Willow Rail

Can your depot actually maintain the fleet it's been given?

Willow works out how much work your depot has, and how much your team can actually deliver. It shows you the gap in hours, berths and competent staff. And it challenges the numbers it's fed instead of trusting them.

Request a demo account See how it works

Informed by RDG guidance: RDG‑ENG‑GN‑009 for depot rules and physical capacity, RDG‑OPS‑GN‑007 for staffing to planned work. Every figure traces to its input, so it can be defended in a capacity review rather than just asserted.

The problem

Most depots cannot show the numbers behind their capacity

Depot capacity is usually a feel, not a figure. When the timetable changes, a fleet moves or a team is short, nobody costs the extra workload until it hurts: exams slip, work arising backs up, and the first sign is a cancelled train.

One chainfrom fleet miles to exams, to hours, to the team you need. Every figure traceable to its source.

Your dataor none. Willow says which inputs are measured and which are still estimates, and won't size a hire on a guess.

Any depoton the same method, informed by RDG-ENG-GN-009 and RDG-OPS-GN-007. No consultancy required.

Where the railway is going

One railway, run on numbers

The Railways Bill puts a single directing mind, Great British Railways, over track and train, with a 30-year strategy and five-year business plans behind it. The Transport Secretary has promised to sweep away the fragmentation of seventeen separate organisations, and the reform is expected to find well over a billion pounds a year in savings. In that railway, "the depot is full" will not be an acceptable answer. Depots will be asked to show their capacity, their gap, and their plan, in a form someone outside the depot can check. Willow produces exactly that, on one traceable method informed by the guidance the industry already wrote for itself.

How it works

Set it up once. Run it whenever something changes.

Willow is not a nightly chore. It runs when a parameter moves: a fleet transfer, a new timetable, a rota change, a team short. Three steps, and every figure on every screen comes from the same chain.

Set up

Your depot, your numbers

Fleet, weekly miles and exam intervals. One team by role, the rota pattern, and the absence split. Task hours from your own working-times study, or shipped defaults clearly marked as such.

Analyse

Demand against capacity

Miles become exams, exams become hours. Rostered hours lose absence, then the share of a shift that is hands-on. The gap in hours, where the hours go, and which inputs are measured and which are still estimates.

The team

One headcount, three views

The team you plan, the team you actually get after absence, and the team demand requires. Establishment held against establishment needed, with a symbol as well as a colour.

The gate

No hire sized on a guess

Until productive share is measured, Willow shows the gap in hours and withholds the headcount and the cost. A 30-observation efficiency walk, or last week's completed exams, opens the gate.

Plan ahead

What-ifs and the watchdog

Move six units, change the rota, take on a fleet, and the whole review re-runs. Lock a baseline and, when diagram mileage changes, the difference is costed in exams and hours per week.

Every depot

Compare on the same method

Depots side by side, each on the same chain. A depot still on default inputs is shown greyed and left out of the totals, never ranked on numbers it has not entered.

Under the bonnet

What's underneath

Demand from your diagrams. Capacity from your real shifts, skills and machinery. The gap between them, in numbers you can take to a review.

Demand vs capacity

Weekly miles through task intervals and hours, set against rostered hours minus sickness, leave, training and abstractions, times measured hands-on time. The gap in hours, and in people and pounds once the inputs earn it.

One staffing model

The roles register is the planned team; the rota sets the number of teams; every head on every screen is derived from them. No second headcount to disagree with the first.

Stabling by the handbook

Road metres to plannable berths by the Appendix B method, tested against what actually stables overnight.

Paste-in onboarding

Paste your Rules of the Plan and the roads build themselves. Paste your rota grid, even a non-standard one, and Willow reads the pattern.

The defect ledger

Thirty seconds per fault. Repeat offenders get named; your measured miles-per-defect challenges the reliability figure the model was told.

Scenarios and outstations

What-ifs on timetable, fleet and staffing. Route exams to outstations and watch the hours relieved at the parent depot.

Willow challenges your inputs

Figures outside industry norms get flagged and queried, not accepted. If a depot claims 89% wrench time, Willow asks how.

Ask Willow anything

An assistant grounded in your live depot data. "Why is this depot short, and what would close the gap?" gets an answer from your figures, and it says which of them are still estimates.