Voices of the Industry presented by Steer - #11 Moving fans home and away: Rail’s role in football

Introduction
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hello and welcome to voices of the industry a podcast series bringing you leading industry voices who challenge
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thinking across Transportation infrastructure and
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cities hello and welcome to voices of the industry a podcast by steer I'm JMA
Meet Gemma Bedlow
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bedo a senior consultant in the sports and major events team I specialize in project management most recently the
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2024 UFA Champions League final as one of the nation's most popular shared pastimes football occupies a special
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place in the collective imagination of the UK but with 830,000 Spectators traveling to matches every week getting
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fans from A to B can be a challenge with me today to discuss what role Britain's
Joining Gary Steele
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Railway plays in this process is Gary steel Gary retired for the first time as
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head of train planning for the Midland Zone at Network ra the second time from Virgin after becoming involved in the
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new football and Rail Project Gary now finds himself working for the rail delivery group as Project Lead for the
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foot rail initiative Gary welcome how are you I'm good I'm good and you yeah
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not bad very nice to see you online Gary we first met during the women's Euros in 2022 but it's probably fair to say that
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we've worked much more closely than this year during the planning of the Champions League final and since you've been in your new role Gemma I wanted to
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say how well that you and your colleague Ed Robinson of St really managed that
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Mobility plan for the UAA Champions League final it was absolutely top draw
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and and and I actually learned a lot from how you handled that and I took that into my strategic meetings with the
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football on rail it was something to behold and you should be very proud of that oh Gary thank you that very kind so
Evolution of Rail and Football Logistics
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you've been working in the ra and football space for quite some time why don't you paint us a picture of how things have changed since you began I I
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just realized that most of my achievements probably happened before you were born I'm feeling very old right
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now I mean I've it's it's been a long career and I've really enjoyed it and
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I've had some amazing experiences and met some wonderful people and the railway it's self has changed a great
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deal and if I was to tell you what's changed we'd probably be here for another three days so I'll probably
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stick to how uh how the football has kind of changed and really I go back to my very
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first job in train planning one of the first roles I had was to plan the many
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additional trains that the British Rail used to put on every weekend for football fans whether it be football
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Charters football relief trains or foot xes and here we go almost 50 years later
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I'm back trying to to do similar although it's proving a lot more difficult to get those uh additional
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trains hard to imagine that for an FA Cup Final we would have probably around 10 additional trains 10 relases Charters
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fexes per team a long time ago and I think that probably the biggest change
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on the football inside probably came with the event of the Premier League it's growing popularity and the sort of
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uh the linkage with TV broadcast casting rights moving football from the sort of traditional 3:00 time spreading those
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fixtures across all the weekend in many ways that's a a blessing in some as it helps spread demand but it also creates
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a lot of problems for the railway as well the railway itself obviously in
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that time going back to British ra to now completely changed and I think the key things for me is it's become perhaps
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more restricted and more difficult to change timetables to amend timet
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operator license conditions engineering schedules planning time scales and the
Impact of COVID-19 on Rail and Football
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process planning time scales really kind of restrict what a train operator can do
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particularly at short notice you've talked there about how things have change over your career today I guess a
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key part of that is of course the pandemic which was a challenging time for everyone not only just the rail
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industry how did the rail industry sort of suffer as a result of covid and and
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how is that affected delivery for football and rail yeah I think it's fair to say recovery has been slow the number
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of Journeys is growing but we're still not the levels we've saw before the pandemic we've seen changes to how
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people use a railway working from home clearly has had an effect people do not go to the office Mondays to Fridays and
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so the commuter Market has been significantly affected since the
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pandemic flexible working continues to affect the traditional peaks of the Railway
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but we've also seen Leisure traffic increase people are now using rail more for leisure but interestingly football
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supporter travel has largely been unaffected by the pandemic in fact
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football supporters were some of the first to come back to the railway I remember working on the 2021 caribo Cup
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Final between Manchester City and Spurs it was one of the first tournaments that allowed Spectators back into the stadium
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or be in very limited numbers and I think this was all part of a process to get people back into stadiums for the
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postponed Euros of 2020 that was a good thing to sort of come to terms with
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because in additional to managing the crowds we also had the additional sort of issue of of managing the kind of
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separation between each people so even though we had empty trains instead of
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carrying 600 we were limited to something like 250 per train so so yeah football fans have have
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always kind of been there and the railway it links the cities so it's it's
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a really convenient way to get people from home to fixture it's interesting
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isn't it so do you think that covid is or can be a turning point for football and rail because the rest of the
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landscape around it has changed so much and the way people travel the railway
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used to be fixed up around going in and out of the Cities commuter TR travel Mondays to Fridays the business people
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the ones going into the cities to do their work and come home again and that clearly isn't happening and we're seeing
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days on the railway Mondays and Fridays where patronage is extremely low and and
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this is all down to flexible working and people more comfortable working from
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home these days and that switch now to to sort of seeing people's Leisure use
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grow and I think that's also probably linked to the importance of school holidays these days where families can
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be fine for taking their children out of school in term time so those weekends
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those bank holidays are becoming more and more important and those are the exact same times that Network rail looks
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to do the bulk of its significant engineering work and I kind of Wonder is
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that still appropriate and are there other ways to do that and in many ways I
Scheduling Challenges
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do think think football can be some kind of catalyst for that because throughout the winter months for 43 weekends of the
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year the bulk of the people that are traveling tend to be football supporters
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going to the various fixtures across the weekend and and I kind of think that is
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sort of symbolic of of how the use is going with people going into cities for
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all kinds of things but as I say slightly controversial but I just wonder if the current setup is still the best
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and I know if you isolate that and just link it with football then it clearly isn't the best because football creates
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a demand for rail journeys when the railway is closing down when the rail is
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shutting down its infrastructure and services are getting fewer and yeah it's an interesting question and and one that
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I think needs much wider debate than than perhaps you and I can provide here
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yeah and like if leisure travel is becoming the focus then surely statistically football's got to play a
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big part in the conversation really particularly I I think we're talking through the winter months as well where
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these are the bulk of users in many ways yeah I guess you've touched on yeah
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we've touched on some of this already but you've you know you've already given us an idea of how often football and
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rail aren't aren't closely associated how do you think they can be brought closer together well I think let's let's
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first address some of the difficulties that perhaps makes it a little difficult to be more aligned I think there's three
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main reasons that uh we currently struggle planning time scales is the
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first one the railway defines its infrastructure and therefore the
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services that it can run on it six months before the day of the race or before the fixture in this case and
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that's a that's a long long way out and we look at football and some of the fixtures kind of defined in less than a
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week I think most people are trying to work to a kind of a a six weeks time frame but again it just emphasizes the
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difference because as soon as a fixture has been announced people are buying tickets for that game and they're
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looking for their travel and that really doesn't give the railway sufficient time to significantly amend its timetable
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that's the first one managing Supply is also one that kind of gets almost
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forgotten about here it it seems simp Le a stadium that holds 30,000 seats well
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that club sells 30,000 tickets the railway really struggles with its Supply
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because he can't manage that Supply because it doesn't really sell seats it sells Journeys and everybody has the
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right of a journey and everybody can buy a ticket for a particular Journey even when reservations are sold out you can
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buy an open ticket that will allow you to travel that particular route the route that you want over a three-month
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period and there's no Intelligence on that is there yeah there's there's no intelligence there we don't know the
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numbers that are actually traveling and it can present its problems because we're making assumptions we are making
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assumptions around popularity of a game and what have yeah and you know we can we can get close but those figures we we
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really don't know the detail and we also know sometimes we're going to be
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overwhelmed by by the demand so that's a that's a tricky one and then the this
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the railway really struggles to increase its Supply train operating companies
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don't really have spare sets lying around these days trains cost several million and train operating companies
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want to sweat their assets they want the most out of those so they don't have spare sets lying around in depos like
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the days of British Railway you can just call upon 10 additional trains and and
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get them running in a short period the time they just don't exist anymore so we've got to be smarter about how we
Football on Rail Project
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improve that supply and unfortunately that again needs time and finally
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managing the demand we touched it on it early the demands comes 100% from the
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football club we don't really have a say we're finding out actually the the times are the fixtures the same time the fans
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are finding out about them and so that demand is created outside of our comfort
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zone sh shall we say there is no better time for a football match to kick off as
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far as the railway is concerned than 300 p.m. unfortunately article 48 means no
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live games can be screened between 1445 and 1715 so everything that moves is
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moving to a time that is less suited to the railway and so again you know that
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demand comes from somewhere else and we find it very very difficult to manage that demand so that's where we are in
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terms of why it's difficult to come together but there are so many things
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that we can do to improve where we are now but it's important to remember I think there is no Silver Bullet there's
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no one thing that is going to solve this and what we're trying to do with the football on rail scheme is to look at
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every element everything that is within our gift to change to amend to do better that's what we're trying to do and
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strangely enough well maybe it's not strangely enough I'm actually finding it pretty easy to get the football industry
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together with the rail industry I think everybody wants to do better I think
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everybody knows of the difficulties that we currently experience and whether it's
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a desire to do better for your supporters for the other rail users or
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for the staff the rail staff and the staff of the ground for whatever reason we want to do better and the members of
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the football on Rail Project include the Football Association the Premier League
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the English football league the football supporters Association we've got Network rail we've got British transport police
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and the football policing unit there's myself from the rail delivery group and there's the train operating companies
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but we've also got the department for transport and the department for for culture media and Sport and the one
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thing that I find is common throughout everybody is their desire to uh to
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support initiatives and to really do what they can to make things better and
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a key area I think is to improve that collaboration to share information to
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gain knowledge so as we can we can plan better and it's not just a sound bite
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there are so many aspects to planning a train service Fleet resources Fleet
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Maintenance pathway creation pathway validation these are the things that time your service the stops the routs
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there's train Crews train crew rosters we've got communication service
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publication yield management Facilities Management Buffet first class Services
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ticket sales cleaning watering watering so important for toilets on board the trains these days operations stations
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station dep patch signal and control train Crews security Gat line security
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platform Security on board security and there's 12 Weeks live in public domain
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that's thousands of people and not one of them was recruited for their knowledge of football and this feels
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this feels like it's a little bit like joining the dots in many ways giving the people the information who need it when
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they need it because as I've said I my experiences are that everybody wants to do better and to do that they need to
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know what it is that they're trying to do trying to plan against and it is difficult to understand the impact that
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football has on on its Railway and services and this information sharing helps us to recognize who
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the potential issues and so we can do something about it we can provide appropriate information to customers to
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allow them to make an informed choice about their Journey it gives an opportunity to provide appropriate
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support for staff and customers and it gives us an opportunity to remove opportunities for conflict I'm just
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explain that if we know services are going to be extremely busy because of a football match then we probably know
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that we're going to declassify that train and we're not going to be able to offer a first class service thought there's not going to be Buffy service on
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that train so we can stop selling those tickets earlier we work very closely with tfl
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for the Champions League final and their TDM team how much influence on The Wider Railway can you have on suppressing
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background demand yeah it's it's extremely difficult to influence
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people's Journeys but that said this sharing of information can certainly
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help us do that a little bit better than we are now now if we know services are going to be busy and we can put that
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information in the sort of booking engines at the time you know make it available at the time when customers are
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looking to buy tickets if you were looking to travel to Manchester on any given day say from London and in the
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information there is a note that's saying this train will be extremely busy
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because of a football match then you get to understand what what that might mean
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whether you want to go a different day whether you want to just arrive a bit early because you know it's going to be
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busy and that's that's important because if you decide you don't want to go on
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that day you'll go another time then you're also freeing up more capacity for the people who who do want to go the
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football supporters or whatever so so it's one way of kind of avoiding that
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point of conflict and it's something that we're able to do more and more I
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guess as well the closer people get to apps such as City mapper or train line
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that means of communication you know flagging points of conflict becomes easier for the operator as we move away
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from traditional ticket machine purchases yeah it does as long as the
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information is accurate and in there and that's one of those dots that we've got to join up because it's not always there
Role of Football Clubs in Travel Management
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but allowing customers to make an informed choice about their journey is so important to managing their
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expectations and allowing them the full choice of of of what they need to do when they need to travel Etc and it's
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extra dots in the picture right like it's more stakeholders at the table that need to be aligned and informed with the
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same consistent information absolutely and and messaging and information is so
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key and again this collaboration if we want to talk to football supporters if
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we want to get messages to those kind of people then that is better coming from the fo Club themselves if you're another
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rail user then you'll look for the information elsewhere you'll look for it in Journey planning systems and maybe
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train operating company websites and the more we can get that information out there the better what role do the clubs
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play in bringing football and rail closer together the clubs are incredibly
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important in this I I mentioned just a little bit earlier the importance of
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that of messaging coming from the club a trusted source and and I've got real
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experience of that if we're having problems with the service because of engineering work and we think we're
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going to struggle to cope with the demand if we were to put a message out to football supporters it's highly
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unlikely that it's going to get through and even if it did they' they' probably ignore it but if that message was coming
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from the club itself if this was the club themselves telling them that it's going to be busy and we're looking at
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different modes of transport to get you to the way of fixture they're more likely to heed that information they're
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more likely to make a different Choice when it comes to taking the train and
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I've got an example of this seems a couple of seasons ago now when I was working for Virgin trains Liverpool were
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playing Tottenham Hotspur the line between Liverpool and crew that's the main line the direct line was blocked
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for engineering work and the diversionary route was taking people taking trains via Warrington and we
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couldn't run the usual amount of trains for that service and it was going to be a real difficulty for us to get
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everybody home we used the clubs we spoke to the clubs to Tottenham hsur and
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Liverpool and Liverpool have an awful lot of following in London they have I think it's over 800 supporters season
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ticket holders with a London postcard address so they've got a lot of people going back to London as well the message
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came from the the clubs themselves we put on Coach Services for the uh this is
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road vehicle coaches for intermediate stations and we wanted those supporters
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just to go straight to the coaches get on board the coaches that will take them to the intermediate stations and keep
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them off the few trains that we had go in London because we wanted to keep those London trains purely for the
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longdistance supporter that worked incredibly well everybody turned up all
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the intermediates got on on the coaches left the capacity that was available on the uh the trains that were going to
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London and and everybody got home without without incident and and again
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there's no way that if the railway had put that out we would have got that message through so what we're saying
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basically is that the desire to do better is is improving but the landscape
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Is Still Remains challenging it's an incredibly difficult landscape with so
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many things that are outside our SP of influence but yeah it's without Shadow
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of Doubt the support is there obviously fan Behavior can be an issue for fellow
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passengers and operators as well as a big media talking point what do you think the challenges are there and what
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are the possible solutions it is an important factor but I think it's I think first of all we've
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got to we've got to understand that the overwhelming vast majority of fans cause
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no issues but I at this moment in time I'm kind of wanting to focus on the
Fan Behavior and Sustainability
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environment that we're creating and to sort of understand what that environment
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looks like we need to look at customer complaints when they're related to
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football and the top five speak for themselves and I'll I'll just go through them I don't think it would come as any
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surprise to to to anybody listening but why don't we plan for this why were we
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not warned why do you sell tickets when you know the trains to be full why do
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you treat everybody appallingly and why do you allow all kinds of bad behavior
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and that for me was the kind of information that really ought to inform
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the strategy on behaviors and that thing that first one why don't we plan for
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this well we mentioned earlier how we're planning better and how we getting those
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information to the right people as early as possible why why were we not warned
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another one that we mentioned earlier getting information out to people to allow them to make a more informed
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choice about their Journey why do we keep selling tickets when full this is an awkward one because we have no way of
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stopping selling tickets to somebody and I don't think there's a desire to stop selling tickets to people what we can do
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again is to provide the information that will allow people to make a better choice about those those Journeys that
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we know to be full and we're trying to do more around providing better support
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for that Journey better queueing safeguarding and security and each point
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of conflict that we can remove that we can take out of that planning process
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whether it's a two-car train set that turns up in place of an eightc car train
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set that really does create that extra level of overcrowding if we know what
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we're dealing with if we understand what the demand is then we can do something about that in the planning stage and I
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think the most important thing perhaps to remember here is that better behaviors are a byproduct of a better
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service and the focus for us is on delivering that better service something we haven't talked
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about yet is sustainability where does sustainability sit within this conversation and how does it form part
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of your objectives and ambition to bring stakeholders into the picture yes sustainability it's it's so
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important to to everybody these days and and I think the benefits of rail are
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clear for most the project needs to be kind of supporting modal shift football
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clubs are actively seeking to become Greener and I know from speaking to a number of football clubs that their
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biggest area of concern is a way fans travel and a way to improve their carbon
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emissions is to perhaps get more people to travel by train and there in line is a kind of a a
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little bit of a problem because it's no use pushing people towards the train if the train actually can't take that shift
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and I think this is where it's it's vital that the football on Rail Project
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is in the driving seat of that it's clear we've got to do more for sustainability but to do that we will
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need to create more Journey opportunities and we will need to create more capacity whether that's optimizing
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the uh the services we've got whether that's adding to them in some way we've
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got to really look at that because I think this is the future here and if you look at some examples and I'm just
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reading this off the blur that I've got here it's if you look at a journey between London Liverpool and Manchester
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both about the same distance from London if you assume there's four people in a car then there are
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14.7 kg CO2 emissions I don't know what the kg CO2 but I'm guessing the lower
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the number the better a 53 seater coach is 9.3 per person and with a train it's
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7.1 and I think if you if you look to the recent tournament in Germany the
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Euros they've gone on record saying they've created the the greenest Euros
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there has ever been and deutsche's B played a significant part in that moving
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football supporters is greener and something that needs to be encouraged
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really and that's where I think when we starting to look ahead we know ourselves
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we've got the Euros in 2028 and speaking to the dcms well they want to make that
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tournament even Greener and if we're to do that we've got to really start focusing on how we actually do that and
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again what I can say is the football people people like Bob Eastwood the
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English football league's head of security and operation s Tom leg the fa's head of external operations Tommy
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gy from the Premier League head of fan engagement and David Rose the deputy CEO
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of the football supporters Association are really supported of this and really
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sort of getting behind how we can make that happen do you think there is for
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the rail industry I mean there are obvious differences but when we're looking at the English Premier League
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compared to International tournaments for example do you think there needs to be a different approach in the drive
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towards sustainability on rail or do clubs sit at the heart of this kind of
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across the piece it's it's difficult because to to drive that modal shift we
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need more capacity we need the ability to move more people whether that is
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actually football supporters or other rail users and is there something that
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we can do differently to create Journey opportunities when people want them and
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I think sustainability is at the heart of that I think the railway can be an enabler and I think it's it's one of
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those where why can't those Euros of 2028 when the UK holds those why can't
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they be a catalyst for for looking at how we move football supporters around
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the country why can't it be its Legacy that this is the thing that will get people in and out of the Cities whether
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it's football whether it's boxing whether it's a theater trip whatever the
Future Collaborations
28:29
reason if we're going to do that then we're going to have to provide longer distance trains running out of City
28:35
centers after 10:00 at night and that's something that in many ways we're a long
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way from at then at the moment but the Euros is four years away and that gives us plenty time but we probably need to
28:47
start sooner rather than later because there's an awful lot of things that have got to move around to make that
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possible I mean we did it didn't we this year for the Champions League final there were there were trains that
29:01
additional trains that went much later into the night but the challenge was just getting people on them and getting
29:07
the clubs to support that modal shift and shifting Spectators onto those late night
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services yeah absolutely and if we go back further than that the 2012 Olympics
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we had Services there running really late into the night it's it's just
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getting the industry and all the elements of that industry to come together to do something meaningful on
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this but I do think it's a future I think sustainability if we if we do this for any reason it should be around
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sustainability I mean and a beautiful segue as we move towards the end of recording looking ahead what does the
29:47
future hold for for Rail and football I'm usually optimistic from what I've seen this past season the support the
29:54
project has got from really all the players has been absolutely incredible
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and and some of those initiatives that we've already seen around the sort of key fixtures at Wembley where we've
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we've managed to get football fixture planners and network rails engineering planners in the same room to sort of
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understand each other's goals and objectives and and again to to sort of provide a framework that might make
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people make a more informed choice and perhaps keep Roots open for for fans
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going to some of the club's biggest games whether it's the playoffs the FA Cup carabel Cup National League finals
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we've got people in the same room and as I say making informed choices about the decisions they're making in terms of
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what routes they keep open clearly they don't know the football teams involved for those finals but again it's a
30:47
starting point and it's making things that just that little bit better they won't get them all right but they'll get
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more right than perhaps they usually do we've partnered with the football supporters Association to survey their
30:59
members and the information that we've got from that and the intelligence that will help shape future strategies we've
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seen tremendous collaboration between Avanti West Coast West Midland trains Chilton Railways particularly around
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those big finals but across the West Midlands as well and for the first time we've seen train operating companies
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working together to provide a more consistent service and certainly a more consistent message when it's going out
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to its customers and next season we'll be adding East Midlands Railways cross
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country Northern Railways trans panine Express to those that are already been
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doing so well this past season it's a huge operation you can't do everything in one go but it's it's kind of breaking
31:47
it up breaking the network up into bite-sized pieces and just kind of rolling out small improvements that when
31:54
added up will make a difference and that area of influence is is growing so
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hugely positive but I think it would be nice to have a couple of big changes but as I say the first thing we need to do
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is to look to see what's within our gift to change to amend to do things better
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and if we can get that right then we'll be offering a better service to all rail users okay that was fun very excited
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looking forward hopefully it's not long until we're around the table again working on another exciting project
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absolutely