HS2 Matters
As a follow-up to RAIL’s report on Grayrigg… ten years on ( RAIL 820), CHRIS RUMFITT, Head of External Communications for Network Rail at the time of the tragedy, recalls how the events unfurled that led to Network Rail accepting responsibility, and consi
Jim Steer: special guest column.
A Friday evening on a blustery February day in 2007 (much like the one that recently marked Grayrigg’s tenth anniversary). A new restaurant had opened near my home, and I was sitting down for dinner with my partner. The wine had been ordered, and we were perusing the menu when my mobile phone rang.
“Sorry, I won’t answer that,” I said, before I noticed John Armitt’s name appear on the screen. “Errr, actually I’ve got to answer that.”
John was Network Rail’s chief executive. He bore the news that every railway press man fears, but knows they are likely to hear one day. A Virgin Trains service from Euston to Glasgow had derailed at high speed in the Lake District. And the initial reports were that it was serious. John had been told that one carriage was balancing on its nose on the embankment, and he feared the worst.
Within moments I was in a taxi heading to Network Rail’s ‘black tower’ at Euston station, and our much-practised crisis communications protocol was swinging into effect.
The location of the accident was causing huge logistical challenges. John Armitt was in northern France on a short break and was immediately heading to the site, but the journey was going to be a long one. We agreed he would come via London, and that I would allocate a press officer to join him for the remainder of the journey.
And once people got to the scene, road access to the site was difficult. A temporary road was being built across a farmer’s field to provide access.
As the night wore on information was coming in thick and fast - some of it true, much of it just rumour. And initially you had no idea which information was in which category.
Perhaps the strangest moment was when word came that a terrorist threat had been made earlier in the week by the Scottish National Liberation Army. It had said it would derail an Anglo-Scottish service if Scotland was not immediately granted independence.
One senior director even suggested I brief this news to the media. I declined. In that situation, there is not a great deal you can do to make things better, but there is a lot you can do to make things worse. And spreading gossip definitely makes things worse.
By morning, and first light, we had the first shocking images of the derailed train. But we also had the news that despite the speed and the violence of the accident, a combination of some fortune and the remarkable strength of the Pendolino train meant that there had been only one fatality. Margaret Masson’s death was tragic, but the truth was that we had feared and expected greater numbers.
As the weekend continued, and the media circus around the site grew, so did the demand for answers about the cause of the accident. Back at the ‘black tower’ information was coming in bit-by-bit… and all of it was bad.
Quite quickly, a set of points was identified as being the likely culprit, and by the Sunday it appeared quite clear that the points had been poorly maintained and poorly inspected. The New Measurement Train had run over the points just days before the accident, so we had a video of the condition of the points. And that video showed the stretcher bar and a number of vital bolts missing.
About the same time, we discovered paperwork showing that the visual track inspection due to have taken place five days before the accident had stopped short of the points. That inspection would almost certainly have discovered - and remedied - the condition of the points. But it had been missed.
On the Sunday afternoon, having worked almost unbroken for 36 hours, John Armitt and I took a walk to clear our heads. We headed up Melton Street towards the back of Euston. There was a bitterly cold northerly wind blowing which made conversation difficult, but I had something on my mind I wanted to say.
“John,” I nervously ventured. “This accident is our fault. I think we should say so.”
Now this was a radical idea. Every previous accident in that terrible run in the late 1990s and early 2000s had been subject to years of debate and argument after the event, and court cases where blame had been thrown left, right and centre. It had dragged the company name through the mud, made the industry look unaccountable, and made the grief of the victims of these incidents even worse. We weren’t just people who killed our customers, we also tried to dodge the blame afterwards.
After a long pause for thought, typical of John’s conversational style, he replied: “Yes, let’s do that.” And that was that.
The following morning, he convened his senior advisers in his office. He wanted to hear all the
“At the end of the day, our mistakes as a company killed someone, and many more suffered terrible injuries. But we did at least show the world it was possible for a company to take responsibility for its actions.”
evidence we had, which we went through in painstaking detail.
Characteristically, he listened carefully to everyone… operations experts, the maintenance people, the lawyers, the regulatory advisers and the PR people. Having done so, he told the meeting that he wanted to make a public statement accepting responsibility, and he wanted to do so immediately.
The lawyers offered one final protest: “If you do that, it is inevitable we’ll get found guilty in court.”
“But we are guilty,” he replied. “And we will deserve to be found so.”
We then telephoned round the broadcast media, and told them all to come to Euston for a statement from John Armitt. It will be very newsworthy, we assured them.
John stepped out and told the world we had assembled the evidence, and we were devastated to conclude that the accident was our fault. We were desperately sorry and apologised to everyone affected, and we would leave no stone unturned in getting to the bottom of what happened.
No company ever deserves credit when it messes up as badly as Network Rail did at Grayrigg. At the end of the day, our mistakes as a company killed someone, and many more suffered terrible injuries.
But we did at least show the world it was possible for a company to take responsibility for its actions. In a leader column the following day, The Times newspaper wrote that Grayrigg had been the first rail accident since privatisation during which anyone had shown any leadership, and where someone had come across as being in charge.
And why was Network Rail able to do so? A purely private plc, such as Railtrack, could never have admitted responsibility so quickly. The money men would have said that doing so would crash the share price, and breach the fiduciary duty to shareholders. Meanwhile, today’s Network Rail, more closely controlled by Government than it was in 2005, would have had politicians crawling all over it. They wouldn’t let NR do anything which could have pushed blame onto them.
Network Rail was able to show leadership and accountability in the aftermath of Grayrigg exactly because of the much-criticised hybrid public-private structure that the company had back then. Independent from both the money markets and the Government, it was able to do the right thing.
Mercifully, a decade on there has not been any repetition of an accident like Grayrigg. We pray that continues to be so.
But would the industry be able to respond as effectively now as then? Would someone show leadership and accept responsibility without question or condition? Let’s hope it’s a long time before we find out.
Chris Rumfitt was Head of External Communications for Network Rail from 2003 to 2008.