Trains cancelled (again!)

Thu 1 Feb, 23:21 (last edited on Thu 1 Feb, 23:57)

I used to work for the railway, many years ago: I was part of the team that turned around ScotRail (even wrote a book about it), spent some time on the Western Region Board, and was generally useful in the system as a whole. ScotRail, for instance, went from being under threat of closure (the Serpell Report, ‘no railway north of Newcastle’) to being one of the best-performing businesses in Scotland. The current situation has me tearing my hair out.

You mention the Yarnton Bridge incident. From its early days until privatisation, all incidents and accidents on British Railways were investigated by a branch of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and the tradition was that if you were in any way involved in an accident you put your hand up. It wasn’t mentioned very often, because – I loved them for it – it never occurred to them that there could be any other way. But it ran very deep. I remember one occasion when a supervisor had missed something and a signal was passed at danger; he’d worked 24 days without a break, 10-12 hours at a time, but he put his hand up. (No, he wasn’t fired: REME saw its job as suggesting improvements rather than looking for someone to blame).

Then I went overseas and found myself in a country where they’d just had a horrendous air accident and the national airline immediately looked to finding a way to blame the pilots, who were (of course) dead. Years later they had to issue a public apology for their behaviour. For me it was a rude awakening.

When privatisation came to the railway, for the first time ever managers needed negotiation skills, because for the first time ever the different parts of what had been an indivisible organism were set against one another. Government spent a billion pounds, which would otherwise have bought us a fair amount of stock, service upgrades, better conditions for our staff … we could have put that money to good use.

That was a long time ago, but we’re still living with the consequences. I have a list of people whom I’d like to dig up and shout at, and some of them buggered up our railway.