Eleven Minutes Late
Page 30
But then into this world of tat, there strode a most improbable figure. In October 2008 the former academic-cum-journalist-cum-Downing Street policy wonk Lord Adonis had been moved from the schools department to be rail minister. Gossip suggested that Adonis’ educational ideas were becoming inconvenient and that this was the British equivalent of putting him in charge of a Siberian power station.
Adonis astonished everyone: he turned out to love trains, both instinctively and intellectually. Over Easter 2009 he followed in my footsteps (if I may say so) by buying a Rover ticket and spending a week travelling the country by train. This generated so much publicity that it reminded the operators of the ticket’s existence, whereupon they immediately upped the price.
In the summer Brown, impressed by the man’s sheer zest, promoted Adonis into the Cabinet as Transport Secretary (the twenty-first since 1979), giving him the ability to make his enthusiasm government policy. ‘It is manifestly in the public interest that we systematically replace short-haul aviation with high-speed rail,’ he announced. He has produced ‘a complete revolution in the Government’s handling of the railways,’ declared a bowled-over Christian Wolmar.
Adonis, in his first few months in the job, had the effect on the rail industry that Barack Obama was having on the world at the start of his presidency. His actual achievements were negligible, but he entirely changed the framework of the argument. In July Adonis announced plans to electrify the main line route out of Paddington, reversing years of governmental drivel. A month later he threw his weight behind High Speed 2, the notional new high-speed line to the north: 200 mph, just over an hour to Manchester, just over two to Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The dates attached to these projects – 2020, 2027, 2030 – seemed, to us refugees from the twentieth century, to have come out of science fiction. And, since these were British railways under discussion, one assumed they were more fiction than science. At this point, though, no one at all was arguing: the opposition Conservatives had actually issued their own high-speed proposals first. And this fitted with a worldwide fashion: across Europe, the Far East and even in the US, schemes for new super-fast lines were sprouting like springtime grass.
However, High Speed 2 was still to meet its likely nemeses: the Tory voters of Buckinghamshire, once they discover the route is going past their front gardens, and future Treasury ministers, operating amid post-credit crunch constraints, forced to make the customary choice. Do they authorize money to improve Britain’s infrastructure for future generations? Or do they spend any dosh that might be available to win the next election? They have never found that a hard decision in the past.
And, with the Labour government expected to be out of office by the spring of 2010, chances are that Transport Secretary No. 22 will be in place and reverting to tedious type. Adonis’ reputation, his non-confrontational style and his position as a peer made it just about conceivable that David Cameron might make an Obama-style manoeuvre and ask him to stay on as a gesture of bipartisanship. But that would be very un-British – just like committing billions to transform the transport system for our grandchildren.
Adonis had no plans to abolish the disastrous passenger franchise system or keep hold of the East Coast line for the state when it was temporarily nationalized following the unmourned exit of National Express. The current system of outsourcing blame for the railways was bad only for the taxpayers, who failed to notice the cost, and the passengers, who failed to complain. And so the railways continued on their weary way.
One absolutely classic scene did attract attention. It occurred when a 75-year-old woman from Bolton, Lena Ainscow, was found to be travelling, by mistake, on the wrong train out of Manchester: the 1045 not the 1015. The train manager told her that she would have to pay £115 full fare. Mrs Ainscow did not have £115; she was on her way to visit her grandchildren, and had just enough money to buy them a present. A professional comedian called Tom Wrig-glesworth overheard this, and then himself did something very un-British: he intervened.
The manager told him to shut up. Then Wrigglesworth organised a whipround, and paid the £115. At Euston he was met by the police, and threatened with arrest for begging. There was a happy ending: Wrigglesworth turned the whole story into an hour-long stand-up routine, which was a big hit at the Edinburgh Festival; Virgin Trains, overwhelmed by bad publicity, changed their rules – slightly. But somewhere in the organization, someone (probably our friend Umerji, in his new role as director of customer relations) will have been plotting ways of clawing the money back. The essence of capitalism is that it involves companies collecting as much money as they possibly can from their customers. It is customary to find ways of disguising this somewhat. On Britain’s railways the process can be very naked indeed.
And stupid too. In November 2009 our old friends at Cross Country were advertising a first-class return from Newquay in Cornwall to Kyle of Lochalsh in the Highlands at a price of £1002, Britain’s first, but assuredly not last, four-figure rail fare. This journey is a hundred miles shorter than my own epic expedition from Penzance to Thurso, which was now being offered at a mere £876. As gleeful journalists dumped buckets of ordure on his head, a Cross Country spokesman explained breezily that that this outrageous attempt at extortion really didn’t matter: ‘We’ve never sold one,’ he said.
Still, it could be worse. There was news from North Korea that the tyrant Kim Jong-il was running a fleet of six trains and ninety carriages, calling at nineteen private stations, all for his own personal use – which puts Von Ieuan’s Express into perspective. And in Washington the US Senate voted to deny the benighted American rail service, Amtrak, its $1.6 billion federal subsidy unless it scrapped a ban on passengers carrying handguns in checked luggage, imposed after the 2004 Madrid train bombings. The vote, orchestrated by the all-powerful National Rifle Association, was not even close: 68–30.
Umerji’s vocabulary has a good word for the politicians who voted for that.
The author regrets to announce . . .
. . . that there are errors in this book. The problem for a nonexpert writing about the railways is that there is someone, somewhere, who knows more about every single sentence than the author does. The trouble is that it is never the same person twice.
The man who can correct a detail about the early days of the North Devon & Cornwall Junction Light Railway is most unlikely to be the person who can explain the complexities of the relationship between the Department for Transport and the Treasury. I have been fortunate to have had a great deal of help from people at both ends of the spectrum. The railway community is a warm and welcoming one, and many members of it have given generously of their expertise.
But the usual disclaimer applies. This is my book, and any errors and flaws are my responsibility (unless I can find a convenient scapegoat). Furthermore, I never wanted to become an expert. This is a lovelorn passenger’s personal view of the railways and I didn’t want my passion and anger and love and loathing about this weird industry over-diluted by listening to too many politicians or professionals defending entrenched positions.
On the other hand, I didn’t want just to rant, I wanted to gain an understanding of how this mess was created – so I talked to a substantial cross-section of people from whom I believed I might learn something. And I did, in every case. A great many others made useful suggestions, checked facts for me, let me pick their brains, bucked me up, or offered hospitality and/or companionship on my travels.
Top of the list is Colin Divall, Professor of Railway Studies at the University of York, who not only gave me a number of terrific insights, but kindly agreed to read the manuscript, and saved me from falling in to a number of heffalump-traps. My special thanks to him.
And also to: Brian Abell, Fiona Barnes, Simon Barnes, Helen Beeckmans, Lord Berkeley, Steve and Sarah Bierley, David Bishop, David Blagrove, Professor Mark Casson, Hugh Cheval-lier, Rhodri Clark, Erlend Clouston, John Crane, Anne Dixey, Harold and Jill Drewry, Professor Andrew Evans,
Roger Ford, Sir Christopher Foster, Stuart Foulds, Lord Fowler, Dr Terry Gourvish, Matthew Hancock, David Haydock, Murray Hedgcock, Professor David Howell, David and Pru Jeffrey, Stephen Joseph, Livius Kooy, Louisa Kuczinski, Steve Lancey, Christopher Lane, Graham Langer, Mike Lunan, Sir John Major, Richard Malins, Peter Miles, Harriet Monkhouse, Pamela Monkhouse, Gerald Mortimer, Stephen Moss, Dr George Muirhead, Martin Myrone, Andy Newbery, David Nobbs, Sue Phillips, Philip Powell, John Prescott, David Prest, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Frank Roach, Andrew Roden, David Sheers, Adrian Shooter, Clare Short, Anthony Smith, Bill Smith, Dr Gavin Strang, Peter Trewin, Marilyn Warnick, John Welsby, Tom Winsor and Christian Wolmar.
A number of railway employees helped me along the way, some wittingly, some not. Several who spoke frankly have asked to remain anonymous, a request I have of course respected. I have also changed the names of those who chatted to me casually or popped up on my travels just in case they were too honest, or in breach of some obscure regulation. The brave driver John Hind is real. So (according to his name tag) is the wretched Umerji.
My thanks go also to Richard Milner, Georgina Morley, Tania Adams, Wilf Dickie, Bruno Vincent, Anthony Forbes Watson, Jacqui Graham, Lisa Footitt and Kathie Gill at my publishers Pan Macmillan, the jacket designer Neil Gower, my agent Carol Heaton, my colleagues at the Financial Times and the helpful staff at the British Library, London Library and the nicely named new research facility at the National Railway Museum, Search Engine.
And, above all, to my beloved family: my wife Hilary (not least for her editing skills), my daughter Vika (who really likes trains) and, for inspiration, my late son Laurie.
This leads me on to take this chance to say thank you to the literally thousands of people who have supported our charity, the Teenage Cancer Trust Laurie Engel Fund. They ensured that 2009, as well as seeing the publication of this book, also saw something far more important: the completion of the teenage cancer unit at Birmingham for which the fund has been striving since Laurie died in 2005. All the royalties from my previous book, Extracts from the Red Notebooks, published in 2007 by Macmillan, go to the fund. See www.laurieengelfund.org.
Readers who wish to correct errors of fact, vent their spleen against the railways or me, pick up on new developments, check the sourcing for my assertions, or join in a discussion about the issues raised by this work are welcome to log on to www.matthewengel.co.uk.
Writing any book is (so I’m told) much like childbirth. There are moments when you think that, if you’d known how much pain was involved, you wouldn’t have started. But, more than anything, this one has been enormous fun.
The author is pleased to add . . .
. . . that the response to the first edition of Eleven Minutes Late has been terrific, and the reviews, letters, emails and blog comments overwhelmingly favourable. A couple of the responses, from people who were themselves at the sharp end of privatization in the 1990s, one in government and one as a railway manager, were very interesting indeed.
These readers were kind enough to praise my account of this era (‘the most fair and accurate I’ve read,’ said one). They both added the same detail that I had not fully appreciated: the extent to which the rush to get privatization completed before the 1997 election was orchestrated, not by the dying Conservative government, but by the resurgent Labour Party.
‘Speed was of supreme importance,’ explained one of these correspondents. ‘It was understood that an incoming Labour government would be highly embarrassed if the franchises weren’t all up and running before they arrived. You can work out why.’ Oh, I can work it out. Labour wanted the industry to remain privatized but did not want the political odium that would come from finishing the job itself. Perfidy was the watchword of the Blair-Brown government from its inception.
One of these letters threw an extra name into the mix of candidates to be regarded as the biological father of the privatized railway: a Downing Street policy advisor called Alan Rosling – ‘a fresh-faced ideologue who was so intelligent that he’d gone full circle and become stupid again,’ as my source put it. The Treasury, under this analysis, was mainly responsible for simultaneously pursuing the contradictory policies of maximizing on-rail competition and maximizing receipts. Most of the senior civil servants ‘shrugged and decided to do a professional job of implementing a policy they judged insane but not immediately life-threatening’.
Hey-ho!
Other readers have been kind enough to make many useful comments and to correct matters of fact (all small, I’m pleased to say). Known errors have been corrected for this edition and my thanks go to Alex Campbell, Peter Clear, David Edwards, Peter Fleming, Pete Francis, Imogen Grosberg, David Panton and John Spencer.
A note on abbreviations
From the earliest days, railways have been bedevilled by abbreviations. It was inevitable when Victorian companies gave themselves names like the York, Newcastle & Berwick Railway; the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast; and the Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock & Ayr.
Now the arcane workings of the business since privatization have produced a new golden age of acronyms. Some railway magazines sometimes seem to be written entirely in capital letters. My favourite new discovery is OLE (Overhead Line Equipment).
This book comes as near as is sensible to being an abbreviation-free zone. The odd LNWR (London & North Western Railway) and GWR (Great Western Railway) may have crept in to denote the early companies. The Big Four companies that ran the industry after 1923 are difficult to write about without their abbreviations: the GWR survived to be joined by the LMS (London, Midland and Scottish), the LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) and the SR (Southern Railway).
Nationalization in 1948 brought forth British Railways, later known as British Rail but, either way, commonly known as BR. In its early days it was run by the BTC (British Transport Commission). The two big railway unions were for many years the NUR (the National Union of Railwaymen) and, to this day, ASLEF (Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen).
All these should be obvious from the context, likewise any abbreviations used for the modern train companies such as FGW (First Great Western). The now-defunct GNER was almost never known by its full title of Great North Eastern Railway.
I regret that until now it has not proved possible to slip in my favourite railway acronym YCSFSOYA, which hung in the Atlanta commercial offices of the (American) Southern Railway. It stood for You Can’t Sell Freight Sitting On Your Ass.
A note on sources
Publishers these days believe that a large quantity of numbered footnotes1 or endnotes to denote sources only succeed in irritating the general reader. They do have the advantage of enabling scholarly and sceptical readers to assess the quality of the information on offer, and letting the author swank about the breadth of his research.
The research for Eleven Minutes Late has led me to such works as The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Volume VII) (1953), The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels edited by Leslie S. Klinger (2006), and More Leaves from The Journal of A Life In the Highlands from 1862 to 1882 by Victoria R.I. And almost two hundred railway books.
Since this book is primarily intended for the general reader, I have decided not to list every reference, but anyone raising their eyebrow enough to want a source for a particular point should find the answer on www.matthewengel.co.uk.
The general books I have consulted that readers might find most enjoyable and/or useful would include Fire & Steam by Christian Wolmar (2007), the only modern general history of Britain’s railways, The Railway Age by Michael Robbins (1962), The World the Railways Made by Nicholas Faith (1990), The Railway In Town and Country by Jack Simmons (1986), The Railway Journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977), British Railway Enthusiasm by Ian Carter (2008) and The Life and Decline of the American Railroad by John F. Stover (1970).
On more specific subject areas it is invidious to single out books. But I will attempt a top ten. Numbers two to t
en in no particular order might be:
The Last Journey of William Huskisson by Simon Garfield (2002)
The Railway Navvies by Terry Coleman (1965)
The Railway Workers by Frank McKenna (1980)
Travelling by Train in the Edwardian Age by Philip Unwin (1979)
The Country Railway by David St John Thomas (1976)
The Crash that Stopped Britain [Hatfield] by Ian Jack (2001)
Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings by Gordon Biddle (2003)
Government, the Railways and the Modernization of Britain: Beeching’s Last Trains by Charles Loft (2006)
and The Railway Clearing House in the British Economy 1842–1922 by Philip S. Bagwell (1968)
But top of any list must come The Oxford Companion to British Railway History, edited by Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle (1997); a wonderful reference book and a great bog-read too. Or indeed train-read.
Index
Abergavenny station ref1, ref2
Abraham, Karl ref1, ref2, ref3
accidents ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Adley, Robert ref1, ref2
air raids ref1, ref2
air travel ref1
Albert, Prince ref1, ref2, ref3
Allport, Sir James ref1
Ally-Pally line ref1
Amalgamated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) ref1, ref2, ref3
Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants ref1, ref2
Anglia Railways ref1, ref2
Anti-Corn Law League ref1
aristocracy ref1, ref2
Arnold, Matthew ref1, ref2
Arriva ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
art ref1
Attlee, Clement ref1, ref2
Austria ref1, ref2