Senior leaders, infrastructure experts, engineers, and operations specialists from the East Coast Partnership boarded a 09:00 LNER service between Edinburgh Waverley and London King’s Cross for the networking event known as the Coffee Cup Run. While travelling at 125 mph along the East Coast route, the teams from Network Rail, LNER, Hitachi Rail and Northern Trains assess the journey and identify potential issues which may impact performance, reliability, and safety. Once identified, the cross-industry group then works collaboratively to develop and deliver solutions. More than a dozen improvements were identified and actioned after last year’s journey.
The annual Coffee Cup Run is a revival of an earlier concept, also on the East Coast Route, to simply place a cup of coffee on a train table and see how much the cup moves, or the coffee spills, which provides engineers with a basic indication of track quality. Key decision makers from across the industry then work together to share plans, best practice, and ways of further enhancing performance. Things are a bit more sophisticated these days however – throughout the journey, engineers onboard use cutting edge on-train monitoring systems and information livestreamed from the train’s forward facing and pantograph CCTV cameras to identify issues which could affect ride quality and safety. The information, along with ideas generated on the day, are then acted upon.
Areas for focus this year include infrastructure issues, including overhead lines, cable theft and the impact weather can have on services. The teams will also look at how technology could play a further role in helping to improve performance. John Grainger, Joint Head of Performance for the East Coast Partnership, said, “We’ve taken an innovative approach to the issue of collaboration and engagement with the aim of improving performance on the East Coast route. By bringing together experts from different organisations, we’re helping to forge new relationships and, importantly, our teams get to see at first-hand how their actions can have a direct impact on the customer’s journey experience. We believe the Coffee Cup Run sets the standard for future industry collaboration and that initiatives such as this will be invaluable to ensuring we deliver the high-performing, customer-focused railway of the future.”
Paul Rutter, Route Director for Network Rail’s East Coast route, said: “These initiatives are vital, allowing us to work effectively with colleagues across the industry to find ways to improve our rail network so that we can deliver better journeys for our passengers. The Coffee Cup Run is a unique event in cross-industry collaboration and recent iterations have already brought about positive change to our railway, such as improvements to ride quality at Colton Junction near York. We look forward to continuing to work with our partners on this event and finding ways to deliver more reliable, smoother journeys for our passengers.”
