Categories: uncategorized
Date: 07 November 2007 19:03:13
I have been waiting with bated breath for over a year, waiting for Grand Central railway to begin running. This is a train operating company that is taking on the big boys in the privatised UK rail sector.
The service has been delayed because GNER objected to them being given access to part of the East Coast Main Line (ECML), that links London with Edinburgh and beyond. The ECML was the backbone of the GNER frnachise and they did not want a competitor, no matter how small, to run trains on "their" track. This ended with a High Court judgement giving Grand Central access.
Originally the plan was to start operating in December. The end of the court case meant that Grand Central were going to be running trains this year. Now it has been announced that services will not start until late November at the earliest. The reason? The reconditioning of their 3 trains and 18 coaches has been running well behind schedule, in fact they have just taken delivery of the first refurbished engine - months behind schedule.
Why am I concerned about this?
Well, railway privitisation saw the exodus of many railwaymen from the industry, as private companies let them go in favour of people who couldn't manage an toy train set. All that experience disappeared overnight. But Grand Central is run by a third generation railwayman who has a passion for the business. Not a coach company, a shipping line or a French utilities company but a real railwayman.
It also shows how badly the UK is now served. The refurbishment of 30 year old trains and carriages should not be rocket science; after all we have been building new steam locomotives over the past few years. Yet they found that the companies that could do the work are working in conditions about 50 years behind modern working practices. Things were so bad that part of delay was that someone ordered the wrong fabric to recover the seats.
After privatisation many of the main locomotive builders closed down their factories and workshops. No one was ordering new carriages or trains so everything came to a halt. Now we're buying trains from the US, Germany and Japan. That's right, the UK, the pioneers of the world's railways, couldn't support its own railway manufacturing industry because of government incompetence (both Labour and Conservative) and the greed of train leasing companies, mostly owned by banks.
Let's hope that Grand Central get everything together soon. Its time that someone shook up the industry.
Woo! Woo!