WEEK ENDING

IT WASN’T the wrong kind of snow that crippled the rail network this week; it was the wrong kind of people.

The industry’s abject failure to adequately plan and implement its own new timetables was a fiasco entirely of its own making and one that painfully illustrated its incapacity to take on board even the most routine change.

By teatime on Monday, 247 of Northern Rail’s services were either cancelled or very late. It blamed a shortage of drivers.

As excuses go, this was scraping what was left of the barrel. How much of a statistician do you have to be to work out that the number of available drivers must match or exceed the number of trains in your timetable? It’s not rocket science, any more than the cattle trucks that still pass for passenger carriages in the North are rockets – unless you’re thinking of the one that George Stephenson built.

Northern went on to say that the new schedule, which has changed the times of nine services in 10, had been “a significant operational challenge”.

But everything is a significant challenge if you’re no good at your job. And that’s the reality of the rail industry today: a network of organisations peopled by managers too ineffectual to manage, overcompensated staff and flaccid civil servants at Chris Grayling’s Department for Transport.

In the case of Northern – by any measure one of the worst-run companies in Britain – the institutional problems are compounded by the hamfisted way it communicates with its passengers. Its policy of threatening them with fines if they forget their ticket has been implemented so ineptly as to constitute a two-fingered salute to everyone who walks on to a platform.

Insult is added to self-inflicted injury today, as it was on Thursday, by yet more strikes by the self-serving RMT union, whose train guards have been guaranteed continued employment with pay reviews for the next eight years yet whose shop stewards want still more benefits.

The dispute is over the roles of these guards, no longer needed to sell tickets or to open and close the train doors, yet clinging to the industrial chokehold they have on the travelling public. It is a sign of how little there is for them to do that they are now being sent in pairs to local platforms like mine, where their instructions seem to be to harangue the passengers.

Their presence there might as well be a Machiavellian scheme to address overcrowding in the carriages by winding up travellers to such an extent that they would sooner spend an hour of their day stuck in traffic than submit to the debasement of a journey on Northern. They are a corporate liability that no commercial company would tolerate.

And then there is the debacle over the East Coast Main Line, the poison chalice of rail franchises, passed around like a hot potato at a bonfire.

The Virgin-Stagecoach consortium, which will be replaced in four weeks’ time by the state-run LNER, is the third to have given up what should have been one of the country’s two best contracts, because it could not make the figures work. LNER, incidentally, was also the name of the private company that ran the line until nationalisation in 1948. So much for looking to the future.

The central flaw in the system is that it is the Department for Transport, not passengers, to whom the train companies are beholden. Travellers, as I have observed before, are just the cargo their contracts oblige them to carry. That’s why they don’t even try to win them over.

The contracts, drawn up by timid civil servants whom the companies could see coming, are predicated on compensating rather incentivising them and, given Northern’s lack of progress on seeing off its strikers, one wonders whether settling the dispute is even a priority for them.

For commuters, the end result is a journey experience that gets progressively worse – in spite of the vapid promises trotted out by Chris Grayling’s clerks – while money is thrown at staff to do jobs that no one needs doing.

Mr Grayling has apologised for this week’s wholesale chaos, but “sorry” doesn’t cut it. He now needs to demonstrate that the Government is not completely in thrall to the companies, by ending this nonsense and stripping Northern of its franchise.

If he doesn’t, Theresa May should strip him of his.