First Great Western wins Customer Information & Service Excellence Award

First Great Western has been awarded the North Star Customer Information & Service Excellence Award for its Reading Christmas Communications Plan.
Network Rail’s £850 million scheme to address the notorious rail bottleneck at Reading got underway during Christmas 2010 with a line closure between 24 December and 4 January. This was necessary to facilitate major preparation work which involved transferring Reading area signalling to a new Didcot control centre and removing a series of bridges and replacing them with a single new bridge which had been prefabricated on site.   
FGW was prepared to go to considerable lengths to minimise the impact of NR’s preparatory works on its customers. It also employed some very creative approaches. This resulted in the company maintaining very high levels of service for customers through the use of alternative routes and replacement road transport, where appropriate. It also relaxed ticket restrictions in some areas to maximise opportunities for customers to reach their desired destination with the minimum of disruption.
The company’s three stage communication plan took a very detailed approach to building understanding by informing and updating stakeholders, media, colleagues and most importantly, regular and occasional passengers

The plan was multi-layered and far reaching in its scope, and has attracted praise and interest from other organisations.
The success of this campaign was recognised by the independent passenger watchdog, Passenger Focus, which conducted a survey showing that 76 per cent of all passengers were aware of the engineering works when they arrived at the station – all the more remarkable because 98 per cent of passengers travelling on diverted trains only make the journey every few months or less.
Passenger Focus says the case study “should give the industry a good steer on planning passenger communications for future weekend and bank holiday disruption”, and believes lessons learned could be applied to all major construction projects where passengers and the wider community are going to be affected, with particular reference to transport planning for the Olympics in 2012.

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