HAVE WE SEEN ‘PEAK RELIABILITY’? ROGER FORD REFLECTS ON A YEAR THAT HAS SEEN PERFORMANCE LEVELS OVERALL FAIL TO IMPROVE FOR THE FIRST TIME
In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The sun also rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. Two ways, he says, ‘gradually and then suddenly’.
This seems to sum up this year’s rolling stock reliability review and the Golden Spanner Awards. In 2016 and 2017 the colour coding (see box on p56) showed a predominance of red in one or two classes.
Because the phenomenon was not consistent from year-to-year, I assumed that it was down to random issues. Never assume! This year the red tide has spread.
Table 1 shows the overall picture. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which collates the performance of individual fleets for Fleet Challenge within the National Performance Task Force, employs a slightly more granular set of rolling stock categories in its report compared with the Golden Spanner Awards.
The overall Miles per Technical Incident Moving Annual Average (MTIN MAA) is calculated separately for each category.
A year-on-year comparison of these overall figures shows that, with the exception of the ex-British Rail diesel multiple-units and the Class 172 fleets in the Era 3 DM…
