UK: ‘How we go about our daily lives and conduct our businesses has changed for a lot of people’, said Steve Montgomery, Managing Director of FirstGroup’s First Rail business at the TransPennine Express RE-Connect 2021 conference.
Before the coronavirus ‘we were seeing customer numbers at record levels’, Montgomery explained at the event on May 26. ‘And just as we were rolling out the new trains to meet that demand the pandemic came along. But we have to accept where we are.’
Looking ahead, ‘business travel and commuting will be different’, he believed. ‘The industry will have to learn what this means and understand what is happening in communities.’
Noting that leisure is the dominant force in travel at the moment, with ‘staycations’ and journeys between cities being very important, Montgomery said passenger volumes were now expected to reach 80% of pre-Covid numbers by the end of 2021, but reaching 100% ‘will take a number of years.’
Changed demand
While a recent survey had suggested that 45 of the top 50 UK businesses did not expect to return to full-time office-based working, some TPE weekend services are already reaching 90% of pre-pandemic levels. The weekend of May 22-23 saw more than 66 000 passengers pass through Manchester Piccadilly station.
A survey had found that 81% of pre-coronavirus commuters expected their commuting would decrease as they work more from home, with the average number travel days down by half at an estimated 2·11 per week, and 35% of respondents said they would not use trains at all until vaccination has been fully rolled out.
TPE expects that numbers may bounce back better in the north of England than around London and the southeast, and so the rail industry will need to be more nimble in matching timetables to demand.
Business travel had been seen as an important growth market for TPE, but is expected to be hard-hit with a reduction of 62% predicted over the next six months. This may partly be due to an acceleration of a trend that was developing as Covid-19 arrived, with almost 30% of business travellers starting to conduct more meetings remotely. However, 54% had indicated that they felt this was less productive than face-to-face meetings, giving TPE some hope that business travel will still grow.
More positive news came from the leisure sector where the average figure of 5·7 journeys made by leisure travellers in the six months up to the first lockdown is expected to rise by 12% to 6·37 trips following completion of the vaccination programme. The one downside is that in the intervening time they expect to only make an average 2·58 trips over a similar period.
Matthew Golton, who takes over as TPE Managing Director as the new National Rail Contract begins on June 1, said he was looking forward to the challenge, commenting ‘I love making things happen’.
A new development team will be in place from his first week, and he said ‘we need this railway to be relevant and wanted by the people and the communities that it serves.’
Regional branding
Commenting on the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail, Montgomery said franchising had created an understanding of how to grow the railway, and ‘entrepreneurship is still going to be there’ within the operators, which were ‘best placed to try and get customer volumes back up as quickly as we can.’
Montgomery said there had been no indication that the Department for Transport was planning any remapping of services between operators as the concession model is rolled out.
However, more regional branding will be developed, and it is unclear what this means. ‘Do we see the demise of brands like TransPennine Express, or LNER?’, he wondered.
Montgomery felt people could align themselves with regional brands, and that TransPennine Express was a brand that customers recognised. ‘My own personal preference is that we should keep some local branding, but whether that happens or we get into regional branding is something for the future’, he added.
- With the first Class 803 EMU starting test running on the East Coast Main Line, Montgomery confirmed that FirstGroup’s open access service between Edinburgh and London was on course to launch in October.
