In terms of the Tracsis suite that you moved on to for GTR, how mission-critical is it? I would imagine it is quite important given the sensitive work you have to do. If you can help me understand to what degree that piece of software is critical for your operations or how it drives your business, that would be helpful.

It is absolutely one of the most important parts of the rail operation. Without it, if it went down and was unrecoverable, or if somebody pulled the plug on it, you would have to do everything I talked about on paper or in Excel. It is absolutely a critical system. In UK rail contracts, they have key contract provisions in the franchise agreement or National Rail contract. I don't know whether the operating software is a key contract, but it has to work for the organization to function properly.

How ingrained is it within the business? You mentioned these big planning phases, do they occur several times per year?

In the train planning team, which are the people who produced the timetable, the rolling stock diagrams, and the train crew diagram, they did not do the daily rostering, that was a different team, there were about 60 people in that team in GTR. Of that, probably 14 did long-term planning. The rest of them were short-term planning. Probably three-quarters of the people employed were doing amended plans for each weekend.

If another train operating company director calls you today and tells you they are running Worldline and thinking about migrating to Tracsis, what would you tell them? Taking into account the whole implementation pain points, but also the end state, what would your answer be?

At points in the process where we were threatening, saying, "Look, if this does not work, we may end up having to pull the plug on this if we cannot get these other modules working as we need them to work," the planning people were saying, "Well, if that is the case, we need to find a way of us keeping our bit and letting the rest of it go back because we do not want to lose what we have now got." So it was really positive.