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#11 From Pitch to Platform: Rail’s role in football
134 Plays11 months ago
Each Football season sees millions of people across the UK travel for matches, creating unique challenges for transport operators. In this episode, Gary Steele, Project Lead for the Football on Rail Initiative at the Rail Delivery Group, joins Gemma Bedlow from Steer’s Sports and Major Events team to explore the role that the rail industry plays in this logistical challenge.
Gary shares insights into the Football on Rail Initiative, discussing ways to improve collaboration between rail operators and football clubs and make matchday journeys smoother and more sustainable. From addressing fan travel behaviours to coordinating with clubs, this episode looks at the opportunities and challenges of aligning rail with the needs of football supporters.
Key takeaways
- Adapting to evolving travel patterns: Commuting used to dominate the railway industry. Post-pandemic, leisure travel has played an increasingly important role. Football is a key part of this. Week after week, fans travel in large numbers, creating distinct and intense travel demands. Rail operators are trying to adapt their business models to refocus on fans, within a system set up for commuters. They are facing obstacles along the way.
- Collaboration for better matchday travel: The Football on Rail Initiative extends beyond football clubs and rail operators — it brings all key stakeholders together. This includes event organisers, blue light services, local, regional and national government bodies, as well as fan groups and travel agents. The Initiative brings these partners together to focus on one goal – the safe, efficient, sustainable and pleasant movement of fans around the country. Good ideas and best practice are shared nationwide.
- Sustainability as a catalyst for progress: Making football travel more sustainable is both a pressing challenge and a shared ambition. Achieving greener matchday journeys requires a strong commitment from clubs and coordinated efforts between them, rail operators and governing bodies. By positioning sustainability as a driving force, stakeholders can focus efforts on reducing the carbon footprint of matchday travel while embracing innovative changes that benefit both fans and the environment.
Guest(s)
- Gary Steele, Project Lead, Football on Rail Initiative, Rail Delivery Group.
Host(s)
- Gemma Bedlow, Senior Consultant, Sports and Major Events, Steer
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Transcript
Introduction
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Voices of the Industry, a podcast series bringing you leading industry voices who challenge thinking across transportation, infrastructure and cities.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Voices of the Industry, a podcast by Steer.
Meet Gemma Bedlow
00:00:31
Speaker
I'm Gemma Bedlow, a senior consultant in the sports and major events team. I specialise in project management, most recently the 2024 UEFA Champions League final. As one of the nation's most popular shared pastimes, football occupies a special place in the collective imagination of the UK, but with 830,000 spectators travelling to matches every week,
00:00:52
Speaker
getting fans from A to B can be a challenge.
Joining Gary Steele
00:00:55
Speaker
With me today to discuss what role Britain's railway plays in this process is Gary Steele. Gary retired for the first time as head of train planning for the Midland Zone at Network Rail. The second time from Virgin after becoming involved in a new football and rail project, Gary now finds himself working for the Rail Delivery Group as project lead for the Football and Rail Initiative. Gary, welcome, how are you? I'm good, I'm good and you?
00:01:21
Speaker
ah Yeah, 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 we've worked much more closely this year during the planning of the Champions League final and since you've been in your new role. Gemma, I wanted to say how well that you and your colleague Ed Robinson of STEER really managed that mobility plan for the UEFA Champions League final. It was absolutely top draw and and and I honestly learnt a lot from how you handled that. And I took that into my strategic meetings with a football
Evolution of Rail and Football Logistics
00:01:55
Speaker
on rail. It was something to behold and you should be very proud of that. Oh Gary, thank you. That's very kind. So you've been working in the rail and football space for quite some time. Why don't you paint us a picture of how things have changed since you began? I would just realise that most of my achievements probably happened before you were born. I'm feeling very old right now.
00:02:20
Speaker
I mean i've ah it's it's been a long career and I've really enjoyed it and I've had some amazing experiences and met some wonderful people and the railway itself has changed a great deal and if I was to tell you what's changed we'd probably be here for another three days so I'll probably stick to how how the football has kind of changed.
00:02:41
Speaker
And really, I go back to my very first job in train planning. One of the first roles I had was to plan the many additional trains that the British Rail used to put on every weekend for football fans, whether it be football charters, football relief trains, or footexes. And here we go, almost 50 years later, I'm back trying to to do similar.
00:03:04
Speaker
although it's proving a lot more difficult to get those additional trains. Hard to imagine that for an FA Cup final we would have probably around 10 additional trains, 10 released charters for Texas per team a long time ago. And I think that probably the biggest change on the football inside probably came with the advent of the Premier League. It's growing popularity and the sort of the linkage with TV broadcasting rights. Moving football from the sort of traditional three o'clock time spreading those fixtures across all the weekend. In many ways that's a ah blessing in some as it helps spread demand ah but it also creates a lot of problems for the railway as well. The railway itself obviously in that time going back to British Rail to now completely changed and I think the key things for me is it's become perhaps more restricted and more difficult to change timetables to amend timetables
00:04:00
Speaker
operator license conditions, engineering schedules, planning timescales.
Impact of COVID-19 on Rail and Football
00:04:05
Speaker
And the process planning timescales really kind of restrict what a train operator can do, particularly at short notice. You've talked there about how things have changed over your career today. I guess a key part of that is, of course, the pandemic, which was a challenging time for everyone, not only just the rail industry.
00:04:24
Speaker
How did the rail industry so suffer as a result of Covid and and how has that affected delivery for football and rail? Yeah, I think it's fair to say recovery has been slow. The number of journeys is growing but we're still not at the levels we've saw before the pandemic.
00:04:41
Speaker
We've seen changes to how people use the railway. Working from home clearly has had an effect. People do not go to the office Mondays to Fridays and so the commuter market has been significantly affected since the pandemic. Flexible working continues to affect the traditional peaks of the railway.
00:05:00
Speaker
But we've also seen leisure traffic increase. People are now using rail more for leisure. But interestingly, football supporter travel has largely been unaffected by the pandemic. In fact, football supporters were some of the first to come back to the rail.
00:05:17
Speaker
I remember working on the 2021 Carabao Cup Final between Manchester City and Spurs. It was one of the first tournaments that allowed spectators back into the stadium albeit in very limited numbers. And I think this was all part of a process to get people back into stadiums for the postponed euros of 2020. That was a good thing to sort of come to terms with because in addition to managing the crowds, we also had the additional sort of issue of of managing the kind of separation between each people. So even though we had empty trains, instead of carrying 600, we were limited to something like 250 per train.
00:06:00
Speaker
so So, yeah, football fans have always kind of been there and the railway, it links the cities. So it's it's a really convenient way to get people from home to fixture. It's interesting, 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 landscape around it has changed so much in the way people travel?
00:06:24
Speaker
The railway used to be fixed up around going in and out of the cities, commuter travel, Mondays to Fridays, the business people, the the ones going into the cities to do their work and come home again. And that clearly isn't happening. And we're seeing days on the railway, Mondays and Fridays, where patronage is extremely low. And and this is all down to flexible working and people more comfortable working from home these days and that switch now to to sort of seeing people's leisure use grow and I think that's also probably linked
00:07:00
Speaker
to the importance of school holidays these days, where families can be fined for taking their children out of school in term time. So those weekends, those bank holidays are becoming more and more important. And those are the exact same times that Network Rail looks to do the bulk of its significant engineering work.
00:07:21
Speaker
And I kind of wonder, is that still appropriate and are there other ways to do that?
Scheduling Challenges
00:07:28
Speaker
And in many ways, I do think football can be some kind of catalyst for that because throughout the winter months, for 43 weekends of the year, the bulk of the people that are traveling tend to be football supporters going to the various fixtures across the weekend. and And I kind of think that is sort of symbolic of of how the use is going with people going into cities for all kinds of things. But as I say, slightly controversial, but I just wonder if the current setup
00:07:58
Speaker
is still the best and I know if you isolate that and just link it with football then it clearly isn't the best because football creates a demand for rail journeys when the railway is closing down when the rail is shutting down its infrastructure and services are getting fewer and yeah it's an interesting question and and one that I think needs much wider but debate then than perhaps you and I can provide here Yeah. And like if leisure travel is becoming the focus, then surely, statistically, football's got to play a big part in the conversation, really. Particularly, I think we're talking through the winter months as well, where these are the bulk of users in many ways.
00:08:43
Speaker
Yeah, I guess you've touched on yeah we've touched on some of this already, but you've ah you know you've already given us an idea of how often football and red aren't closely associated. How do you think they can be brought closer together?
00:08:58
Speaker
Well, I think let's let's first address some of the difficulties that perhaps makes it a little difficult to be more aligned. I think there's three main reasons that we currently struggle. Planning timescales is the first one. The railway defines its infrastructure and therefore the services is that it can run on it. Six months before the day of the race or before the fixture in this case.
00:09:23
Speaker
And that's ah that's a long, long way out. And we look at football and some of the fixtures kind of defined in less than a week. I think most people are trying to work to a kind of ah a six weeks timeframe. But again, it just emphasizes the difference because as soon as a fixture has been announced, people are buying tickets for that game and they're looking for their travel. And that really doesn't give the railway sufficient time to significantly amend its timetable.
00:09:52
Speaker
That's the first one. Managing supply is also one that kind of gets almost forgotten about here. It it seems simple. A stadium that holds 30,000 seats, well that club sells 30,000 tickets. The railway really struggles with its supply because it can't manage that supply because it doesn't really sell seats, it sells journeys. And everybody has the right of a journey and everybody can buy a ticket for a particular journey. Even when reservations are sold out,
00:10:21
Speaker
you can buy an open ticket that will allow you to travel that particular route, the route that you want, over a three month period. And there's no intelligence from that, is there? Yeah, there's there's no intelligence there. We don't know the numbers that are actually travelling and it can present its problems because we're making assumptions We are making assumptions around the popularity of a game and we can get close. But those figures, we we really don't know the detail and we also know sometimes we're going to be overwhelmed by by the de demand.
00:10:57
Speaker
So that's ah that's a tricky one. And then the this the railway really struggles to increase its supply. Train operating companies don't really have spare sets lying around these days. Trains cost several million and train operating companies want to sweat their assets. They want the most out of those. So they don't have spare sets lying around in depots.
00:11:22
Speaker
like the days of British Rail, where you can just call upon 10 additional trains and and get them running
Football on Rail Project
00:11:28
Speaker
in a short period of time. They just don't exist anymore. So we've got to be smarter about how we improve that supply. And unfortunately, that again needs time. And finally, managing the demand. We touched it on it early. The demand comes 100% from the football club.
00:11:45
Speaker
We don't really have a say. We're finding out actually the the times are the fixtures, the same time the fans are finding out about them. And so that demand is created outside of our comfort zone, shall we say. There is no better time for a football match to kick off.
00:12:03
Speaker
as far as the railway is concerned than 3pm. Unfortunately article 48 means no live games can be screened between 1445 and 1715 so everything that moves is moving to a time that is less suited to the railway.
00:12:21
Speaker
And so again, you know, that demand comes from somewhere else and we find it very, very difficult to manage that demand. So that's where we are in terms of why it's difficult to come together. But there are so many things 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 no one thing that is going to solve this. And what we're trying to do with a football on railski is to look at every element, everything that is within our gift to change, to amend, to do better. That's what we're trying to do. And strangely enough, well maybe it's not strangely enough, I'm actually finding it pretty easy to get the football industry together with the rail industry.
00:13:04
Speaker
I think everybody wants to do better. I think everybody knows of the difficulties that we're currently experiencing. And whether it's a desire to do better for your supporters, for the other rail users, or for the staff, the rail staff and the staff at the ground, for whatever reason we want to do better.
00:13:24
Speaker
And the members of the Football on Rail project include the Football Association, the Premier League, the English Football League, the Football Supporters Association. We've got Network Rail, we've got British Transport Police and the Football Policing Unit. There's myself from the Rail Delivery Group and there's the train operating companies.
00:13:44
Speaker
But we've also got the Department for Transport and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. And the one thing that I find is common throughout everybody is their desire to to support initiatives and to really do what they can to make things better. And a key area, I think, is to improve that collaboration, to share information, to gain knowledge so as we can we can plan better. And it's not just a sound bite.
00:14:12
Speaker
There are so many aspects to planning a train service. Fleet resources, fleet maintenance, pathway creation, pathway validation. These are the things that time your service, the stops, the routes, the train crews, train crew, rosters. We've got communication, service publication, yield management, facilities management, buffet service services, ticket sales, cleaning, watering.
00:14:37
Speaker
Watering's so important for toilets on board the trains these days. Operations, stations, station-depatch, signal and control, train crews, security, gate line security, platform security, onboard security. And there's 12 weeks live in public domain. That's thousands of people. And not one of them was recruited for their knowledge of football. And this feels this feels like it's a little bit like joining the dots in many ways.
00:15:06
Speaker
giving the people the information who need it when they need it. Because as I've said, my experiences are that everybody wants to do better. And to do that, they need to know what it is that they're trying to do, trying to plan against. And it is difficult to understand the impact that football has on its railway and services.
00:15:25
Speaker
And this information sharing helps us to recognize earlier the potential issues. And so we can do something about it. We can provide appropriate information to customers to allow them to make an informed choice about their journey. It gives an opportunity to provide appropriate support for staff and customers. And it gives us an opportunity to remove opportunities for conflict. And just to explain that, if we know services are going to be extremely busy because of the football match,
00:15:53
Speaker
then we probably know that we're going to declassify that train and we're not going to be able to offer a first-class service or there's not going to be buffy service on that train. So we can stop selling those tickets earlier. We worked very closely with TFL for the Champions League final and their TDM team. How much influence on the wider railway can you have on suppressing background demand?
00:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's extremely difficult to influence people's journeys. But that said, this sharing of information can certainly help us do that a little bit better than we are now. If we know services are going to be busy and we can put that information in the sort of booking engines at the time, you know make it available at the time when customers are looking to buy tickets. If you were looking to travel to Manchester on any given day,
00:16:45
Speaker
say from London and in the information there is a note that's saying this train will be extremely busy because of a football match then you get to understand what what that might mean 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 busy and that's that's important because if you decide you don't want to go on that day you'll go at another time then you're also freeing up more capacity for the people who who do want to go, with the football supporters or whatever. So it's one way of kind of avoiding that point of conflict, and it's something that we're able to do more and more.
00:17:26
Speaker
I guess as well, the closer people get to apps such as CityMapper or Trainline, that means of communication, you know, flagging points of conflict becomes easier for the operator as we move away from traditional ticket machine purchases. Yeah, it does as long as the information is accurate and in there. And that's one of those dots that we've got to join up
Role of Football Clubs in Travel Management
00:17:50
Speaker
because it's not always there, but allowing customers to make an informed choice about their journey is so important to managing their expectations and allowing them the full choice of of of what they need to do, when they need to travel, etc. and it' It's extra dots in the picture, right? Like it's more stakeholders at the table that need to be aligned and informed with the same consistent information. Absolutely. And and messaging and information is so key. And again, this collaboration
00:18:21
Speaker
If we want to talk to football supporters, if we want to get messages to those kind of people, then that is better coming from the football club themselves. If you're another rail user, then you'll look for the information elsewhere. You'll look for it in journey planning systems and maybe train operating company websites. And the more we can get that information out there, the better.
00:18:42
Speaker
What role do the clubs play in bringing football and rail closer together? The clubs are incredibly important in this. I mentioned just a little bit earlier the importance of that, of messaging coming from the club, a trusted source. and And I've got real experience of that. If we're having problems with the service because of engineering work and we think we're going to struggle to cope with the demand, if we were to put a message out to football supporters, it's highly unlikely that it's going to get through. And even if it did, they'd probably ignore it. But if that message was coming from the club itself, if this was the club themselves telling them that it's going to be busy and we're looking at different modes of transport to get you to the way of fixture, they're more likely to heed that information. They're more likely to make a different choice when it comes to taking the train and
00:19:39
Speaker
I've got an example of this. Seems a couple of seasons ago now when I was working for Virgin Trains. Liverpool were playing Tottenham Hotspur. The line between Liverpool and Crewe, that's the main line, the direct line, was blocked for engineering work and the diversionary route was taking people, taking trains via Warrington. And we couldn't run the usual amount of trains for that service and it was going to be a real difficulty for us to get everybody home. We used the clubs, we spoke to the clubs to Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool and Liverpool have an awful lot of following in London. They have, I think it's over 800 supporters, season ticket holders with a London postcard address. so
00:20:22
Speaker
They've got a lot of people going back to London as well. The message came from the ah clubs themselves. We put on coach services for the this road vehicle coaches, for intermediate stations, and we wanted those supporters just to go straight to the coaches.
00:20:41
Speaker
get on board the coaches that will take them to the intermediate stations and keep them off the few trains that we had go in London because we wanted to keep those London trains purely for the long distance supporter. That worked incredibly well. Everybody turned up.
00:20:57
Speaker
All the intermediates got on the coaches, left the capacity that was available on the yeah the trains that were going to London, and and everybody got on without incident. and And again, there's no way that if the railway had put that out, we would have got that message through. So what we're saying basically is that the desire to do better is is improving, but the landscape is still remains challenging.
00:21:24
Speaker
It's an incredibly difficult landscape with so many things that are outside our sphere of influence. But yeah, it's without a shadow of a doubt that support is there. Obviously fan behaviour can be an issue for fellow passengers and operators as well as a big media talking point. What do you think the challenges are there and what are the possible solutions?
00:21:46
Speaker
It is an important factor, but I think it's i think first of all, we've got to got to understand that the overwhelming vast majority of fans caused no
Fan Behavior and Sustainability
00:21:56
Speaker
issues. But at this moment in time, I'm kind of wanting to focus on the environment that we're creating and to sort of understand what that environment looks like. We need to look at customer complaints when they're related to 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 surprise to to to anybody listening but why don't we plan for this? Why were we not warned? Why do you sell tickets when you know the trains to be full?
00:22:30
Speaker
Why do you treat everybody appallingly? And why do you allow all kinds of bad behavior? And that for me was the kind of information that really ought to inform the strategy on behaviors. And that thing, that first one, why don't we plan for this? Well, we mentioned earlier how we're planning better and how we're getting those information to the right people as early as possible. Why were we not warned?
00:22:59
Speaker
another one that we mentioned earlier, getting information out to people to allow them to make a more informed choice about their journey. Why do we keep selling tickets when full? This is an awkward one because we have no way of stopping selling tickets to somebody and I don't think there's a desire to stop selling tickets to people. What we can do again is to provide the information that will allow people to make a better choice about those there was journeys that we know to be full.
00:23:29
Speaker
And we're trying to do more around providing better support for that journey, better queuing, safeguarding and security, and each point of conflict that we can remove, that we can take out of that planning process.
00:23:45
Speaker
whether it's a two-car train set that turns up in place of an eight-car train set that really does create that extra level of overcrowding. If we know what we're dealing with, if we understand what the demand is, then we can do something about that in the planning stage. And I think the most important thing perhaps to remember here is that better behaviors are a byproduct of a better service. And the focus for us is on delivering that better service Something we haven't talked about yet is sustainability. Where does sustainability sit within this conversation and how does it form part of your objectives and ambition to bring stakeholders into the picture? Yeah, sustainability, it's it's so important to everybody these days and and I think the benefits of rail are clear for most. The project needs to be kind of supporting modal shift.
00:24:41
Speaker
football clubs are actively seeking to become greener and I know from speaking to a number of football clubs that their biggest area of concern is a way fans travel and a way to improve their carbon emissions is to perhaps get more people to travel by train there in line isn't a kind of ah a little bit of a problem because it's no use pushing people towards the train if the train actually can't take that shift. I think this is where it's vital that the Football on Rail project is in the driving seat of that. It's clear we've got to do more for sustainability but to do that we will need to create more journey opportunities
00:25:22
Speaker
and we will need to create more capacity. Whether that's optimizing the yeah the services we've got, whether that's adding to them in some way, we've 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 reading this off the blurb that I've got here, that's if you look at a journey between London, Liverpool and Manchester, both about the same distance from London,
00:25:48
Speaker
If you assume there's four people in a car, then there are 14.7 kg CO2 emissions. I don't know what the kg CO2, but I'm guessing the lower the number, the better. A 53 seater coach is 9.3 per person.
00:26:04
Speaker
And with a train it's 7.1. And I think if you if you look to the recent tournament in Germany, the Euros, they've gone on record as saying they've created the the greenest Euros there has ever been. And Deutschesbahn played a significant part in that. Moving football supporters is greener and something that needs to be encouraged, really. And that's where I think when we're starting to look ahead,
00:26:34
Speaker
We know ourselves, we've got the Euros in 2028. And speaking to the DCMS, well, they want to make that tournament even greener. And if we're to do that, we've got to really start focusing on how we actually do that. And again, what I can say is in football people, people like Bob Eastwood, the English Football League's head of security and operations, Tom Legg, the FA's head,
00:27:00
Speaker
of External Operations, Tommy Guthrie from the Premier League, Head of Fan Engagement and David Rose, Deputy COO of the Football Supporters Association. I'm really supported of this and really sort of getting behind how we can make that happen.
00:27:16
Speaker
Do you think there is, for the rail industry, I mean, there are obvious differences, but when we're looking at the English Premier League compared to international tournaments, for example, do you think there needs to be a different approach in the drive towards sustainability on rail? Or do clubs sit at the heart of this, kind of across the piece? It's it's difficult because to to drive that modal shift We need more capacity. We need the ability to move more people, whether that is actually football supporters or other rail users. And is there something that we can do differently to create journey opportunities when people want them?
00:27:58
Speaker
And I think sustainability is at the heart of that. I think the a railway can be an enabler. And I think it's it's one of those where, why can't those euros of 2028, when the yeah UK holds those, why can't they be a catalyst for for looking at how we move football supporters around 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 it's football, whether it's boxing, whether it's a theater trip, whatever the
Future Collaborations
00:28:29
Speaker
reason. If we're going to do that, then we're going to have to provide longer distance trains running out of city centers after 10 o'clock at night. And that's something that in many ways we're a long way from it then at the moment. But the Euros is four years away.
00:28:45
Speaker
And that gives us plenty of time, but we probably need to start sooner rather than later because there's an awful lot of things that I've got to move around to make that possible. I mean, we did it, didn't we? This year for the Champions League final, there were there were trains the additional trains that went much later into the night, but the challenge was just getting people on them and getting the clubs to support that modal shift and shifting spectators onto those late night services.
00:29:14
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And if we go back further than ma the 2012 Olympics, we had services there running really late into the night. It's it's just getting the industry and all the elements of that industry to come together to do something meaningful on this. But I do think it's the future. I think sustainability, if we if we do this for any reason, it should be around sustainability.
00:29:40
Speaker
I mean, a beautiful segue as we move towards the end of the recording. Looking ahead, what what does the future hold for for rail and football? I'm usually optimistic. From what I've seen this past season, the support the project has got from really all the players has been absolutely incredible.
00:30:00
Speaker
and and some of those initiatives that we've already seen around the sort of key fixtures at Wembley where we've we've managed to get football fixture planners and network rails engineering planners in the same room to sort of understand each other's goals and objectives and and again to to sort of provide a framework that might make people make a more informed choice and perhaps keep routes open for ah fans going to some of the club's biggest games whether it's the playoffs, the FA Cup, Carobale Cup, National League Finals. We've got people in the same room and as I say making informed choices about the decisions they're making in terms of what routes they keep open.
00:30:42
Speaker
Clearly, they don't know the football teams involved for those finals, but again, it's a starting point and it's making things that just that little bit better. They won't get them all right, but they'll get more right than perhaps they usually do. We've partnered with the Football Supporters Association to survey their members, and the information that we've got from that and the intelligence, that will help shape future strategies.
00:31:07
Speaker
We've seen tremendous collaboration between Avanti West Coast, West Midland Trains, Chilton Railways, particularly around those big finals, but across the West Midlands as well. And for the first time we've seen train operating companies working together to provide a more consistent service and certainly a more consistent message when it's going out to its customers.
00:31:29
Speaker
And next season, we'll be adding East Midlands Railways, cross-country, Northern Railways, Transpan and Express to those that are already been doing so well this past season. It's a huge operation. We can't do everything in one go, but it's it's kind of breaking it up, breaking the network up into bite-sized pieces and just kind of rolling out small improvements that, when added up, will make a difference. and area of influence is is growing. So 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 is to look to see what's within our gift to change, to amend, to do things better. And if we can get that right, then we'll be offering a better service to all rail users. OK, that was fun. Very excited looking forward. Hopefully it's not long until we're around the table again, working on another exciting project. um Absolutely. like