turning round the two real disappointments of railway privatisation.
These were, of course, Virgin West Coast and Virgin Cross Country. They were disappointments because, against popular legend, at last something Virgin-chief Richard Branson had touched had turned to dross.
Having left British Rail and come back to the fully privatised railway what changes struck him the most?
Typically, Green starts with the good news – the level of funding flowing through the industry. Before joining Virgin he was a non-executive director on the Connex board at the time when the funding of the new Class 375 fleet was being authorised.
This, he says, was ‘an impressive example of private life compared to Treasury life'. Decisions were made very quickly and the head office in Paris ‘agreed within weeks'. This compares with the Treasury delaying the order for NSE's Class 465 Networkers by ‘at least two years'.
At Virgin, too, he has found that funding is much quicker to arrange when you have private shareholders. ‘The ability to get capital investment agreed, to change budget targets, to negotiate with unions on pay deals are all much, much faster'.
‘On investment we're talking one board meeting against a year's argument with the Department of Transport and the Treasury'.
He also found innovation encouraged to a far greater extent. He quotes the ‘classic example of a company thinking outside the box' in the formation of www.thetrainline which already handles 3% of long distance ticket sales.
But on the downside, Green the railwayman admits to ‘frustration' on seeing a national rail industry over- fragmented. This applies to separation of track and trains as well as to the 27 TOCs ‘who now have to try and reach corporate decisions at the board of the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC)'.
His second ‘frustration', reflecting his operating background, is over the collapse of performance soon after privatisation.
Look back at the punctuality and reliability graphs and you will see an improvement in the year after franchising was completed. I have always put this down to the collective sigh of relief as managers were able to get back to running railways. But, Chris Green sees the improvement as the industry ‘living on its fat' as the BR processes and expertise kept the railway going for a year. Then, says Green, eyes went off the ball.
Then there is the treacle of the ‘virtual railway'. A Train Operating Company owns nothing and depends on contracts with a number of companies. For someone noted for making things happen fast, has he noticed any changes?
‘It's harder to make things happen physically', says Green, ‘We get there but its probably twice as hard as it was in the command structure of BR'.
‘If in the past I wanted to take out some redundant track in a freight yard and turn it into a car park, I would have talked to colleagues in the industry, we'd have agreed the same day and the work would have been done the next weekend'.
Today, the Rail Regulator has to give up to six months' notice to all potential users of the lines that are about to be removed ‘before we can even consider turning it into a car park'. Another hazard is Railtrack's duty to maximise the return for its shareholders which might mean that a property development on the site produced a better return than a car park aimed at getting more people to use trains.
And it's not just change on the ground that has become more convoluted.
On Maundy Thursday, around 06.30 there was a dewirement at Northchurch Tunnel near Berkhamsted. Virgin Trains responded by sending its spare ‘Thunderbird' rescue diesel locomotive with driver to Rugby where the overhead electrification (OHLE) train was stabled.
But instead of hauling the OHLE train to the dewirement the Virgin loco was turned away, because Railtrack's haulage contract was with English Welsh & Scottish Railway. Then 2 ½ hours were wasted while EWS found a spare loco and driver at Toton. End result, WCML fast lines closed to late afternoon on the busiest day of the year.
Green contrasts this with the command structure in the old days which would have ‘grabbed' the nearest loco and driver, ‘commandeered' OHLE fitters and the line would have been open by lunchtime. ‘If you can't clear the busiest main line in Britain in six hours, there's something wrong' comments Green, adding ‘there's still a lot of this sort of thing going on'.
We are about to move on to the next question when Chris Green comes up with another example of the new complexity, this time a subject dear to his heart – the regular interval Virgin Cross Country timetable (Modern Railways xx 1999).
It has taken a ‘solid two years' of consultation with 17 train companies, six Railtrack zones and 140 local councils. The result was due to have gone to the Rail Regulator on 12 May for track access agreement and should become a live timetable in 2002.
In his previous incarnation, Green reckons that the consultation would have been concertina'd into a few months. ‘It's a minor miracle we've achieved it at all' is his considered view. On the plus side, the authorities see this as a good example of ‘open consultation' in contrast to the ‘closed' deal between Virgin and Railtrack over Passenger Up Grade 2 on the West Coast Main Line.
All this said, Green believes that the Cross Country timetable will be seen as ‘the big success of privatisation' and an example of a truly radical timetable InterCity failed to grasp.
When I raise the controversial subject of ‘command and control' in the new railway tentatively, Green is away. ‘The nearer you get to the coal face the more natural it is to have a command structure to make the railway work. The further you are away the easier it is to manage through contracts and strategic direction'. He quotes Eurotunnel as a good example of a unified railway which is able to act rapidly on performance issues.
He draws a parallel with a large orchestra. When it starts to play ‘there has to be one conductor, everyone has to be committed and you really can't have different parts of the orchestra threatening each other with litigation or stopping to refer to contracts'.
In contrast, when the impresario is promoting the concert, hiring the orchestra, the concert hall or commissioning a new work, ‘he can and should operate at a commercial and contractual level'.
‘the actual (franchise) bidding process and the franchise agreement have worked well. Trying to make trains run by contract has not and we have actually had to rediscover the unified railway for day to day operation'.
As an example of this rediscovery, Green quotes Operation Euston as a ‘complete partnership' through which Railtrack, Silverlink and Virgin Trains are running one railway during the station throat remodelling work between now and the end of September by mutual agreement. Virgin and Silverlink are sharing passengers, staff and standby resources while Railtrack is meeting the two operators' joint commercial needs.
For example the two operators have different morning rush hours so Railtrack are being ‘sensible' with priorities. Silverlink have more arrival paths up to 09.00 and Virgin then have priority between 09.00 and 10.00.
And this informal arrangement seems to be working. Over the first four days of Operation Euston, Virgin West Coast punctuality went Friday: 96%, Saturday 98%, Sunday 96%, Monday 93%. ‘‘A' Grade every day', Green points out, ‘with really old equipment, two out of six tracks missing and only 13 platforms'.
As Railtrack found out the hard way with its infrastructure maintenance contractors, you can't sign a contract and let the supplier get on with it unsupervised. Since his return Green has had to create several new posts to refocus everyone on daily performance.
First there is the Director of Operations, in the form of Chris Tibbits, supported by two Operations Managers for the two franchises. Then there is a ‘major' contracts department to manage ‘and enforce' Virgin's contracts.
Currently these managers spend ‘most of their working day' chasing the two train service providers, Alstom and Bombardier who took over maintenance of the existing fleets as part of their new train contracts. The match with Railtrack's experience is too close to be coincidence.
He believes that for new fleets, train service provision ‘really does make sense because the future maintainer is involved in the detailed design'. But here and now, traction and rolling stock is a problem. And the contract does not help.
For example, if the contract allows six train failures a day, five failures represents success for the maintainer. But, in the days when Green had his own engineers, ‘we'd be pushing it down to zero all the time, as even one failure can cause domino delays on busy routes.'
In a commercial world, no private contractor was willing to sign up for zero failures on an ageing fleet. For the new trains the targets are much more demanding and the contract that much more effective.
Chris Green concedes that his two train service providers may still be climbing the learning curve. ‘'You're being too generous', I tell him, since both Alstom and Bombardier have hired experience maintenance managerial talent.
Indeed, Green's immediate concern is that this talent wants to develop three month plans for remedial action, while ‘we want people with spanners – now! We want overtime – now! We want locos to be hired in to make the difference'.
And he has reason to be unhappy. At the time of the interview, the 56 strong Virgin West Coast loco fleet was having to be augmented by a further seven hired in locos to cover the 42 diagrams. ‘What would you be asking if you had a Director of Engineering sitting here at this table'?
It seems that the new railway is full of upsides and down sides. Thus on the WCML everyone is committed contractually to infrastrucrure upgrades and new trains. Hoorah! But the same contracts mean that it is extremely difficult to change the timetable or plans as the market evolves.
Such as? Well, Milton Keynes, for example, where there is more demand for trains to stop in the 21 st century then there was at the end of the 20 th . To reflect plans for more homes in the south east, Virgin needs to expand the service to the city. But each new stop will mean taking away another stop somewhere else.
‘Black and white contracts are dangerous' in Green's opinion. He shares the Regulator's enthusiasm for ‘commercial purpose' terms in contracts to spell out what the contract is trying to achieve and simplify resolution of disagreements. Thus the commercial purpose could specify a broad journey time aspiration with the ability to flex.
On the plus side, Railtrack's contracts on the WCML passenger upgrades, meant that once Virgin realised that not much was happening, it could wield a very big stick indeed. Railtrack has effectively doubled its expenditure on the West Coast Route Modernisation just to meet Virgin's requirements. Another £1billion lurks in the background to meet other users' capacity needs long term.
But making the WCRM happening is what Green calls his ‘night job'. The day job is all about restoring quality of service.
He is clear why the West Coast service fell apart two years ago. ‘Everyone knows that when you reorganise you bleed', he says, 'but the first place the blood shows in is performance and the second is in customer service'.
West Coast management ‘understandably' had its eye off the ball because it was negotiating the most complex contracts for £4.7billion of investment, and then there was the aborted flotation of Virgin Rail which ‘took all the senior managers away from the day to day performance'.
So, it was ‘pretty obvious' when Green arrived that the two things that needed doing were to focus on reliable trains and a welcoming customer service - both ‘absolute basics'.
Pretty obvious to anyone, you might think, but what surprised Green was how much experience had been lost and how few operators and customer service experts with InterCity experience were still around.
But where had they gone? ‘I think in the early days of privatisation there was quite a sorting out of staff in all TOCs and Virgin lost experience in that process'.
Recovery began with Green's ‘insistence' on the Director of Operations reporting directly to him. Then, (not unwillingly I imagine) he set the tone by having the daily performance logs faxed to his home each morning before he left for work.
Before that, ‘Performance was deemed to be something that was done by middle management', comments Green.
Now all seven Virgin Trains directors read the log every morning and chase the big issues. More important, no point is too small to be followed through by Chris Tibbits and his operations teams.
Relentless following up has got across to all concerned that Virgin means business. And not just Railtrack and its zones. With the maintainers this has meant involving the Group Presidents in Paris and Montreal. One French-based Director was even called in from his August holiday when train reliability got particularly fraught.
This attention to detail drills down through the system. Tibbits' team visits the county police forces if they have caused line blockages after a suicide. Maintenance contractor Jarvis gets hauled up when over-running possessions cause major delays nd a point is made of thanking BT Police when vandals are caught.
And the hard work is paying off. Over the month of March this year Virgin West Coast punctuality averaged 90% compared with 80% last year. This improvement is reflected in the number of pages that stutter out of the fax machine in the Green household every morning. Daily logs that were 16 pages long last year are now typically five pages.
A ‘great chunk' of this reduction is down to the Railtrack Zones. ‘Remember all those broken rails' Chris Green asks? ‘Not one over the latest period'
Another Green innovation was to create a customer service department with a seat on the Board, something that hadn't existed during Virgin's first two years in charge. This had to be headed by an industry expert – enter Brenda Klug with wide experience in airlines and the medical profession.
So, the first year AG (After Green) has seen Brenda Klug ‘sorting out an infamous contract with food supplier Rail Gourmet. ‘She has done a first class job in radically renegotiating the contract with serious penalties' says Green. if the right food is not delivered to the trains on time. Which suggests that contracts have their uses.
At the same time, all 600 on board staff were retrained in four months. Jobs have also been restructured to create a single on-board team with the senior conductor becoming the Train Manager and the chief steward the Train Service Manager. GNER travellers may find this familiar.
Now, journalistic observers may still not be wildly impressed by Virgin food service. ‘Older journalists perhaps' suggests Green unkindly, pointing out what counts is what the customers say. And what 82% of them said in the latest satisfaction surveys is that they would recommend Virgin Trains to a friend. That compared with 58% a year ago.
This reflects an amalgam of punctuality and on board service – although the team won't be happy until satisfaction is up to 90%.
Still, Green thinks that Virgin Trains has ‘broken the back of the customer service problem and the drive now is to do it much better. Staff have started coming up to him with ‘ideas for improvements rather than grumbles'. Summing up the change Green muses wryly ‘Of course we've been round it before, in a way we've just described Network South East in 1986'.
And finally, there is the night job,. The WCRM. What amazed him on his arrival was Railtrack's lack of commitment, awareness even, given the timescales it had signed up to in contracts with crippling penalties.
What made this even harder to understand was that if Railtrack's poor performance affected Virgin's customers, it risked losing out twice through the revenue sharing deal which started the day PUG2 was signed.
But, ‘all that is now in the past', declares Green. ‘We have an excellent professional relationship with Railtrack at all levels. We have the highest respect for the alliance teams led by Tony Fletcher and Robin Gisby. Increasingly open relationships are developing where we share problems both inside and outside the contract'.
Ah those contracts again. And for Green, ‘the trick is to live within the spirit of the contract but work as a team on delivering the detail'.
Some things haven't changed. I once got Chris Green a rocket from the BR Board by revealing his unilateral adoption of differential speed limits for IC125 in Scotland. A quarter century on and he is still more concerned with giving customers the best railway he can rather than painting by centrally imposed numbers.
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