‘TRYING TO NAIL JELLY TO THE WALL’

A1 Trust chairman Steve Davies is hopeful about its next planned trains in September “but at the moment it’s like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

If it does happen, it will mean Tornado exiting its tarpaulin-covered slumber at York and heading north for what remains of the trust-promoted ‘Aberdonian’ series. The EdinburghAberdeen trips were a key part of the trust’s 2020 schedule; August has already been cancelled, but of the original six, two are still in the diary for September 3 and 10.

“We did not wholesale cancel the programme”, says Steve – instead passengers were informed at a certain point out for different trains. “And as everybody else is doing, you give them an option, you can either have a refund, or a credit note for a future train… So what would happen is, the moment we are allowed to get going again, we will pick up with the first booked train that we’d already planned.”

What though if it is theoretically possible to run – but only with social distancing measures limiting numbers?

“As at today [early June], that kind of fog pertains,” Steve says, “but I have this instinct that over the next few weeks this is going to evolve quite quickly and I think two issues will come into play. One is, if the government reduces two metres down to one metre, all of a sudden, things become easier to manage.”

He also contends that if an airline “can pack 150 people into a small tube the length of two Mk 2s,” people will ask “why are we not able to spread that same number of people over the length of six or seven coaches?

“But also what we can’t be in the business of doing, is running uneconomic trains – which are guaranteed to be uneconomic, by virtue of huge reduction in volume.”

Whichever way the coming weeks unfold, the A1 Trust faces a busy period: ‘boiler two’ is expected in the UK before the end of the year; construction of the ‘P2’ continues; and work is ongoing both in preparation for a purpose-built two-road Darlington HQ to replace Hopetown Lane, and towards the formal launch of its third new-build project, a Gresley ‘V4’. Having both the ‘A1’ and ‘P2’ available for ‘S&D200’ in 2025 is an aim.