JOHN POYNTZ 1938-2020
TONY STREETER pays tribute to a life spent serving military railways, heritage organisations, and Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate
John Poyntz - the Railway Inspector who was the first point of contact at the safety body after accidents including Southall, Ladbroke Grove and Hatfield - has died aged 82.
The last Army officer to join the Inspectorate directly from military service, Major Poyntz began his second career in 1989. For the next 12 years he would be on 24-hour call as Accident Officer, until relinquishing the post after the Great Heck derailment in 2001.
Poyntz’s experience of railway accidents went back far beyond the privatisation era, however. In 1952, aged 14, he and his family made a trip from south London to see the aftermath of Britain’s worst peacetime crash - the double collision at Harrow and Wealdstone that killed 112 people.
Then in October 1956, by now serving with the Royal Engineers on the Longmoor Military Railway, Poyntz witnessed the worst peacetime accident on a military railway - a head-on collision that claimed the lives of six soldiers.
Born in Hammersmith on May 27 1938, John David Pierrepont Poyntz started his Army career in 1955. He worked his way up through the ranks to Warrant
Officer before (by now in the Royal Corps of Transport) gaining a commission in 1975.
Although other areas of specialism while in the Army included both hovercraft and landing craft, it was his time at the Royal Engineers’ dedicated rail training establishment at Longmoor (which with breaks lasted from 1955 to 1969) that would perhaps prove the most influential on his later career.
By now an officer, Poyntz would subsequently become OC of the RCT’s 79 Railway Squadron’s operations for the British Army of the Rhine. As well as internal railways in depots such as at Mönchengladbach, this included operating on West Germany’s main line network.
Poyntz held the title of
Eisenbahnbetriebsleiter, an officially recognised position equating to operations manager. Activities included preparing for the Army to take over control from the Deutsche Bundesbahn and ensure access to Berlin in case of Warsaw Pact aggression - and soldiers regularly drove DB locomotives under supervision.
Although Poyntz had moved to the Railway Inspectorate by the end of the Cold War, his time in Germany resulted in Army ‘V36’ 0-6-0 diesel 36274 being named after him. The locomotive was gifted into preservation in 1997 and can today be found at the museum depot in Arnstadt, Thuringia.
Poyntz’s background as a practical Army railwayman in Germany subsequently led to his involvement in two extraordinary events headed by former BR Southern Region PR man Neil Howard: the ‘Train for Life’ that took aid from the UK via Germany to Kosovo hauled by Class 20s in 1999; and 2012’s re-creation of a familiar operation to Poyntz - the British Military Train that once served West Berlin.
At the Inspectorate, in addition to his role as Accident Officer, Poyntz had responsibility for heritage lines. As his period in the organisation predated the advent of the Railway and Other Guided Transport Systems (Safety) Regulations 2006 (ROGS), this included the signing-off of new works such as extensions.
He also quickly took it on himself to become the organisation’s unofficial librarian and historian. This remained the case after his retirement - he both
contributed the foreword and conducted much of the picture research for the definitive Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate
from 1840, produced by Steam World Publishing in 2019.
By that stage, Poyntz had been retired from full-time employment for 13 years. He had left in 2006 as Principal Inspector on the approach to his 68th birthday, although he both remained as an HMRI consultant until 2014 and formed his own organisation - Railwyze.
Throughout his life, Poyntz maintained a passionate interest in rail-borne transport of all kinds. A regular attendee at the InnoTrans trade show in Berlin until recent years, he was also a much-respected figure in both tramway and heritage circles - his activities included being a member of the Technical Advisory Panel of the A1 Steam
Locomotive Trust.
John Poyntz died of cancer on November 2. He leaves behind his wife Ann, and a daughter.
With thanks to former HMRI Deputy Chief Inspector David
Keay for assistance compiling this obituary.