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If you can't change the privatisation machinery, you can at least make it run better with fewer moving parts
Gerald Corbett caught everyone on the hop with his emotional post Hatfield call for radical restructuring of a railway ‘ripped apart at privatisation'. Subsequently most people agreed that massive restructuring, at least in the short term, would do more harm than good. But neither is freezing the Tory's privatised railway in aspic an acceptable way forward.
Former BR Chairman Sir Peter Parker was wont to remark, railways tend to fall flat on their interfaces. Since contractual interfaces are central to the problems on the railway, the secret is to reduce their number and thus the opportunities for falls.
For this to happen all we need is fewer franchises aligned, where possible, to a smaller number of Railtrack Zones. So, same contracts, but not so many of them.
According to Informed Sources, Railtrack is already planning to reduce the number of Zones. Apart from cutting overheads, there aren't enough good managers around who know how to run a railway.
It seems blindingly obvious to an old buffer like me that Grouping in 1923 provides the model. Starting in the North, Scotland Zone and the ScotRail franchise are about as vertically integrated as you can get without offending Tom Winsor and politically fit well with the Scots Parliament. McRailtrack might even be spun off as a subsidiary.
Eastern England will be served by a new LNER Zone which includes Anglia . After all, if Gerry Fiennes could run track and trains in the old Eastern Region someone ought be able to run just the infrastructure today.
In the West we have the WalesRail problem. Politically, emulating ScotRail/Scotland Zone is certainly attractive, but then you have the problem that the Wales network is much less self contained than Scotland . Lines have to go somewhere useful, hence the ‘ Wales and the Borders' franchise. But just assume a London Midland Zone plus or minus Wales .
To complete the map we have Southern Zone, for the DC electrified lines, and Great Western Zone, including
Waterloo-Exeter.
To align trains with track, or rather train operators with Zones means genuinely reducing the number of franchises, as opposed to the SSRA's cosmetic tweaking from 25 to 21.
A first step would be for the new 20 year ‘line of zone' operators to expand to take in other current or planned franchises.
For example, look at the four organisations short-listed for the Trans Pennine Express franchise and ask yourself whether it wouldn't be better off as a GNER service running into London Midland Zone or a Virgin Cross country service (bags of rolling stock synergy) running into LNE Zone?
But what about competition, cry the residual Thatcherites. Tough; what the public wants is a clean train that runs on time and achieving that will be hard enough.
Similarly, why doesn't GNER take over Great Northern. Just imagine, an integrated service with connections at Peterborough and Stevenage that work. Ditto, or even more so, for Virgin and Silverlink. Ditto Great Western and Thames . What about competition again? You mean you like the Silverlink livery?
And while these proposals may seem shocking, fewer bigger zones and operators reflect with Sir Alastair Morton's agenda. If you revisit my interview with the SSRA Chairman and his Franchising Director Mike Grant in the December issue you will see that Sir Alastair favoured one operator in charge of Anglia and commended the M40 Trains/Swiss Railways aspiration to add the replacement Thames Trains and the new Wessex franchises to Chiltern.
But the SSRA would only like to see these things happen – it desires the end but won't will the means. Just as a million monkeys seated at a million word processors for a million years would write this month's Informed Sources (wondered why it was late: Ed), so the SSRA hopes that if you drop a few broad hints and throw groups of replacement franchises into the air, they will fall in the pattern you want, for example GB Railways running all the East Anglian franchises.
Unfortunately, the market doesn't work like that. And I don't know what past trauma stops Sir Alastair using his considerable powers to shorten the odds by, for example, incorporating Anglia Railways with West Anglia Great Eastern, which wouldn't be difficult.
But if he bit that little bullet, he might be encouraged to grasp some of the bigger nettles. How about one Southern Franchise to go with Southern Zone? That should fill Forum next month