Sub Surface signalling contract lessons learnt

They have never learnt since the Jubilee line in the 90's

I've seen similar behaviour from many large organisations. An almost religious obsession with procuring the lowest price tender offered regardless of technical proficiency, due - as RT quite rightly says, to the process being almost entirely influenced by accountants with little input from those who actually understand what they're talking about.

On a couple of occasions I knew about heads of IT technical departments being excluded from the final procurement decisions because it was known they favoured the best solution offered......which in both cases whilst affordable, were unfortunately (although understandably) the most expensive.

The cheapest solutions were purchased in both cases, one company folding within a month of commissioning leaving an utter shambles and the other (rather embarrassingly) having to seek help from the previous incumbent as they lacked the experience to merge their solution into the existing system.

Of course my view is one sided, it cannot be anything but biassed and in that regard I can say no more than that my opinion is bound by knowledge gained as an insider over four decades working under various regimes. LTI is not a red herring, there was a point to be made and you understood the point perfectly, hence your proper remark about the golden handshakes. An incompetent not fit for purpose government sought to remove a millstone from around its neck, the embarrassment of a negative balance sheet in the public finances led to many incompetent decisions, not least of which was building scores of new hospitals under totally unaffordable PFI schemes but which included the Underground PPP. An exercise which cost far more in real terms than the alternatives and for which the politicians that presided over it should be held to account. Even now most £taxpayers will not understand how they have been fleeced in terms of value for money.
The Underground Make or Buy reviews of the late 1980s were the beginning of the process of the government washing its hands and under the Tories I expect that had they remained in power we would now have a privatised fragmented Underground system instead of a publicly owned one. There are pros and cons to that just as there are pros and cons to a publicly owned and operated Underground but the PPP gave us the worst of both worlds simultaneously and created a golden opportunity for some to make hay while the sun shone briefly as the treasury opened the public purse long enough to ditch the Underground at any cost. Of course it didn't ditch the Underground at all but the move did get it removed from the balance sheet and also made many people quite rich as thousands of man years of technical knowledge, experience and competence was not only allowed to leave but was positively encouraged to do so on Friday and return to work as a contractor on Monday, some even sitting at the same desks but all costing more per hour to employ. Many of course formed the cores of the new contract companies, not just top level engineers but also time served experienced and skilled men from the sharp end too, not just from signalling but from all engineering departments that had not already been sold off in the 1980s i.e. data networks, power generation & distribution and HT mains staff.
Underground devolution to lines was another costly step in the multiplication of middle management on the operations side of the business with hundreds of new managers directly recruited from areas such as retail management as well as bright and shiny new graduates but barely any from a transport organisation and few if any railwaymen. At the sharp end, for some 10 years from 1992/3 until 2002/3 and the actual full outsourcing of signalling work, the few staff still directly employed had to continually 'pickup and make good' after many errors made by the new contractors as they learnt their trade 'on the job' while they earned 'big bucks'. Along the way projects such as JLE were never completed to specification as they ran out of money and were unable to dot the 'i's and cross the 't's.

The question I would ask is one that will never be truthfully answered by any politician or anyone at the top of LUL. "Just how much money has been spent on the Underground since 1990, how much of it was £taxpayers billions, and exactly where was it all spent?"

There is no doubt that one gets what one pays for and that quality costs. It seems to me that the people who determine what is cost effective in real terms are simply not qualified to make such decisions because whether they are knowledgeable in any useful way or not they are all bound to short termism by the politicians, the politicians being people who are interested more in their own public image than anything they were supposedly democratically elected to effect.

It is simply wrong to run different stocks on different lines and wrong to have different signalling systems using different components on different lines, that is, however, not to say that there should not be any differences. There is no real reason not to have a single set of standards from which all situations can be catered for from the same basic sets of building blocks. However, it would require London Underground and all the manufacturers of rolling stock, signalling and other equipment to come together and to create and agree common standards and common components. Further there would need to be full compatibility and interchangeability of components. Economies of scale and reduction of costs would be the result, recycling would also be even more viable. Unfortunately LUL seemingly has no clout these days and has to buy off the shelf what is available when it would once have led the way by designing and building its own or getting others to build to its designs. The corporate image is just a large umbrella concealing a very fragmented and not very efficient empire. There are so many ways that it could do better but it just doesn't seem to possess the expertise these days as the emphasis is all about operating rather than that which enables efficient operation.

I wouldn't argue with much of that but I have to say that inverting the pyramid in terms of the management:staff ratio has not been good for the passenger (I hate calling the travelling public customers and customer focus is a euphemism for operating train services, nothing new in that except perhaps that for some it's more difficult to buy tickets) in terms of service performance or reliability, one of the most commonly reported problems revolves around poor dissemination of correct information during incidents and delays. One cannot help but think of too many cooks none of whom are privy to the full recipe. Looking back into history, much was done in the 20th century to mitigate service delays and provide a level of service that with all the recent upgrades LUL seems unable to match so far in the 21st century. So much of that is due in no small part to the way in which the implementation of health & safety legislation and political correctness have allowed so many to abdicate responsibility for their actions making it very difficult to pinpoint exactly where and with whom the buck stops for anything. This is compounded by the culture which aims to protect the corporate image no matter what, heads do not roll, although they may get shunted into side offices to mark time indefinitely where everything they do is benign, but are quietly replaced. Of course that culture is a well established carry over from the good old days of LT and much less visible in the top heavy corporate structure of today.

I think Mr RT is referring too is that yes have different systems but atleast make them compatible. The original SSR plan was to have the Bombardier system called Cityflo but on JNP it was going to be the Thales Seltrac system which neither are compatible with each other. I.e the Met can no longer run down the Jubilee and vice versa and the same would of occured between the District and Picc.

The original SSR resignalling plan by Metronet was Westinghouse DTG-R, Tube Lines went for Seltrac TBTC. TfL then retendered the SSR contract and selected Cityflo 650, if compatibility was important for TfL then I'm not quite sure why they didn't just go for TBTC.


Would DTG-R still have been an option on offer by Siemens in 2014 though?

Almost certainly, unless they were looking to introduce something from Germany.