Northern Rail

I have watched open mouthed as all the trouble beset Northern rail. It appears they have forgotten the simple first rules of transport. Maybe there was nobody employed who was familiar with these principles.
There are very few people who like transport for transports sake. They use transport to fulfill other objectives like getting to work, visiting relatives and so on. If they could step into a box and be instantly transported to their destination, they would take that option. So the objective of transport is to get the passenger to their destination in other words the arrival. This has to be accomplished safely.    It must also be accomplished in the time promised by the timetable.
Northern rail failed on all these counts. As for their project management comment on that will have to wait for my next blog.
For a expanded version of this buy Managing Transport Operations by Edmund Gubbins. This is the first lecture I gave to my students before I retired. It might sound to simple but a great deal of transport operations follows from this.