Our place at the heart of the rail industry

We're joined this month by Johnny Schute, our Chief Operating Officer. Johnny speaks with us about RSSB's unique whole-system perspective and what that means for the GB rail industry. 

He touches on the value it generates, the efficiencies it enables, and how it helps us strive for safety while also ensuring cost reduction, revenue growth, and improved service reliability and resilience for our members.

Find out more at https://www.rssb.co.uk/our-business-plan

Transcript

Host [00.18]: Hello and welcome to the RSSB podcast. The GB rail industry is a tapestry of interdependent systems and stakeholders. Navigating these complexities requires a holistic approach—one that considers the intricate relationships between safety, performance, and innovation. And that's where RSSB comes in.

RSSB's unique whole-system approach allows us to address immediate challenges while also anticipating future needs, ensuring that our industry remains safe, efficient, and responsive to change.

With us today is Johnny Schute, our Chief Operating Officer, to talk about RSSB's whole system perspective in action, as well as what this means for the GB rail industry.

Hi Johnny. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Johnny Schute [01.04]: Hi James, and it's great to be with you.

Host [01.06]: To kick things off, we often describe RSSB as having a whole-system approach. Can you give us an overview of what this means?

Johnny [01.13]: So, James, rail is a system. And because it's a system, it's made up of constituent parts that interface: track, operating companies, supply chain. And it's on those interfaces that risk exists.  So, what you need is an organisation that understands where that risk lies and is then able to provide the necessary tools to mitigate that risk. And that will of course lead to mitigating the two great challenges that the rail industry meet at the moment, which is poor performance and reducing costs.

So, RSSB occupies an almost unique position in that area. 

Host [01.51]: You mentioned it's something that's unique, but what is actually unique about it?

Johnny [01.56]: What makes us unique is that there are very few organisations in rail that have the capability to work across interfaces. And there's very few organisations in rail that has as its membership the constituent parts of the whole system.

And so RSSB represents everyone. We are, as most people know, independent and impartial. We are very authoritative through the technical expertise that resides in the company. And we have years of experience. So, I think the aggregate of all of those attributes makes us pretty much unique within the rail industry. I can't think of anywhere else where you will find all of those vested in one organisation.

Host [02.44]: Could you give us one or two examples of how this approach helps us maximise the value we produce for our members?

Johnny [02.51]: I'll take a couple, I think. And there's something that we've been working on recently, which is called PRIMA, and this is about maximising the ability to run trains in extreme weather, balanced against cost, but also balanced against safety.

So, it is a decision support tool that allows both operators and also the infrastructure manager, Network Rail, to make judgments about how it is that we can improve performance by using this decision support tool. And what comes from RSSB is the ability of our people to leverage our skills in the areas of risk modelling, data engineering, climate change adaptation, and also risk to sort of carve together this decision support tool so that operating companies have a ready playbook—for want of a better word—to be able to manage running trains in extreme rainfall, and we hope to soon maybe add wind to that as well. And that, of course, reduces costs and enhances performance.

Now, a second area I'll pick on is some work that we've been doing on freight couplers. So, this is basically examining the coupling that exists between freight wagons. And for many years there was a formula that was used to determine the length of a freight train. But using a research programme that we put together, we recognised that we could actually afford to run longer freight trains and clearly a longer freight train [means] more return on investment, more commercial growth. And what that did is that brought together not only research, but also safety, because clearly the freight train must be a safe one to run, and also brought in standards, because obviously standards would need to be adjusted to accommodate that. And of course that then, and the net effect of this is reducing the cost, increasing revenue for no greater safety risk. So, this has been a significant financial advantage to the freight sector. There's a couple of ideas of things that we've been working on.

Host [05.04]: Thanks, Johnny. And I know a priority for many of our members, and much of industry, is efficiency. How does our whole-system approach support that ambition?

Johnny [05.13]: I think that what we can do to improve efficiency, and the way you make things more efficient often, is to to prevent duplication and actually just doing things once.

We were vested, we came from an accident. We came from an inquiry by Lord Cullen. So we have a really good understanding of the past, where things have gone wrong in the past, where you don't want to make the same mistakes again. What we do is learn from the past and then we are able to predicate or predict what the future might be looking like. And so we therefore can guide members to solutions that will make them much more efficient. And we also, on top of that, we are bringing in things like better automation and also the greater usage of AI, and that, of course, is making sure that there's more efficiency vested in the rail industry going forward.

Host [06.02]: Thanks, Johnny. Because we have such a breadth of expertise at RSSB, we're often working on dozens of projects simultaneously. But where is our focus at the moment, and what's driving that? 

Johnny [06.13]: We have to be responsive to the rail sector. We are owned by our members, the rail sector are our stakeholders. And at the moment, there is a laser-like focus on the two industry challenges of reducing cost and also increasing revenue, so [that] the overall net margin within the rail sector is better, and at the same time, improving performance.

So, all our programmes, at the moment, are working towards this. We make sure that our work is relevant, and I think that actually our stakeholders appreciate us because we actually do focus on those two areas. And of course we get there by working through collaboration, so all of our stakeholders feel that they have a part in the solution, and we also make sure that the solutions we craft are achieved by consensus, and that means that you get—for want of a better word—better stickability because people feel that they have had a part to play in creating the solutions.

That's where we're focused at the moment, and through collaboration and consensus, we then come up with solutions that are going to stay, hopefully, for many years to come.

Host [07.22]: Thanks, Johnny. The emphasis on safety sits at the heart of everything we do. How do you think the unique approach we've talked about helps us retain our focus on safety, while also striving for efficiency, revenue growth and industry, and of course improved service performance?

Johnny [07.39]: Unsurprisingly, with a name of the 'Rail Safety and Standards Board', safety—as you rightly say—sits absolutely front and centre of what we do.

So, when we're crafting any solutions, we have to have safety in our mind because it is in our title. And we can see what the safety consequences are of decisions that might not necessarily be made in the safety arena. So that, I think, is also one of our great unique attributes: that we can see the impact of decisions, whether it's made in [infrastructure], asset integrity, performance. What is the impact on safety going forward? And of course, passengers and freight alike know the value of safety because accidents cost a lot of money. Keeping people safe saves money. And there is no doubt about it that a good safety record, a good safety record within a company, generally means that that company is a high-performing company.

So, I think that actually keeping that eye on safety leads us through to all those other areas which remain challenges for the rail sector. But if you can preserve that, then you'll probably find that all the rest of it will follow nicely after it. 

Host [08.46]: The rail industry is entering a period of transition with the new government's plans for Great British Railways. How do you think our whole-system perspective will help us support industry in navigating this transition?

Johnny [08.58]: As I've already said in this broadcast, we were born out of tragedy. We were born from a horrendous accident which cost many lives. And so, we are very much the corporate memory. If you understand history, you should make sure that you're not going to make the same mistake again.

So, you need to actually make sure that you understand the risk of when you go through a major transformation. Change is an area where risk is obviously engendered. So, what we are doing is monitoring all parts of the system, and as the repository of data, as the data aggregator within the rail sector, and through our insights team and also using our predictive modelling capability and also because we can pick up weak signals, we have got all the right forums and all the right things in place to make sure that that risk that might exist going through transformation does not manifest itself and doesn't take place.

We are actually leading on a thing called the Safety Working Group, which is part of the Rail Transformation Council. And it's through that medium that we're making sure that safety is preserved and indeed enhanced as rail transformation takes place.

Host [10.13]: Thanks, Johnny. And finally, could you tell our listeners one thing they might be surprised to learn about RSSB? What would that be? 

Johnny [10.21]: Well, I thought long and hard about this. But actually I think in the spirit of rail transformation, it's probably not well known that, come the advent of Great British Railways, Great British Railways will not have all of the rail sector in it.

Great British Railways will not have freight. It won't have rolling stock companies. It won't have the supply chain. So, the only place in which you will find infrastructure, train operating companies, freight operating companies, ROSCOs, supply chain is in RSSB. And I would commend my listeners to this, just to reflect on that as we head into rail transformation. It's all here within RSSB, and we should make the most of it. 

Host [11.03]: Johnny, thank you so much for joining us today. 

And if you want to learn more about RSSB and the work we do across all aspects of the rail industry, please do visit our website. 

We look forward to you joining us for our next episode. In the meantime, thank you for tuning in.