NETWORK RAIL is to take lessons from the Japanese in how to run a railway.

Teams of rail managers are to be sent to Japan to study how the country has managed to achieve near-perfect punctuality without a single fatal train crash in 40 years of running the Shinkansen “bullet” trains.

The not-for-profit company that replaced Railtrack wants to measure its performance in every area against the standards achieved in Japan, the only other significant economy with a privatised railway.

Train delays will be top of the agenda. On the 170mph (270km/h) Shinkansen services, a delay is recorded if a train arrives 15 seconds late. Britain’s 125mph intercity trains are not considered late unless they arrive more than ten minutes behind schedule.

Instead of leaves on the line or the wrong type of snow, the only excuse for delays that Japanese passengers are ever likely to hear is that their line has been disrupted by an earthquake.

On the Tokaido Shinkansen, which carries 355,000 passengers a day between Tokyo and Osaka, the average train was 26 seconds late last year.

On Virgin West Coast in the same period, the average delay was 7 minutes 30 seconds.

Network Rail hopes to glean ideas and measure its progress through “international benchmarking”.

Ian McAllister, the chairman of Network Rail, said that the company was conscious that its monopoly made it difficult to assess its own performance.

“If we are not careful we can be fat, dumb and happy. So we have to create a substitute for competition by doing international benchmarking. We are setting up a series of structured information exchanges which go right into the detail of how the Japanese do things like rail maintenance, repairs and customer focus. We want to find out who is better in each area.”

Keiichi Kagayama, the manager of Tokyo’s Shinkan-sen control centre, said: “For us the constant pursuit of accuracy is a way of life. We try to spot potential problems before they cause delays, which means carrying out preventive maintenance.”

Network Rail believes that the quality of staff training on Japanese railways will be one of the first things it imports to Britain. Roderick Smith, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College and an expert on Japanese railways, said: “We regard staff training as a luxury that can be sacrificed. In Japan the training is so thorough that even people with the humblest jobs do them very well.” But he said Network Rail would struggle to teach its staff to embrace the Japanese attitute to work. “The mindset of the Japanese is suited to the rule- driven process of running railways like clockwork. In Britain we tend to think we can do better and don’t bother to observe the rules. It’s individualism versus collectivism.”

Professor Smith said railway workers in Britain usually focused on their individual tasks and had little experience of how the railways were run as a system. Japanese train drivers remain versatile, driving the train one day and collecting tickets the next. “This means they don’t lose contact with the passengers and can see the effect on people of delays.” Professor Smith said that Japanese staff were highly motivated because they joined one of the six regional railway companies for life. “The situation in Britain is musical chairs, with people jumping from company to company as short-term franchises come to an end,” he added.

There are no train franchises in Japan, which decided to keep track and trains under the control of a single company in each area when it privatised its railway in 1987.

Senior Network Rail officials privately admit that their preliminary visits to Japan have highlighted the benefits of keeping wheel and rail under the same ownership.

The secret of Japan’s train punctuality also lies partly with having well-behaved passengers who form orderly queues at painted markings on platforms. The markings show precisely where the doors will be when the train stops. The waiting passengers do not surge forward and block the doors but wait patiently until everyone has alighted. Such orderly queues mean that Shinkansen trains spend only 40 seconds at stations, half the time trains wait in Britain.

The co-operative attitude of Japanese passengers might also partly be explained by the freeze on rail fares since privatisation 17 years ago.

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