Comment
at as a determining factor in favour of adopting the hybrid IEP concept? For years Grantham regularly changed steam locomotives ‘one off, new one on’ in two and a half minutes. Crewe, likewise, made the change in three to four minutes. Such times are still practicable these days, despite some health and safety thinking. Coupling/ uncoupling between electric trains and diesel locomotives need take no longer than in the past, provided, of course, that the two ‘elements’ that have to be joined have compatible couplings and do not suffer from the initial difficulties experienced between Pendolinos and Class 57s. The potential 40-year lives of both items of equipment should not be determined by such nonsensical ideas that do not stand up to a moment’s serious consideration. ‘Growth in rail travel gives value for
money.’ If, as a passenger who lives near a relatively major station, you have access to the internet (not everyone does) and you book onto a specific train well in advance of the time of travel, you can obtain good value and varyingly cheap tickets. To turn up at the station for a train without early notice, without a season ticket and because
the journey must be made to X that day, and at that time, can be very expensive. Ticket gates at stations – disliked by most passengers – are a backward step. How many station staff are employed
to man ticket barriers at peak times to prevent congestion, to cater for passengers with luggage, wheelchairs and minor perturbations because of barrier failures, given a peak period between 30 and 120 minutes according to location and time of day? How many staff could be eliminated if ticket barriers were removed and passenger safety and congestion flows only controlled by reduced numbers of station/platform staff? I suggest the staff that could be saved per franchise should be trained to become conductors/train managers, responsible for carrying out effective ticket inspection on trains. All these comments simply reflect
contemporary management thinking. Mr Roberts doesn’t want us to be complacent about what has been achieved since 1994 – in fact, we should be worried at the way standards have dropped. The Red Book available to the Big Four and to British Rail had a section called How to Deal with
Passengers Delayed by Weather, Failures or Accidents, explaining, in great detail, how to deal with passengers on the affected train, the system and even relatives at home. All this was long before modern sophisticated communications existed. On the wider scale, clear thinking
linked to sensible timescales is still lacking and is too often bogged down by bureaucracy. The problems for InterCity may be solved by 2020 if there is no further slippage. In 1935, private enterprise produced the LNER A4s in seven months, from board decision to high speed operation out on the line. In the 1970s the appearance of the HST, after the collapse of the APT project, was not as fast but took less than a year and a half, from design through to commissioning and then full service on the Western Region main lines. I quote a view often expressed in the
mid-1990s: ‘BR was slow, inefficient and lacked drive.’ You must be joking!
DAVID BARRACLOUGH began his railway career working for British Rail, moving to Hong Kong to work on the MTR for 12 years in 1977, eight of which he spent as operations director.
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