What’s in a name? Meet Ilford Depot’s ‘Double MTIN Team’

Ilford Depot’s ‘Double MTIN Team’ has an obscure, jargonesque name, but a closer look reveals a small, dedicated team working hard to get great results for Greater Anglia’s passengers.

Formed 15 months ago, the team of five performance engineers was put together and tasked with looking at the reliability figure for the company’s Class 317 trains – and doubling it.

MTIN stands for ‘miles per technical incident’ – this is how many miles a train runs before it develops a fault that requires fixing.

15 months ago Greater Anglia’s Class 317 fleet (which serves commuters in Essex) was not scoring well on ‘miles per technical incidences’ (they were only achieving 8,000 miles between faults), causing an unacceptable number of delays to passengers.

To turn the situation around the Double MTIN Team was created and in a short space of time they have seen excellent results, with the Class 317s now running 100% more reliably than before.

With research into the most commonly occurring faults and a sustained focus on finding permanent solutions to them, the team has seen a month on month improvement in the trains’ performance and has already hit its target of doubling the miles per technical incident for the last three consecutive months.

Over the last three months the Class 317’s MTIN has achieved in excess of 16,000 miles per technical incident, peaking at over 20,000 in February. As a result the number of cancelled services is significantly down, as are delay minutes.

This means that the Class 317 trains are now running more reliably than ever before.

But the dedicated Double MTIN Team isn’t stopping there. In a bid to improve the service further still, they have set themselves a new target of 20,000 miles per technical incident and may also start to focus on other types of trains in the fleet as well.