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Immediate, effective action is vital when you are handling almost 1,700 train services a day over around 640 miles of track. Almost all services come in and out of London Waterloo—that's 80 trains an hour—so bottlenecks can soon lead to trains backed up down the line. "Any incident can cause disruption to the service which could escalate very quickly," says Richard Davies. "The Network Rail Route Control Manager's top priority is to prevent this happening by taking immediate action to manage the service and minimise the impact on passengers."
Unfortunately, sometimes this will mean cancelling or diverting a train, but when this happens, the controllers ensure that the affected passengers are taken care of and alternative travel arrangements made.
"Quicker decision-making means we can also get faster advice and action to help our passengers," says Customer Information Manager Tina Cook, "such as arranging alternative transport and helping customers who need to replan their journey."
The Wessex Integrated Control Centre operates 24 hours a day, with 24 controllers on duty at all times, 365 days a year. Each controller has a different responsibility, ranging from managing incidents to ensuring that the right response staff are sent to manage the situation on the ground. They also see that trains are crewed and maintained and stations and signal equipment are operating effectively—in fact, everything it takes to keep a railway running on time.
The control centre is plugged into state-of-the-art train-mapping and incident-reporting technology. Large screens show the position of trains across the network in real time. Every delayed train is colour coded and controllers can see the reason for the delay at the touch of a button.
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