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FeedsHome: February - March 2010 › Cover Story › Tracking down markets
Tracking down markets
01/03/2010 | Channel: Infrastructure, Business Improvement, New Products & Services
Following the launch of its record breaking high-speed service between St Pancras International and Kent, Nicky Pearce talks to Charles Horton about how Southeastern is opening up new rail markets.
Operating as a fully integrated franchise since 2006, running services in South East London, East Sussex and Kent, Southeastern transports over 140,000 passengers into London every day. Owned by Govia, a joint venture between Go-Ahead Group (65 per cent) and Keolis (35 per cent), the organisation gains benefits from being part of the UK’s busiest rail operator – Govia also owns Southern and London Midland. For the first three years management emphasis was placed on conducting market research and working with industry partners and stakeholders to create a truly integrated timetable incorporating mainline, metro and high-speed services. Southeastern offers 2000 train services to 179 stations across 540 miles of railway infrastructure every day, delivering 156 million passenger journeys annually across its multi-disciplinary capabilities.
With the core aspiration to create a growing railway for a growing region, the company looks to slash journey times, boost capacity and provide customers with a wider variety of transport options. As one of the most forward thinking and innovative rail providers, Southeastern brought the biggest timetable change to Kent for 40 years when it took over the Integrated Kent Franchise in 2006. Though this ability to persistently enhance services is a mainstay of the business, Charles Horton, managing director of Southeastern, who has 25 years experience in the rail industry, believes its core strength lies in its people: “We have a real commitment to our 3500-strong workforce, we want our people to be well equipped, confident and able to do the best job they can for our passengers. We’ve invested £10 million in training programmes across the organisation and today over 40 per cent of our employees have a National Vocational Qualification. We’ve recently achieved the Investors in People accreditation and won’t stop there as we hope to gain bronze status this year, and look to progress into the silver and gold levels in the future. While launching high profile programmes obviously causes great pride in the company, I strongly believe that our people are the key to providing a reliable and quality service.”
Whilst on a constant cycle of development across its range of services, Southeastern reached its greatest milestone and fulfilled its ultimate ambition with the official launch of the UK’s first domestic high-speed service on the 14th December 2009. Operating from St Pancras International to Kent, this new service has changed the face of commuter transport by cutting journey times dramatically, bringing regeneration and new investment opportunities to the region. Taking £5.8 billion of investment from the Department for Transport, the project benefited from the existing infrastructure of the Eurostar HS1 line into St Pancras, though the new Ebbsfleet, Stratford and St Pancras stations underwent a number of enhancements.
Maintaining close relationships with stakeholders and industry partners such as HS1 and Network Rail proved essential throughout the implementation of the high-speed line, while a partnership with Hitachi was created for the design and supply of the new record speed Class 395 trains. Charles explains: “We worked very closely with Hitachi from the initial design stages to the final delivery. Our engineers regularly visited the team in Japan during the construction process and some of our drivers completed early training over there. The first train arrived in August 2007 and last year we set the new UK domestic service record speed at 225.3 kilometres per hour with these patented trains. The fact that we were able to introduce a ‘preview’ service six months early in June 2009 is testament to all of the collaborative hard work we enjoyed with our partners. This new service is key to our aim of offering greater choice to our passengers and has a huge role to play in the rejuvenation of parts of East Kent and Thames Gateway. The faster journey times make Kent a more attractive county to invest in for business, and live in for people needing to spend all or part of their time within easy reach of London and beyond.”
Indeed, the high-speed line will save passengers up to 49 minutes in journey times from 21 stations. The metro and mainline services are as important as ever and since the launch in December there are 50 new metro services and 100 high speed, increasing capacity into London by five per cent. Whilst it is appreciated that the new line will not suit everyone, the choice it brings is its ultimate success.
Southeastern gained encouragement from the impressive number of people that tried the service in its ‘preview’ period and research has shown that there is a substantial amount of new travellers who would have otherwise made their journey by car, particularly from Ebbsfleet – the organisation has tapped into new rail markets. Charles comments: “We’ve tried to create a timetable that suits and improves service for the majority of people, and we will be monitoring schedules over the coming weeks and months to see what future advances we can make. The feedback from passengers in the ‘preview’ period was positive as people began to appreciate how much of a life changing experience it was going to be – it is so encouraging to be personally thanked by passengers because they’ve got a couple of hours of their life back!”
Southeastern will continue to develop its market-leading franchise through its involvement in the Olympic ‘Javelin’ service. Located only seven minutes from St Pancras, Stratford station is at the heart of the Olympic village and the company’s Class 365s will be used to deliver fast tracked transport throughout the games in 2012 as directed by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). The organisation is also currently involved in a number of National Station Improvement Programme schemes alongside Network Rail with whom it holds a lucrative association, while close relationships are held with regional councils and communities to improve and enhance access to local stations.
Looking to the future of Southeastern and its high-speed offering, Charles outlines his vision: “The introduction of this domestic high-speed service has been an exciting venture for all of us and I think it has been a real mark of success that we have improved the punctuality and reliability of the metro and mainline service over the last few years. As these are the backbone of transport in South East London, Kent and East Sussex it is important to us that our current customers continue to experience improvements. Our aim for the coming years is to build on the foundations we have laid in the first few years of our franchise. We will do this by continuing the investment in our people and maintaining the vital relationships we have with industry partners that are a key element to the success of any business.”
With the core aspiration to create a growing railway for a growing region, the company looks to slash journey times, boost capacity and provide customers with a wider variety of transport options. As one of the most forward thinking and innovative rail providers, Southeastern brought the biggest timetable change to Kent for 40 years when it took over the Integrated Kent Franchise in 2006. Though this ability to persistently enhance services is a mainstay of the business, Charles Horton, managing director of Southeastern, who has 25 years experience in the rail industry, believes its core strength lies in its people: “We have a real commitment to our 3500-strong workforce, we want our people to be well equipped, confident and able to do the best job they can for our passengers. We’ve invested £10 million in training programmes across the organisation and today over 40 per cent of our employees have a National Vocational Qualification. We’ve recently achieved the Investors in People accreditation and won’t stop there as we hope to gain bronze status this year, and look to progress into the silver and gold levels in the future. While launching high profile programmes obviously causes great pride in the company, I strongly believe that our people are the key to providing a reliable and quality service.”
Whilst on a constant cycle of development across its range of services, Southeastern reached its greatest milestone and fulfilled its ultimate ambition with the official launch of the UK’s first domestic high-speed service on the 14th December 2009. Operating from St Pancras International to Kent, this new service has changed the face of commuter transport by cutting journey times dramatically, bringing regeneration and new investment opportunities to the region. Taking £5.8 billion of investment from the Department for Transport, the project benefited from the existing infrastructure of the Eurostar HS1 line into St Pancras, though the new Ebbsfleet, Stratford and St Pancras stations underwent a number of enhancements.
Maintaining close relationships with stakeholders and industry partners such as HS1 and Network Rail proved essential throughout the implementation of the high-speed line, while a partnership with Hitachi was created for the design and supply of the new record speed Class 395 trains. Charles explains: “We worked very closely with Hitachi from the initial design stages to the final delivery. Our engineers regularly visited the team in Japan during the construction process and some of our drivers completed early training over there. The first train arrived in August 2007 and last year we set the new UK domestic service record speed at 225.3 kilometres per hour with these patented trains. The fact that we were able to introduce a ‘preview’ service six months early in June 2009 is testament to all of the collaborative hard work we enjoyed with our partners. This new service is key to our aim of offering greater choice to our passengers and has a huge role to play in the rejuvenation of parts of East Kent and Thames Gateway. The faster journey times make Kent a more attractive county to invest in for business, and live in for people needing to spend all or part of their time within easy reach of London and beyond.”
Indeed, the high-speed line will save passengers up to 49 minutes in journey times from 21 stations. The metro and mainline services are as important as ever and since the launch in December there are 50 new metro services and 100 high speed, increasing capacity into London by five per cent. Whilst it is appreciated that the new line will not suit everyone, the choice it brings is its ultimate success.
Southeastern gained encouragement from the impressive number of people that tried the service in its ‘preview’ period and research has shown that there is a substantial amount of new travellers who would have otherwise made their journey by car, particularly from Ebbsfleet – the organisation has tapped into new rail markets. Charles comments: “We’ve tried to create a timetable that suits and improves service for the majority of people, and we will be monitoring schedules over the coming weeks and months to see what future advances we can make. The feedback from passengers in the ‘preview’ period was positive as people began to appreciate how much of a life changing experience it was going to be – it is so encouraging to be personally thanked by passengers because they’ve got a couple of hours of their life back!”
Southeastern will continue to develop its market-leading franchise through its involvement in the Olympic ‘Javelin’ service. Located only seven minutes from St Pancras, Stratford station is at the heart of the Olympic village and the company’s Class 365s will be used to deliver fast tracked transport throughout the games in 2012 as directed by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). The organisation is also currently involved in a number of National Station Improvement Programme schemes alongside Network Rail with whom it holds a lucrative association, while close relationships are held with regional councils and communities to improve and enhance access to local stations.
Looking to the future of Southeastern and its high-speed offering, Charles outlines his vision: “The introduction of this domestic high-speed service has been an exciting venture for all of us and I think it has been a real mark of success that we have improved the punctuality and reliability of the metro and mainline service over the last few years. As these are the backbone of transport in South East London, Kent and East Sussex it is important to us that our current customers continue to experience improvements. Our aim for the coming years is to build on the foundations we have laid in the first few years of our franchise. We will do this by continuing the investment in our people and maintaining the vital relationships we have with industry partners that are a key element to the success of any business.”
