Author Archives: Tim Hall

Trouble rail maintenance contractor Jarvis are giving up their contracts for rail maintenance. Network rail will now be doing maintenance in-house. A little bit less fragmentation, and about time too.

Both passenger’s groups and train operators are glad to see the back of them. Rail Passengers Council chairman Stewart Francis had this to say:

“I think passenger confidence in Jarvis had been shaken due to a number of incidents on the railways. Passengers don’t care who maintains the railways as long as they are delivered safely and their trains run on time.”

While GNER’s Chris Garnett said:

“Certainly the aftermath of the Kings Cross derailment was, as far as we were concerned, just one thing too many. I think the fact that they’re going is very good news for all our passengers and for all our staff.”

Next; what about the radical concept of the same company controlling both the trains and the tracks?

Steve Jones talks about layout ideas and layout inspiration.

As I grew up in England’s industrial Midlands, much of my train-watching has centred on the Birmingham/Black Country area, Walsall in particular. This is the real, working railway as opposed to the stylised idyll of the country branchline, viewed through the chocolate and cream tinted spectacles of model railway magazines. The landscape is intensely urban and decaying, the flora limited to canal towpaths and railway embankments, the fauna just a thin smear on the ring-road. You can taste the atmosphere – in fact you’ll probably cough it back up.

Some wonderfully atmospheric black and white photos to illustrate. Reminds us of the fact it’s now 35 years since the end of steam in Britain, and the early diesel era is as much ancient history as the ‘kettle’ era.

This is not what we want to happen to an National Railway Museum exhibit. Pioneer class 37 No D6700 was a guest at the Barrow Hill open day, and has had an argument with fellow class 37 37515 during a somewhat careless shunting move. The damage looks repairable, but there goes someone’s no claims bonus.

As Patrick Crozier says, if you read no other article on British railways then read this one. Find out what happens when a reporter from The Times takes a senior manager from Swiss Federal Railways on a tour of Britain’s fragmented mess of a network.

A CLASSIC SCENE at Crewe railway station. Every platform indicator is blank. Passengers drift like jetsam in a harbour. A rumour springs up — who knows from where? — that a Birmingham train is approaching Platform 5. The station assistant can’t confirm it. But then again, he doesn’t deny it. We leg it over the bridge.

Then a disembodied voice booms out. “We regret to announce that the Virgin train service to Birmingham is running approximately 70 — that’s seven zero — minutes late.”

Peter Grossenbacher is not given to displays of large emotion. He is, after all, Swiss. But when he hears this gloomy news his moustache twitches, his right eyebrow rises a full centimetre above its normal platform, and he gives a slight but tragic shake of his head. “That’s . . . very sad”, he mutters.

The article comes to the conclusion that’s now obvious to anyone that knows anything about operating a railway. If we want a world-class railways like the state-owned Swiss network, or the privatised Japaneses one, we have to bring back vertical intergration. None of this nonsense of one company running the trains, another company operating the tracks, and a third failing to maintain them properly.