MEET THE TEAM - TRAIN PLANNING

We had the pleasure of speaking to members of the train planning team, the people behind producing timetables for London Overground that enable trains to be where they need to be to run an A* service.

Did you know the train planning team is split into two? Long-term planning (LTP) covers twice-a-year timetable changes and short-term planning (STP), which involves amending the long-term plan for anything and everything, including bank holidays, engineering works or special events.

Anyway, enough from us... it's time to hear from the people themselves in this short video package below.

To begin with we spoke with Ian Ross, Senior STP (short term plan) specialist, who has been working for the Overground for nearly nine years.

“My role is to lead on the specification of amended train plans mainly for engineering work, event services and all sorts of other known issues which affect the timetable. Many of these will not feed changes to passenger services – the most complicated changes we often make are to late night and early morning ECS (empty coaches) moves around overnight engineering rather than the more obvious weekend rail replacement between two locations which is often more straightforward.”

To successfully train plan you must work closely with other operators and within your team to coordinate especially when there is a change in schedule. In unprecedented circumstances, such as the pandemic and operation London bridge, the coordination between multiple teams is constant to be able to adapt quickly and effectively as to not impact passengers.

“The difficult bits are done by the long-term planners! They may need to get agreement from TfL, all areas of ARL, multiple bits of NR and all other operators before being able to make even what might seem like ‘no brainer’ simple changes to many.” – Ian Ross, senior STP specialist

A common sentiment shared by the train planning team is a lot of their work goes unnoticed. Train planning play an integral part in our services running successfully.

“Whether that be long forgotten service level increases, changed and cancelled engineering work and driver training, we approximately plan every amendment 2.2 times over.”

We now know how technical train planning can be but most importantly what is the best part of train planning.

“I just like doing timetables! It’s great when the pieces fall into place and a complicated set of amended workings come together to suddenly move a messy picture of multiple unfinished pieces fall into line following a lightbulb moment. STP allows the variety week to week of chopping and changing and playing with many options and seeing how it goes on the day. The current team is a great help too and we are working well together.”  - Ian Ross, Senior STP specialist

Thank you to the train planning team for taking part and providing Exchange Extra with an interesting insight into life in the team! Do you want your team to feature in the next 'Meet the Team'? Please email communications@arrivarl.co.uk