Meltdown Monday leaves irate commuters stranded

Railways grind to a virtual halt as engineering works and strike action threaten Christmas travel misery

HUNDREDS of thousands of commuters were left stranded yesterday on one of the worst ever days for rail chaos. Even after “Meltdown Monday”, the misery for passengers travelling into Waterloo, Britain’s busiest railway station, was set to continue until Christmas with the hard-left RMT union planning strikes on the beleaguered South Western Railway service, which took the unusual step of telling customers not to travel after engineering works overran by four hours, shutting down some of the main commuter routes into the capital.

South Western bore the brunt but Southern Rail, Gatwick Express, and Thameslink also suffered, with separate engineering work and signalling problems. In the North, passengers on Northern and Transpennine Express were hit by cancellations and reduced services due to leaves on the line and a points failure linking Manchester airport to the city centre.

The mayhem was caused when Network Rail failed to complete weekend maintenance on 14 miles of track near Surbiton in Surrey. Lines between Weybridge and Waterloo, which handle 100 million passengers a year, remained shut until 10am with a huge knock-on effect throughout the day. By 10.45am about 270 South Western trains – 75 per cent of all its services – had been cancelled or were more than 30 minutes late. Commuters who managed to get to work later struggled to get home with delays and cancellations to evening services.

Commuters have been increasingly frustrated by the service offered by South Western, owned by Firstgroup and the Chinese state-owned MTR Corporation, since it took over the franchise 16 months ago. South Western is in talks with the transport department to review part of its contract.

But strike action by the Rail, Maritime and Transport union has added to South Western’s troubles with a series of stoppages due on Saturday.

Last night, an RMT spokesman said it would consider further strikes in the run-up to Christmas, describing yesterday as “Meltdown Monday” and South Western franchise as a “basket case”. Mick Cash, the RMT’S general secretary, said Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, should resign. “He should go, and he should go now,” he said. An industry insider said the RMT had “smelt blood” and would use the chaos to put pressure on the Government to nationalise South Western’s routes.

A transport department spokesman said: “The disruption is unacceptable and we are seeking an urgent explanation from Network Rail as to why their engineering works have overrun.”

Both Network Rail and South Western apologised for the disruption, cancellations and delays.

Among those who did manage to get into work in spite of yesterday’s closure of lines into Waterloo was Mick Cash, general secretary of the RMT, who was at his desk early to deliver his standard rant. The chaos, he said, was “just another example of the fragmentation and division on Britain’s privatised railways”.

That just about sums up the growing delusion that all would be well on the railways if only Jeremy Corbyn were allowed to renationalise them. Some hope, not least because the latest failure was down to over-running engineering works on the railway lines – which are under the operation of Network Rail, a publicly owned company.

If Mr Cash really cared about passengers, of course, he could cancel the strikes his union is inflicting on South Western passengers. At least there was some purpose behind the engineering works – not so behind the RMT’S strikes, which are over the supposed safety risk of removing guards from trains. Driveroperated trains have been running safely since 1982 and now account for a majority of rail services – the Office of Rail and Road, which regulates safety, has concluded that in some ways they are safer than trains with guards.

Commuting is a misery that no one comes out of well: not Network Rail, which has continued to pay fat bonuses to senior staff in spite of the now nearperennial problem of over-running engineering works; not the private rail companies, which have ruthlessly exploited their monopolies to jack up fares; not the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, who repeatedly washed his hands of problems on Southern Rail, insisting it was a purely private matter. And certainly not the rail unions, which continue to use their power to disrupt the system in spite of winning salaries of up to £70,000 for train drivers – putting them in the top 5 per cent of earners.

All these issues could be resolved if the Government stopped acting so helplessly. First, it should remind Network Rail that the reason taxpayers are pumping £4.2 billion a year into the system (nearly three times in real terms what they paid in 1994-95, the last full year of British Rail) is that railways are a vital public service, with a terrible knock-on effect on the economy if they stop working. It is not good enough to tell people not to bother travelling to work. If there is engineering work, alternative means of travel must be substituted. If they fail, bonuses must be cancelled.

Second, it needs to overhaul the train operating companies. Why are they granted franchises which give them the exclusive right to operate trains over a wide area? We have a Competition and Markets Authority to sniff out uncompetitive practices in other industries, yet on the railways the Government has instituted monopoly.

Finally, unions? The job of train driver should barely exist at all. Automated trains work perfectly safely in many countries. If the Government put a fraction of the effort into developing driverless trains as it does into technically much more difficult driverless cars we would save a fortune.

Railways, as they did under British Rail and have done ever since, seem to operate in a bubble of their own, where official expectations of service are pathetically low, reform is too much trouble and the unions are allowed to run the show. It is time the bubble was burst.