NETWORK RAIL

Network Rail has announced that £18m will be spent on refurbishing Derby's railway station. The project will include rebuilding all the platform canopies and lifts are to be installed to take people from the footbridge to platforms two, three, four and six. Work to dismantle and rebuild the platform canopies will take place in four phases between February 2008 and June 2009. The station will remain open although certain platforms will have to close at various stages of the project.

Dyan Crowther, Network Rail route director, said, "Certain platforms will have to be closed at different points throughout the project and there will be some changes to timetabled train services, particularly at weekends." East Midlands Trains managing director Tim Shoveller said, "We're proud to manage the station at Derby, a city with a great railway history, and we hope that this upgrade will provide a station fitting with this." (Source: Derby Evening Telegraph, Nov/07)

Network Rail has asked for a grant of £7bn to ease overcrowding on services across the country. It says it needs the extra money to cope with an expected 30% increase in passengers and freight over the next decade, on top of more than £4bn a year that it already gets to run the current network. It wants to spend the extra money on extending platforms to take longer trains, and on new sections of line on the busiest stretches of mainline and commuter routes into London and other cities.

Critics claim rail infrastructure costs have been too high ever since they soared after privatisation a decade ago, even though Network Rail has cut the annual operating bill by £1bn-£1.5bn since it took over from Railtrack in 2002. Stephen Joseph, executive director of campaign group Transport 2000, said, "They are getting shedloads of money, and if you look at how much it costs to do things here compared with other countries, it's quite high and they are going to have to justify that." (Source: Observer, Jul/06)

Network Rail's four directors are to receive bonuses totalling almost £900,000 despite one in six trains continuing to run late. John Armitt, the chief executive, will receive a bonus of £270,000, taking his total earnings for the year to £755,000. Iain Coucher, his deputy, will get £240,000 on top of his salary of £433,000. Two other executive directors will receive bonuses of £180,000 each. The rail infrastructure company more than doubled the bonuses that the four men received the previous year after saying that they had exceeded all their targets for punctuality, financial performance and the condition of the network.

But Network Rail had admitted that its punctuality target was too weak. Punctuality has improved slightly in the past 12 months to 83.8% of trains on time, but Railtrack achieved 90% in 1998. Under Network Rail’s improvement programme, 90% punctuality will not be restored until 2009. Network Rail’s remuneration committee, which sets the bonuses, chose to ignore a request from the rail regulator to take into account the company’s failure to give sufficient warning of engineering works.

Millions of passengers have had to buy more expensive tickets because Network Rail’s delay in issuing emergency timetables has prevented train companies from selling discounted fares in advance. The regulator wrote to the committee pointing out that the company was “seriously in breach” of its operating licence and that this must be taken into account when deciding on the level of bonus. But the committee decided to award bonuses worth 55.6% of the directors’ salaries, just below the maximum permitted of 60%. In 2004 they received 24%.

Ian McAllister, Network Rail’s chairman, said that the bonuses were modest compared with those awarded by other large companies. “In the past year train delays have been reduced by 17%, significant efficiency savings have been made and the condition of the railway assets has improved markedly,” he said. “I would rather have the problem of people telling me the bonuses are too high than to have missed the targets.” He said that Network Rail had also improved safety, with broken rails, signals passed at danger and train accidents all at their lowest level.

The company measures its punctuality performance by the number of minutes of delay it causes to trains. The total fell by 2.3 million minutes in 2004 but was still at 11.4 million minutes, well above Railtrack’s record of 9.1 million. Railtrack predicted in 2002 that it would cut delays to eight million minutes a year by 2006. Even after setting a tougher target, Network Rail is aiming only to reduce delays to 10.6 million minutes in the 12 months. While the directors and senior managers will receive bonuses based on a percentage of their salaries, the remaining 27,300 staff will receive a fixed sum of £1,112.

The top four executives at Network Rail are to share bonuses of nearly £1.1million despite losses of £232million. The biggest payout goes to chief executive, John Armitt, who will receive £352,728 while his deputy Iain Coucher gets £314,490. Projects and engineering director Peter Henderson and finance director Ron Henderson each pocket £235,033.

Network Rail chairman Ian McAllister said the bonuses had been paid because the firm met performance targets including fewer broken rails and reducing the number of “signals passed at danger” to record lows. The 32,000 staff who work for Network Rail, responsible for Britain’s railways stations, tracks, signals and tunnels, will each get a bonus of £954. (Source: The Sun, May/06)