This is a city region that deserves a modern, reliable and effective public transport network. For a variety of reasons it is not getting that right now.
Merseyrail and its famous yellow branding are an iconic part of life in this region, but in recent months the service has not been what people here expect and deserve. Over the past few weeks the services have been hit by delays and cutbacks because of some unexpected faults, which have led to packed trains and people being late for work. To add to this, the entire network will shut down on three days next week as Network Rail staff walk out on strike.
All of this disruption comes with the spectre of a new fleet of state-of-the-art trains that are still yet to arrive on the Merseyrail network. This is despite the deal to purchase the 52-strong fleet being announced in 2016 and testing of the new trains has been going on since last year.
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The combination of delays and disruption on the current ageing trains and the heavily delayed introduction of the new ones is causing more and more frustration for commuters and passengers who rely on the service to get to work, to get around the region and who pay good money to do so. We've taken a close look at the variety of issues, what's behind them and when they could be resolved.
Faults on the current trains
The recent problems started to have an impact earlier this month, when Merseyrail announced that passengers travelling on its Kirkby and New Brighton lines would face limited services and rail replacement buses. The operator said this was due to an 'unexpected and significant increase in wheel bearing faults.'
Things got worse the week after. While services resumed on the Kirkby and New Brighton lines, Merseyrail said the discovery of more faults mean reduced timetables would need to be put in place across large swathes of the network. The regular 15-minute timetables were cut back to 30-minutes on the Ormskirk, Kirkby, Hunts Cross, New Brighton, West Kirby, Chester and Ellesmere Port lines.
It was the last news commuters wanted to hear. After all the 15-minute timetable had only returned in April after years of pandemic disruption. The cutbacks saw large numbers of people packing on to smaller trains at peak times and having generally very unpleasant journeys.
The good news is that from next week, the 15-minute timetables will return, although there will be no trains running on the network on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday. This is because of national rail strikes that do not involve Merseyrail staff but will include Network Rail signalling and maintenance workers, without whom the network cannot operate.
While it's good news that trains are getting back to normal and credit must go to the engineers working around the clock to fix the faults, questions continue to be asked about why so many faults have been occurring on these trains and how this has happened.
In 2017, a year after they had signed a deal to build and maintain the new fleet of Class 777 Merseyrail trains, Swiss manufacturer Stadler also signed a deal with the Merseytravel (the city region transport body at the time), for the maintenance of the current, ageing fleet of trains operating on the network.
Liverpool Liberal Democrat Councillor has questioned whether this change of maintenance contract for the current fleet may have had an impact on the faults we are now seeing. He also asked whether we could be seeing more faults because it had been expected that the new trains, as yet to appear on the network, would have been in operation by now.
Cllr Makinson said: "Merseyrail were doing a decent job of maintaining their own trains before the transport authority decided to contact out the work to Stadler, who are now expected to maintain another manufacturer’s trains. Questions need to be asked on whether they cut back on maintenance because these trains were expected to be in the scrap yard by now.”
This notion is flatly denied by Stadler and the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. A CA spokesperson said: “The reliability of our trains and safety of passengers is always our top priority. Since maintenance responsibility was transferred from Merseyrail to Stadler nearly five years ago, the fleet performance has improved. Train reliability, for example, has increased by 13%.
"Overall, this has helped ensure that Merseyrail has been the most punctual train operator in the country for four years running, while Stadler have won a number of awards for their maintenance work.”
For its part, Stadler says it is doing everything it can to deal with the wheel bearing faults. A company spokesperson said: "In light of the significant increase in wheel bearing failures observed recently, Stadler and Merseyrail have collaborated with industry experts to establish the root cause, determine the number of trains affected and to ultimately resolve the current situation.
Stadler technicians continue to work tirelessly to repair trains and return them back into service for passengers with an increase in services from the June 20, as announced by Merseyrail.”
New trains and unions disputes
One of those questions posed by Cllr Makinson - and a few others - asked whether the unexpected number of faults we are seeing on the ageing fleet could be related to the fact that these trains have not yet been replaced by the new state-of-the-art vehicles that were supposed to be running on the local network by now.
That's been strongly denied by the operator, transport body and manufacturer but it is getting increasingly frustrating for everyone that none of these new Class 777 trains have started taking passengers on journeys around the city region.
It was way back in 2016 when the deal to purchase the 52-strong fleet of state-of-the-art new trains from Swiss manufacturer was finalised. Platform upgrade work began in 2019 and testing of the trains on the network got underway last year.
The project to deliver the new trains onto the tracks has been hit by numerous delays, for numerous reasons - with a significant one being a global pandemic, which meant many staff were unable to operate the current fleet or carry out testing of the new one. The covid crisis also brought travel restrictions that prevented Stadler engineers from travelling to the UK to work on the trains and there was also flooding on the tracks in Europe, which delayed the initial arrival of the vehicles.
One major issue that needs to be discussed when talking about the new fleet of Merseyrail trains is the union dispute. There has been a long-running dispute between the RMT union and Merseyrail and the transport body which oversees it. The dispute began in opposition to plans to remove the guard positions on the new trains, with drivers able to operate the opening and closing of doors.
The dispute saw a number of strikes over a three-year period, but an 'agreement in principle' was reached in 2018 that would protect the role of the guard and further industrial action was suspended. However, it transpires that both the RMT union and the ASLEF union for train drivers are yet to accept a deal for staff to work on the new trains.
Despite the in principle agreement, the RMT reported in May that its members had voted against the staff deal for the new Merseyrail trains by a margin of 54.4% to 45.6%. The ECHO understands that the union is in the process of re-balloting members now. The latest ballot will close on July 12. It is understood that the ASLEF union is ready to sign its own deal for drivers on the new trains, but will await the result of the RMT ballot before doing so.
Deals close, training to begin
While Stadler staff have been able to continue the testing schedule of the trains (each vehicle must complete 500 miles of fault-free testing before they can be used by passengers), no staff training has been able to get underway with those union working deals still not agreed.
On the subject of the union dealings, a Combined Authority spokesperson said: "In terms of the current position, we understand there are meaningful discussions taking place between Merseyrail and the RMT to finalise operational agreements and it wouldn’t be in appropriate for us to comment further at this time."
They added: "We would anticipate that the training programme would begin without any delay. There was always going to be a phased introduction of the new fleet and a sequence to agreements with the unions. Similar negotiations will take place with Aslef, which will also include finalising the training programme.
"We are still working towards the introduction of our world class trains into service later this year and are continuing to do everything we can to make this happen. In line with industry practice, the trains will be phased into service and we expect it to take about 15 months for the whole fleet to be running across the whole network."
