Anger as rail chaos boss is made a CBE
A RAIL boss who presided over travel chaos yesterday received a royal honour as a watchdog slammed the company’s performance.
Mark Carne, who earned £750,000 a year, stood down as chief executive of Network Rail in the summer.
He received his CBE at Buckingham Palace for “services to the industry” ahead of today’s announcement of a 3.2 per cent increase in rail fares from January.
But Labour MP Lisa Nandy called for the honour to be withdrawn.
And Transport Salaried
Staffs Association chief Manuel Cortes likened it to “rewarding the captain of the Titanic for jumping ship”.
Watchdog the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) said it was taking action against Network Rail, adding that punctuality and reliability were “at their lowest levels” since 2014.
Mr Carne was in charge during a timetable meltdown in May that stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers and caused turmoil for weeks. Extreme weather and problems with the new timetable were the main causes.
Services only began to run smoothly when an emergency introduced.
Yesterday, the ORR ordered Network Rail to deliver an action plan for improvement within three months.
Its Chief executive John Larkinson said: “Passengers and freight customers rely on Network Rail for punctual and reliable services and the evidence we have suggests Network Rail is failing to take all reasonable steps to effectively manage performance and recover from incidents on its network.
“We need to act now, rather than wait for the end of the financial year.”
The Department for Transport admitted that the timing of Mr Carne’s honour was “unfortunate” but said the issues should not detract from his overall record.
Network Rail’s new chief executive Andrew Haines apologised for passengers’ nightmare journeys.
He said: “We know train performance has not been what our passengers deserve. We have let them down and we take responsibility for the part we have played in poor train service reliability.” timetable was