Metronet Rail, the group responsible for upgrading, replacing and maintaining two thirds of the London Underground network, released its performance results at the end of April for the first year of its 30 year concession – and reported up to US$21M of penalties levied against it.
Under Metronet’s contract, its payment or penalty figures are calculated every four weeks based upon the criteria of capability, availability, ambience and service points for the service offered. It has accepted a penalty figure of US$8.7M against one of its operating divisions. Metronet attributed the penalty to recovery operations following a derailment in the period before it acquired responsibility for the lines. A further US$12M of possible penalties is being contested and discussed with London Underground Ltd.
The report listed several highlights of the first year of service such as; more Central Line trains available for service than in the last 11 years; Central Line trains now running four times further before failures; 10km of new track laid and all trains are now free of non-scratch graffiti. Less celebratory were; the derailment incident at Hammersmith; poor cold weather performance; and a poor record of hand-backs following overnight engineering works.
Andrew Cooper, managing director of Metronet Rail BCV, which is responsible for the deeper tube lines said: “We hadn’t planned to deal with the Central Line recovery – but we used it as a catalyst for performance improvement. Much of our work in the year has been to prepare the business for the next 6.5 years of capital investment and improvement.”
John Weight, executive chairman of Metronet Rail, said: “Our first year was always going to be challenging. Our unprecedented annual investments of some US$1.8bn in the Tube will soon start to produce many more tangible results for the public.”
The investment is maintained for the first seven years for new equipment and upgrades.
