Ep 41. Danny Vaughan - Head of Metrolink in Manchester

The latest episode of the Rail Technology Magazine Podcast features Danny Vaughan, the Head of Metrolink in Manchester.

Danny has worked in light rail for 25 years and has overseen expansion projects across the city – Including the recently opened Trafford Park Line.

He discusses how light rail offers options and flexibility where mainline rail cannot, the hopeful future of TfGM’s all encompassing Bee Network, which hopes to change and simplify how transport in Manchester works and Metrolink’s place in that future.

Danny also expands on his experience, how he hopes for a better transport system and what he thinks technology within the industry can achieve.

What is Rail Technology Magazine Podcast?

Welcome to the Rail Technology Magazine Podcast. Keeping you up-to-date with the most current rail industry news, giving you an all-access pass to the key insights and innovations helmed by the decision makers in our industry

Light Rail. It has all of the stuff you need to consider when you're operating or running a railway. But then it's got all of the stuff that you need to consider when you're running buses as well. When you're investing in light rail if you're making a difference at a city level, we're accountable. We make the investment in the infrastructure, and we need to make sure it works for passengers to deliver that growth from a patronage point of view from a customer point of view from a revenue perspective.
This is the rail technology magazine podcast, bringing you views insight and conversation from leaders across the rail industry presented by Richard Wilcock.

My guest today is the head of Manchester's Metrolink, Danny Vaughn. So Danny, what does the ideal Metrolink look like to you?

The ideal Metrolink? Well, I would say, given my position that it looks like it looks like right now outside that door, we have a perfect network, and nothing ever goes wrong. But I think no, I think our ideal my ideal certainly is a is a very reliable one. I mean, we know from talking to customers, that's really what they want, you know, and I think that's where we do. Well, I mean, I've gotta say there's loads of things we'd like to improve on. But I think Metrolink reliability is right up there among some of the most reliable networks you'll see around. And we can objectively say that and we know things go wrong. A few weeks ago, we had an overhead line issue of Victoria, it was right at the worst time possible because it was during the park live festival. And that was 1000s of people didn't get the journey they expected. There were plenty buses on people got home, it was it was fine in that perspective. But you know, we do have these high profile events. So when things do go wrong, naturally because it is so busy intensively busy, they can go quite spectacularly wrong. And that's a bit of a challenge for our engineers to put things right. But that's where our focus is. Reliability, the idea of Metrolink, to me looks like the most reliable service it can be.

So it's almost you know, the most reliable means that obviously trains are on time. And the trams are moving in the right direction each and every time. And I guess if it's reliable, and it's consistently reliable, then that means that you're providing the service that you're supposed to be doing, basically.
Yeah, so reliability is the number one thing so if you if you take the Maslow's hierarchy of needs in management speak, you know, for anybody getting around on any form of transport, it's got to be a reliable service. Right? And I think everything comes from that so you can start to talk about the sort of the, the comfort the whether or not you're you're you're trying to do your jobs, have Wi Fi etc, they all are further up the pyramid, you have to get the basics right. That's what we focused on on Metrolink for years, you know, we put a lot of money into expanding the network and so on. But what we did try to do at the same time was to grow the reliability of the network and we are one of the most reliable networks around.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, Danny, how did you manage to to find yourself as the head of Metrolink?

I'm a mechanical engineer. And I started out my career in the railway and a graduate scheme in Irish rail, you can probably tell from my accent. I'm not from around here. So I'm a rolling stock engineer. And I suppose I joined the railway in Ireland at a time where they were coming through what was decades of a lack of investment and then suddenly they were buying rolling stock because they they realised that rail was important I suppose at the time, so I had the benefit of being thrown into the deep end, we were spending lots of money we were buying lots of different types of of rolling stock in Dublin for Irish rail, had fantastic experience, I became a rolling stock engineer. I used that then as a sort of a tool to go travelling I went to us moved to Australia. And within a week of arriving in Australia, I was snapped up for a rolling stock sort of consultancy job. I was based in Sydney, but that saw me travel all around Australia and got me into and New Zealand and got me into various things such as light rail. So my first exposure to light rail was buying trams on behalf of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for Melbourne. And that was quite interesting. But when I when I finally did decide to move back to Dublin at the time, they were building the the tramway, the Lewis system in Dublin, which is light rail and that was to sort of what were at a time emerging fairly modern, slick European tramway in Dublin and had great experience they're sort of setting up the maintenance entity and they got into operations and infrastructure. And then I went over to the what we call the the client side if you like so got involved in the strategic decision making for building new lines and expanding the networks and essentially running it from running the operating business from the client side and then I moved I moved to Manchester, really partly, mainly I should say for the job. Metrolink was about to rapidly expand. And I suppose we had just come through a big programme in Dublin in Ireland, and I thought, you know, I'd like to do more of that. So came to TfGM to take part In what was, you know, Britain fantastic expansion programme on Metrolink and, you know, trying to on behalf of TfGM manage the network on behalf of of the, of its passengers on behalf of of TfGM. And what is now the Combined Authority in, but at this at the same time, it's expanding that network hugely, we have 60 kilometres to it, trying to run a business that was growing and growing, growing passenger numbers and keep everything operating smoothly and well maintained at the same time. So that's how I ended up where I am.

So what is it about light rail? And that attracted you? You mentioned that you started in Australia? Did you sort of realise then that it was that element of the industry you wanted to focus on? Or is it just a happy accident as such?

I'm not quite sure, I'd say happy accident, certainly an accident?

No, it was it was a Yeah, it's a happy accident, I suppose. I mean, it started out in the railway, what I suppose what light rail, it has all of the stuff you need to consider when you're when you're operating or running a railway. But then it's got all of the stuff that you need to consider when you're running buses as well. Because you're you're in mixed traffic. So you've got, I suppose the worst of both worlds really, because you've got standards to meet that are railway standards, you know, and there's not much difference actually between the standards you would apply in what we call heavy rail and in light rail, but then you've got an additional layer of highway standards and traffic management so and pedestrians, you know, sometimes when people from a heavy rail background common they see Manchester in action in it from a light rail centre, they walk around Piccadilly gardens or whatever, they're kind of thinking, how does this work, you know, because you know, in the railway, you want you want to keep people as far away from from the network is possible. Whereas in the light rail sense, you're part of the urban realm, really, you know, so. So you're really part of a city environment. And I think that's the most important difference, really, I think you, you feel when you're investing in light rail, like you're making a difference at a city level. It's much more akin to a metro network in that sense, than, you know, the heavy rail networks, it was enjoyable. And those challenges bring are quite rewarding to sort of, you know, when, especially when you're an engineer, you get to see the breadth of the full operation of the railway, I guess. And whilst it can be challenging, it's very rewarding to get involved in all of that, and to feel like you're part of the changing landscape of a city as well.

So I guess when you first started at TfGM, you were going for a rapid expansion, and there was an awful lot of investment, as we know, in in certain lines and certain areas. What were the challenges to doing that? And what did you learn from from all of those particular periods of, of expansion and investment?
The first thing to say is that it's a massively successful capital programme, that you'd say I would say that wouldn't the Metrolink expansion came together from what was probably decades previous have a vision from the sort of what I call the civic leadership of of the city, you know, it was to serve a lot of purposes such as joining up the two main rail stations which weren't previously connected, but also making use of what were then railway lines in decline, the altering of line the berry line. That's what what we call sort of phase one. Phase two was the Eccles Line in 2000, which was sort of much more on street much more of that traditional sort of tramway, but also served a purpose. It wasn't just to build the tramway for the sake of it, it was about regenerating the sort of sulphur keys area and look at Cypher keys. Now, if you look, you know, 2023 years later, we'd like to think we were a part of that. But then everything else that happened in between what we call the phase three expansion, sort of from Media City opening in 2010, to the traffic Park line, which was our latest extension in 2020. That decade, was an investment of roughly 2 billion pounds. That was we like to say that was the largest investment in public transport infrastructure outside of London at the time. If you compare the sort of scale of spend, I always make this reference to cost overruns in Crossrail are probably half what we spent here in Manchester, but look what we did, because we transformed the whole city really, you know, including the second city crossing. You know, we've gotten mostly mostly all the town centres around the place. So you've got you know, Rochdale, Oldham, Charlton Didsbury, within Shaw, Manchester Airport, Ashton Doyle's and it's all connected up now there's a network you can get almost anywhere to anywhere else in light rail in a decade, huge expansion, a huge rate of expansion. I think in 2014. We opened three new lines, that's unheard of really anywhere else. And it became Like shelling pays, I suppose, you know, the programme overall didn't start out very easy, but it became quite easy. And we had some innovative approaches to construction. So for example, joint utilities trenching. In my experience, certainly in Dublin, you know, when we were building the light rail network, it was hard, you'd sort of open the road to divert gas mains or divert some utilities and then you close the loop again, and then somebody else comes along, like the telecoms and then you open and so on, it becomes expensive. They normally run over time, they normally run over budget, but Metrolink actually within that 2 billion it was all ahead of time in the end, and I'll within within our budgets. And the thing is, it was easy to go back to government and say, we are this successful, you know, we're churning out more and more, and we got more and more support over the 2 billion was probably a billion in government money, but it was also a billion local contributions. So in borrowings effectively. So and that's that that was to sort of show the confidence that we had in actually delivering a really great outcome for the city. So it wasn't just for building a light rail network for a lot for that for the sake of it, you know, we were joining or barriers of deprivation to opportunities for employment and for leisure and so on. So there was there was a strategic purpose to at all. We were joining up highly populated areas, areas of low car ownership, etc. And that made it a successful network from an operating point of view. We didn't have any operating subsidy, Metrolink had no subsidy to operate from 1992 from the from the first lines opening right up until the pandemic, so we never had to go back once we had the investment. We made it work. And we were delivering on all of those sorts of commitments. So really successful light rail network, what what did what did what did I learn? To call back to your earlier question, it was probably the collaboration and teamwork that we brought to it. So lots of different people involved, you know, so we had TfGM ourselves. We had lots of different stakeholders and each of the local authorities around around Manchester, we had utility companies we had MPT which was a joint venture consortium to construct the thing. We had the Metrolink operator at the time or ATP naw Kham Keolis AMI, I should say, and, and really the whole everyone had to work as a single team on that Metrolink brand. And because we could then create the vision of what we were trying to do, everyone got behind it. So you know, at a point in time, during the programme, you could walk into our offices at Piccadilly place. And people didn't say, Well, I worked for TfGM, or I worked for whoever they worked for Metrolinx. So they worked at you know, so it was it was really quite a good vision to get behind. I suppose I've done so that's what I learned most is that collaboration and want a huge range of stakeholders. And that's what made it work.

You'd never hear when we're talking to, you know, different project owners and different projects across the country. When I certainly do anyway, I'm sure you're the same collaboration is absolutely key to any sort of investment project that the infrastructure or any civil projects across rail in the country, I guess, moving forward, then how important is the B network? And the whole sort of idea? How important is that to Metro Lincoln? And where does that kind of fit into it? Do you see this in almost like a litmus test for other light rail projects in the country? So I'm thinking West Midlands, you know, Nexus and Newcastle. Is it a litmus test? You would you would you say?

Well, there's probably a few, a few angles to answer that question. So the northern powerhouse partnership published a report a few weeks ago on UK productivity, okay, well, it specifically it showed Manchester punching above its weight. I think it's above every other city in terms of productivity growth, productivity in the UK is a problem and it's holding the whole economy back. But the report from the northern powerhouse partnership, basically says that Manchester has grown more than others, and puts it down and I'm really quite proud of it to the investment specifically in Metrolink. So that's an investment in transport infrastructure is so important for an economy. And we did that right. And therefore we're a bit ahead of the game in terms of productivity growth. And like I said, we we expanded all over Manchester, but not everywhere. So we can bolt and Stockport don't have Metrolink in that something we'd like to do in the future, or possibly even tram train variants or options of that. What from that point of view, I think Manchester is a great example for other cities to follow. But what we're where I think we are now though, is that, you know, we have a very busy network, it's difficult to add to it because the capacity through the city centre, for example, it's difficult to expand more what we need to do is integrate better with other modes, and that's where the B network comes in for me, so. So I think the if you look at the contracting model that we have permissioning TfGM the public sector has what we call revenue risk. And yes, we pay a private sector, a very good operator to operate the network for us. And they bring that international best practice. But TfGM also has the call the infrastructure risk, they're talking to this risk is a bit of jargon for the industry. But essentially, we're accountable, we make the investment in the infrastructure, and we need to make sure it works for passengers to deliver that growth from a patronage point of view from a customer point of view from a revenue perspective. So we have control over the fare setting, and the fares policy and all of that sort of thing. That's a great model. That's what we need to move to in the boss world, or what we are moving to in the boss world through was franchising. And then we need to integrate those two things and that integration. So if you integrate buses and trams, and the integration really comes about through ticketing, so we're launching some combined products in September when both franchising comes to, we're going to bolt in initially, but you can make multi ECOSOC to make multimodal journeys at a reasonable price. So when we get that right, that's, that's the integration piece. So I think the next bit of growth, so coming back to the productivity growth thing, the next bit of growth that we see in the economy will be with people started to come to use buses and trams together as an integrated mode of transport. People say a London Style Network, you know, that's coming to Manchester, it'll be hop on hop off, you know, touching into a child sort of ticketing, we've already got that a Metrolink will introduce a version of that on buses. That's why passengers have been really crying out for for us. I think so. So that's where I think Metrolink sits in the B network. I think we're the first bit of it, you know, because it's in public control. But then it's not just about trams and buses. I think that's the next step. We need to think about how rail integrates with that. Yeah. So that's cool. Me too. I think the mayor now has powers to to make that happen, at least on a trial basis with with ticketing, for example. It should be relatively easy, the technology exists to make it happen. But it's but it's a difficult landscape. And to work with it. But we're determined to suppose to integrate rail into the BT network. And I shouldn't say that the original BT network brand actually came from active travel, and it was to improve, certainly cycling around around the city. So cycling and walking have to fit into that just as much as the public transport modes. So it's quite an exciting vision, it's quite an exciting thing to move towards. So while I say Manchester is a good example of investing in transport infrastructure that other cities and city regions should be thinking about, I think we're probably going to be ahead of the game again, in terms of that integration piece, which everyone will want to follow us on it. London has already got it nailed. We're gonna be the next city to do it. And then other cities will follow.

Yeah, so I mean, I guess, extension, and expansion was was certainly that period for Metro link. And now it sounds like we're moving into sort of that integration period. And that is exactly what Metrolink can bring to other light rail systems in the country. Would you see that as sort of your legacy?

I'm proud to have been a part of it's not my legacy? No, absolutely not. I mean, it's many people have sort of had that vision to bring light rail back to Manchester, I suppose. Initially, for the 1992. And then, you know, we're taking the next step further. So, you know, my colleagues are looking at where we go to next with Metrolink extensions or tram train or, you know, bullets are part of that sort of city region plan. It's not the only element, there are many other elements to be delivered from a transport perspective. But you know, in terms of planning in general, I'm proud to be a part of it. But I'm only a relatively small part, I think the UK is probably a bit behind in terms of other modern European economies now in recognising the value of light rail. So not all cities are big enough to have metro style underground systems, you know, that's quite clear, but light rail can fill that gap. It's the mass transit form that complements poor services and complements active travel and so on, I'm confident we can we can grow patronage in Manchester and we can achieve goals like you know, reducing the amount of carbon you know, the goals like sort of levelling up, you know, so growing the economies outside of London and so on, light rail can be can be a hugely influential part of that. And like I said before, about the productivity growth as a result of investment in the mass transit mode, you know, it could solve some of our other problems in the UK like an industrial strategy. For example, in France, they did it 20 years ago, where they decided that cities above sort of 600,000 in population should have a light rail transit system that that helped stimulate their own homegrown industries. And then once they achieved that target, they lowered it to 500,000 and then they lowered it to 400,000. So now everywhere you go in France, in nearly every city There is a light rail network, you know, similarly in, in Germany in other European cities and I think UK adopted a similar approach. It's, it's the answer to a lot of current problems that we hear about, you know, even even as far as sort of climate change goes, because, you know, you're using the most sustainable form of transport zero emissions, you know, depending on how you procure your energy.

I guess that was gonna be one of my other questions and sort of leading on from that is that one of the big pluses that light rail has is that obviously, when it comes to carbon emissions, it is considerably lower than most other modes of transport. Can you go further with it? Can you can you? Can you get closer to zero emissions in terms of, of light rail?

Yeah, we can't I mean, so, Metrolink is 750 volt DC, overhead line, transmission network, essentially. So everything we use is electrical, and then how you procure electricity. So we've always paid a premium, for example, to have the greenest form of tariff. And I think they say it's something like 70% of that is carbon neutral and and the other 30% is renewable sources like biomass, etc. Know exactly how the composition of the grid guarantees was that I'm no expert, but we, we certainly made sure it was our policy to procure always the greenest tariff. So I think once you have the electric, electrical infrastructure, you know, and stick to that, it's, it's, it's dead easy to do. You can also look at the consumption side. So one of our big challenges in recent years has been inflation, especially energy inflation, and so our energy bills went up by a factor of three, which was usually significant. So, you know, not only for reasons of sustainability, but for reasons of actually, you know, trying to reduce costs, we should be looking at ways that we can, we can go a bit further. So, for example, the trams have regenerative braking. So, so when, and this is pretty standard technology in the railway now, but when, when, when they're breaking the traction motors turning to generators and put that energy back into the overhead line, if there's another term in the section, you can take it. But if there's no, it just it goes into a breaking rheostat, which does heat up the air outside, you know, there are probably ways we can harvest maybe that energy more. So we've looked at the concept of battery farms, for example, where we have substations so that energy would go into charging or batteries, which could then be used to supplement some of the some of the energy draw, which is a concept that we have, well, I don't think it's a proven technology anywhere, yes, there's nothing off the shelf, we can just go and buy. But that's something we have to explore in the future.

So thinking on that just then I guess, innovation at Light Rail does have that joy that where you can innovate with light rail in, you know, in it can almost be you know, it can be the first sort of trial in turn technologies to then, you know, go towards mass rail and have a rail transit systems. Where do you see innovation, pushing in terms of technology at the moment in light rail? Is there anything out there that particularly excites you in that realm at the moment?

Well, there are lots of things it'd be Right Light Rail is a good testbed for because it's, it's it's a lot more manageable. You know, we were sort of a vertically integrated railway, we've got infrastructure and trams and operations all under one roof, more or less. So it's quite easy to do things. I think, where the innovation is coming, or where we need to focus next, certainly in Manchester is on is on the ticketing side of the business. So we refer to integration, the integration happens via how people interact with with the network. And that's usually how they sort of procure a ticket get around, you've got
a good grip on that also, at the moment as of contact you, you hit the contactless milestone recently,
we have, you know, we need to we need to take that further. So account based ticketing is probably the next thing so people were familiar with how oyster sort of works but you can you can you can tailor certain people's accounts to their specific needs. And and that is technically possible. Now, I think it's only useful when when you're when you're more than a single mode. So when we have when we are, we will we will start to introduce multimodal ticketing simply via an app initially, but then we're going to move towards account based ticketing which will make it much more flexible ticketing offer for everybody I suppose and and an ease of travelling around the place. That's where a lot of innovation is coming from. But as an engineer, I think I get excited by things. So our operator, Keolis AMI have invested in remote condition monitoring a lot. So you might so in the railway, there's some of this goes on and the sort of small examples of it, of good practice elsewhere. But we we now have reams and reams of data about our most sort of the the main interaction between towns and infrastructure. So the wheel rail interface, for example, when every tram goes back to the Depo at Old Trafford Every evening they we scan the wheel profiles with lasers and all of that sort of recorded, you can pick out problems before they become problems. So you can, you can start to do predictive sort of maintenance, we do software, I did mention earlier on overhead line issues from time to time. So what we're what cam are doing an investing in innovative bit of kit that takes a photograph of every pantograph on the roof of every tram as it goes through a certain part of our network, and takes a very high res very fast 3d sort of image of every single pantograph. And it can use software to automatically pick up where that where there are components that might fail, which would then lead to overhead line issue. So so so we're trialling that we picked up one last week that are the system works, if you know that we and Cam could could take preventative action before that became a bigger issue. And then similarly on the rail. So we have fitted out one of the one of the trams to sort of automatically measure every aspect of rail geometry as it travels around the network. So you can do that more often than that you can pick out trends. And you can get ahead of the game in terms of maintenance, so you can plan your maintenance better. That's the that's the idea. Before these things become problem. So I'm quite proud, I have no hand in this myself, you know, the technology is beyond me. But when I'm kind of blown away by what I see what some of the guys are doing in the maintenance in the workshop. So that's really innovative. And I think when you have full control of our railway as we do, you can start to see that you can free up the engineers time from doing the inspections if you automate much of that. And they can be doing the fixing and the and they're prioritising their workload if you know what I mean. So you can work smarter.
So I'm sitting on a tram. I'm going my way to work from from Piccadilly train station in 10 years time, what kind of tram will I be sat on? What would it look like, in 10 years time? What will Metrolink
ratio probably be set on the exact same tram because because our fleet our fleet is interesting, we have 147 of exactly the same type of vehicle we're very lucky in that. It's where the biggest light rail network in the UK we've got the biggest homogenous fleet. And a homogenous fleet lends itself to you know, maintenance and repair. But but the first one went into service in 2009. The last one went into service last year in September. So we've got kind of this 12 or 13 year period of different ages of the vehicles and they don't they won't need to be retired until they're sort of 30 years old. Obviously we'll be giving them a bit of a makeover and refurbish them in the meantime. What we're looking at now though, is the possibility of tram train. So tram train is the concept of sort of making better use of some whales
and putting into place at the moment. So the first place in the UK was Sheffield, so Sheffield, to Rotherham, and the very successful network, a very extensive, very successful extension to the light rail network if you like. So it's definitely possible and we're working with some of the same experts Cardiff look like they're doing it in their sort of Valley lines project. That's an interesting one to keep an eye on. What we may end up doing, if we can pull it off, I suppose is if you look at the sort of map off of rail lines around Manchester, some of them are underutilised, or there's opportunities I should say, to maybe start thinking about some routes that look like an orbital route. Metrolink is quite a radial sort of network. So we can start to join up some of the dots. Now the problem or the technical difficulty with tram train is that everywhere is very different. So Sheffield, for example, you need to have more traction. Like I said we're 750 volt DC a lot of the railways is 2.5 kilovolt AC, or has no wires whatsoever. So you might not use you need to look at Battery technology. And so if you want everything to get everywhere else, you kind of have to homogenise eventually the sort of attraction package. But there's also different standards to meet such as crashworthiness in the heavy rail network versus light rail, we are lighter, therefore, the axle loads are a lot different. Because we're slower networks that we have, we have lower standards, lower vehicle weight, and so on. We're looking into into all of that, but what we're trying to do is look at that, imagine that next generation vehicle, which could be you know, a dual or tri mode, traction type vehicle, it will be longer. So we operate in double contests now, we're seeing you know, we can't run more trams through the city centre, but we what we could do is make them longer to deliver that capacity. So you might be sitting on a longer vehicle and it might be battery powered. And yeah, and who knows might be more comfortable environment and you know, we might have screens on for entertainment and all that kind of thing. So we are looking at all of that what the next generation vehicle might look like from Manchester, but that would then face the heavy rail network as well as the Metrolink Network.

Thank you for joining us today. Danny. You've been listening to the latest podcast from rail technology magazine. Don't forget to like I can subscribe to make sure you receive every new edition