Steaming back to the past is just smokescreen for rail failings

ONE MARVELS at the capacity of the railway industry to make, with each new announcement, an already appalling service seem even worse.

It has been a week in which the Transport Secretary attempted to make Britain fit for the future, as he put it, by taking it back to the past and reopening lines closed by Dr Richard Beeching in the 1960s.

This made headlines on Wednesday because it held out the appealing possibility of trains running once more to Ripon, Wetherby and Otley – all railway towns until the Beeching axe fell. It also raised hopes of the restoration of the link from Skipton to Colne, which is demonstrably viable.

In fact, the Government is actively considering reopening only one line – the one between Oxford and Cambridge. That says more about outdated British values than the Minister perhaps realised, and brought to my mind the 1981 episode of Yes

Minister, in which Jim Hacker wonders aloud why a motorway to Oxford was built before any of the ports got one. Nearly all Permanent Secretaries went to colleges there, he is told... and most of them give very good dinners.

It is the railway with which Beeching left us that is the more pressing problem, and this week Northern Rail released a report outlining its “progress” during the last six months. Its managing director, David Brown, at least admitted that “there is still much work to be done to give our customers the rail service they deserve”.

You’re telling me. Northern’s latest stab at progress is to screw warning signs at platforms, with the subtext “prove to us you’re not a criminal”.

This public relations own goal is part of a new and half-baked requirement to make passengers, however infirm, climb a footbridge if necessary to obtain a ticket, or a slip of paper in lieu of one, before getting on board, or else incur a £20 fine.

If ever there was a policy designed to get customers’ backs up, this is it. It’s one thing to stigmatise determined fare-dodgers; it’s quite another to tar every passenger with the same brush.

Actually, its more than just a PR

faux pas; it’s the classic behaviour of the bully – one who throws around his weight and then, when challenged, seeks to hide behind someone else – in this case the Government and its supposed mandate on ticket enforcement. In Glasgow this week, they began to allow passengers on the tube to use their smartphone instead of a ticket, which is a 21st-century solution to the same issue. The fact that Glasgow even has a tube further underlines the Dickensian nature of the transport network here in Yorkshire.

There is a further trait of the bully about Northern, which is to recoil when faced by a bigger bully such as the anachronistic RMT union, which has staged a series of increasingly ineffective strikes across the North this year, despite none of its members facing loss of employment or earnings.

This week it announced strikes on the CrossCountry franchise, which, like Northern, is owned by Arriva, whose bus service in Liverpool is also being decimated by industrial action.

The RMT claims, disingenuously, that its concern is with safety, and warns of “a danger at the platform train interface”, which I think is the door.

To Northern’s credit, it has neutralised much of the RMT’s action by running trains on strike days without them, making it harder for the union to justify its continued existence – but the dispute should have been settled by now. Given Arriva’s record of discord, however, I’m not holding my breath. Indeed, Northern’s deputy managing director once opened a dialogue with me by asking what the rules of engagement would be. So much for reconciliation.

Three generations have passed now since Beeching closed the branch lines. I would love to see trains running once more between York and Beverley, for instance, but the sad truth is that a restoration of the old lines after all this time is just not economical.

The Government knew this when it invoked Beeching’s name in Wednesday’s headline grab – but it was an easier plan to announce and later to discard than a practical and methodical reform of the services and companies we still have. Are rail’s problems really so ingrained that Ministers and civil servants can’t tackle them as they climb on board the gravy train they reserved for themselves and head out to yet another dinner at Oxford?

Three generations have passed since Beeching closed the branch lines. The sad truth is a restoration is not economical.