SHOOTER: TYSELEY’S VISION IS ABOUT LEARNING FROM THE PAST
Boss of VT’s proposed TOC outlines its vision – and recalls 1950s trips with the guard.
For Adrian Shooter, the Great Western meant travelling from Paddington to see his granny. One lived in Bristol, the other in Torquay and – aged seven – young Adrian would be put in the care of the guard on the ‘Bristolian’ or ‘Torbay Express’. This was 1955 – so strictly it was the Western Region, but it was still a time of ‘Castles’ and ‘Kings’, which, he recalls, “were immaculately gleaming.” These days, he is perhaps best known for his leadership of Chiltern Railways post-privatisation. He’s still involved with the modern railway, not least through the conversion of ex-Tube stock into ‘D-Trains’ for use on the network – we’re taking the chance to talk after a late January ‘Breakfast Club’, organised by SR’s sister magazine RAIL. Yet Adrian – who also has a Darjeeling ‘B’ 0-4-0ST running round his garden – could be about to make a major impact on the main line steam scene: he’s been chosen to be the chairman of Tyseley’s planned new in-house train operating company, Vintage Trains Ltd. Initial funding for the TOC is through the Vintage Trains Community Benefit Society share offer, which aims to raise £3m, with a minimum of £800,000 working capital to be raised by the end of May (SR475/6); by February 12, Adrian was able to report it was so far “almost halfway” to that latter amount. The aim is for what he describes as a “soft start” this year; Tyseley envisages running the ‘Shakespeare Express’ from July, with charters ramping up from next year to a planned 80-odd trains in 2020. There are wider ambitions too – such as the renovation of Tyseley’s carriages. The motivation is not only about steam, but also helping Birmingham’s tourism, as well as things like training and engineering.
RISK MANAGEMENT
Tyseley’s licence application is now with the Office of Rail and Road (“I have an expectation that we’ll get a licence at some point in the spring”) and the safety management system – an essential mound of paperwork that does what it says – has been created. This, the lifetime railwayman reports, “is probably actually more complex than some more conventional franchise TOCs because of the number of risks.” Those risks stem from the fact that VT will call at stations relatively infrequently; that
IT’S AN OPPORTUNITY FOR PEOPLE OF ALL BACKGROUNDS TO HAVE A SMALL STAKE IN THEIR OWN COMPANY
ADRIAN SHOOTER
it runs slam-door stock (though there is an ambition to fit central door locking); and – of course – that it runs on steam. Steam locomotives, Tyseley’s man says drily, “were not constructed with the best possible visibility from the cab. There’s an inconvenient thing called a boiler…” Partly, these risks are mitigated through route assessments; in the case of visibility, AWS and TPWS help and, the former Chiltern chairman says, so does a level of route knowledge for firemen so they know where “to look out for signals… what they’ve got to observe, what is a proceed aspect, what isn’t. “Bear in mind that some steam locomotives are left-hand drive, while some are righthand drive, so the duties of the fireman on the one or the other are actually different.” Plus, he says, “we will have a much larger proportion of supervisory people than is normal…” VT “is not going to be a company where the managing director or the operations director sits in an office with a secretary and a cup of tea,” adds Adrian. “They will have to do the things that those roles demand… but they’ll also have to be hands-on as well.” Indeed, he says he will require “that one of those two people… are out every single time we’re running a steam train, making absolutely certain that these things are being done right. “Now, once we get up and running… and we’ve been doing it for a while, we’ll run things like the ‘Shakespeare Express’ to Stratford… with just a driver and a fireman, and that’s absolutely fine. But to start with we won’t. To start with we will have, in effect, an inspector on there as well…” “But when we’re running… longer distances and on more complicated journeys, we will have a third pair of eyes…” Bearing in mind that even 80-odd trips a year still works out at under two trains a week, the idea is also to offer training within the wider railway industry, for example for drivers. Then there is the potential for what you might call non-steam ‘bits round the edges’, for which Tyseley has applied for a freight licence; the share prospectus envisages non-passenger work to be worth over £400k in 2023, compared to passenger operations being worth over £2.9m.
LIGHT FREIGHT
“Now, to be clear, we’ve not said we’re going to be hauling 5,000-ton freight trains and that kind of thing… the reason for that [a freight licence] is if we pick up any sort of ancillary work, which might involve conducting tamper drivers, moving the odd few empty wagons or empty coaching stock,” explains Adrian. To help move all of this on, from the end of February the new organisation should have its first employee – Operations Director Ian Lake – formerly of Chiltern, before that an inspector in Ireland, and before that with Network Rail; plus, he comes with a preservation pedigree as a North Norfolk Railway driver. The hiring of more staff will have to wait until the £800k is reached. So much, if you like, for the ‘nuts and bolts’. How essential are the share offer and the TOC to the future of Tyseley? “They’re certainly essential to the vision that I’ve described,” says Adrian. “On the other hand… Tyseley Locomotive Works is also owned by the trust but is a discrete entity, and is one of the nation’s largest and most competent steam locomotive overhaul works.” The workshop’s current order book, he says, is about two years. “So we have a substantial business there. In terms of the vision as I have described it to you, then… that’s essential. Is that the only vision you could possibly have? Well, no it isn’t. You could do things in other ways. We’re confident that we’ll succeed on this, but sometimes things don’t go quite as you intend. In that case we’ll find another way.” And what about for main line steam in general? Adrian thinks that understanding how engineering used to be done is important. It is, he says, “always useful to remember where we’ve come from and that you can always learn lessons from it – anybody can come and look at one of these gleaming locomotives and think ‘blimey, did they really know how to do that then?’” VT’s chairman concludes on a positive note: “It’s an opportunity for people of all backgrounds to have a small stake in their own company. “This ticks so many boxes in terms of preserving our past, but it’s also about learning from it and improving the lot of a very important part of the UK… it’s a really good opportunity for people to say ‘I own a little bit of that company’, and we want them to be proud of it.”
●● A larger interview with Adrian Shooter on the subject of VT will run in RAIL 849 (on sale March 28). For details of the share offer, see www.vintagetrains.co.uk