“In my previous life, I ran an organisation, at Transport for London , where everything that went wrong was my fault.” That was the rail minister, Lord Hendy, addressing the transport select committee this week. Since he spoke to MPs, an awful lot has gone wrong with the railways in the UK.
On Friday, Storm Eowyn meant no trains ran in Scotland, Northern Ireland or northern England. By Saturday, we imagined things could only get better. Passengers on platform 5 at Newcastle boarded the first train since Thursday to go north.
It left on time at 8.41am, as the Scotland-bound passengers settled in for what was scheduled to be an 85-minute sprint to the Scottish capital. The train eventually arrived exactly five hours behind schedule, having averaged just 14mph.
A spokesperson for Network Rail said: “We’re sorry for the disruption to passengers travelling between Newcastle and Edinburgh today. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires between Chathill and Alnmouth.” “One of the prevailing cultures in the whole railway is that when something goes wrong you look for somebody else to blame,” Lord Hendy continued.
“It is almost an automatic reaction. “That is completely hopeless for passengers and for late-running freight trains. What you want is for people to think, ‘How do we get this fixed?’ “This railway has to get into the habit of saying, ‘This is our problem, and we fix it’.
” Lord Hendy had been summoned by committee chair Ruth Cadbury.
