The annual Golden Whistle awards 2018 took place on the 26th January sponsored by Tracsis. The event, held at the Marriott Hotel on Grosvenor Square, saw an engaging morning conference followed by the annual awards ceremony, celebrating the best performing passenger operators, freight operators and Network Rail routes. Special awards were also presented to teams and individuals who had proved themselves to be outstanding in their work.

Tracsis’ Alex Robertson and Andy Schwarz were first up, presenting on “decision making and communication in a digital rail environment”. Their informative presentation focused on the issues that operators currently face in terms of train service delivery. Existing systems are hard to integrate and nothing has been designed for use in control ‘On the Day’. Alex and Andy discussed the benefits of TRACS Enterprise, Tracsis’ high-availability, cloud hosted solution that provides a single source of information for all resource planning and work allocation on the network. The solution aims to have high quality data in one place, allowing teams to make changes within the system and communicate them out automatically. Tracsis is delivering this fully integrated end-to-end solution throughout 2018, enabling users to make better decisions and significantly reduce the time required to recover from disruption.

Tracsis has software programmes already implemented across the industry and several of the TOCs who are users won awards on the day. c2c, winners of Operational Performance – London & South East use Enterprise and DayOne along with Southeastern who were highly commended for Outstanding Operations. Another user of DayOne is Greater Anglia who won silver for Operational Performance – Long Distance.

The afternoon awards were hosted by Dick Fearn with an opening speech from Tim Shoveller, Managing Director at UK Rail Stagecoach, which outlined the foundations of train planning and praised guests for excelling in following these guidelines. Tracsis CEO John McArthur presented the first awards for Operational Performance – Long Distance and this started a great afternoon that saw many teams and individuals being celebrated for their hard work throughout the year.

The winners for each category are listed below with Golden whistles for the best performing and Silver for most improved –

Operational Performance – Long distance
Gold – East Midlands Trains
Silver – Greater Anglia
Operational Performance – London & South East
Gold – c2c
Silver – Govia Thameslink Railway
Operational Performance – Regional
Gold – East Midlands Trains
Silver – Arriva Trains Wales
Operational Performance – Freight (based on the Arrivals to Fifteen (A2F) measure)
Gold – Direct Rail Services
Silver – Freightliner Heavy Haul
Operational Performance – Passenger or freight operator delay minutes on self
Gold – CrossCountry
Silver – Govia Thameslink Railway
Operational Performance – Network Rail Route (based on fewest delay minutes to operators)
Gold – Scotland
Silver – South East
London Underground Line Performance (both awards based on improvement in the Lost Customer Hours (LCH) measure)
Gold – Circle & Hammersmith
Silver – Metropolitan
Iarnród Éireann Performance – Right Time by route (both awards based on improvement)
Gold – Westport
Silver – Cork
Iarnród Éireann Performance – route delay minutes (both awards based on reduction in delay minutes)
Gold – Heuston Commuter
Silver – Waterford
Outstanding Operations – Team or Individual
These awards are decided by a panel of judges from the Institution of Railway Operators.
Gold – Waterloo Upgrade Team, South Western Railway
Silver – Old Oak Common Depot Team, Great Western Railway
Highly Commended – Newman Luke, Operation Vienna, Revenue Control, London Underground/Transport for London; Tommy Puncheon, Head of Control, c2c; Joint Performance Team, Southeastern and Network Rail
Special Award
Angela Hern, Head of Trains & Stations (Central Region), Northern
Angela was presented the special award for the work she did leading the recovery at Manchester Victoria station following the terrorist attack on 22nd May 2017.

Golden Whistle Awards 2018 - Results and Review of the Day