#96 – Transport Planning Masterclass with Gary McGregor (Part 2)

A brownfield CBTC project that lands a year late is a good result. Not a consolation prize. That is what the record actually looks like once you take the press releases out of it. Mike Palmer spent 29 years at London Underground, finishing as the user acceptance manager on the Jubilee and Northern line upgrades, where every operational decision on scope and functionality went through him and nobody else. He then crossed to the supplier side, and in 2014 Andy Byford brought him to the Toronto ...

Fit the locomotives, commission the trackside, write the rules, and ETCS can still stumble on the day a driver decides the old way was better. The technology is the measurable part of an ETCS introduction. The people are the program. My guest Cara Cohen is an organisational psychologist who worked on business change for the introduction of ETCS at UK freight operator Freightliner, inside the East Coast Digital Programme. This conversation was recorded during her time there; she has since move...

Twenty people comment on a document. Nineteen of them have no expertise in it. Every comment has to be answered, and the two that mattered get lost in the noise. Andy Petrie has spent thirty years watching this happen and has stopped being polite about it. Andy is Director of Systems and Safety Assurance at ARCH in Sydney, with thirty years across rail, nuclear, oil and gas, and major civils. He has been Lead Independent Safety Assessor on Melbourne's Metro Tunnel, Director of Safety and Engi...

Freight is where the ETCS business case really gets tested. Many freight locomotives were built long before anyone drew a European Train Control System (ETCS) fitment design, and there is no factory fit to fall back on. So the fair question is whether you can retrofit an entire freight fleet without it turning into a nightmare. Recorded during his time leading ERTMS operations at Freightliner, this conversation has Craig Evans explain how one of Britain's largest freight operators is fitting ...

Twenty years ago the promise was simple. Digital train control would get cheaper, and ETCS and CBTC would become the default for every new scheme. Neither happened. Costs keep rising, and the system knowledge keeps migrating into the supply base. My guest is Andy Harrison, a long-time friend and consultant to top railway clients across Great Britain, with four decades in the industry. We get into why the tipping point never came, what changes when the railway no longer holds competence in its...