No Marston Vale line trains… and no one in charge seems to ‘give a damn’

I have previously berated the lack of a can-do spirit in trying to keep rail services going in the face of adversity. And here is another telling example of the Nobody Gives a Damn Railway.

There is no doubt that contrary to what supporters of privatisation say, there is much less effort today to ensure that services continue to run when things go wrong.

Richard Crane, the long-time campaigner for the Marston Vale line between Bletchley and Bedford, tells me that there are currently no trains running after Vivarail, the company which provides the old London Underground trains that have been refurbished as diesels, finds itself in administration (see Network News, pages 12-13).

That seems odd. Why should the likely collapse of Vivarail, the brainchild of the innovative Adrian Shooter whose statue now graces the forecourt of Marylebone station, mean that no trains are running?

Well, in the convoluted world of the semiprivatised rail network, the engineers who maintain these innovative trains were employed by Vivarail, and not the train operator - London Northwestern Railway.

This really is the worst kind of excuse for not running the service - ‘wrong type of engineering company’. And it comes at a particularly bad time - services had returned to a normal 17 trains per day, after cancellations had been at a high level because of the post-pandemic issues I wrote about in RAIL 949.

Passenger numbers had been rising sharply. But the replacement of the service by buses, which take far longer because of the number of stations in out-of-the-way villages on the route, will ensure they plummet again.

Richard Crane suggests (sensibly) that “London Northwestern should be instructed by the Department for Transport to take over the small Vivarail engineering workforce and premises at Bletchley on a short to mediumterm basis, honouring whatever has been their salaries and conditions of service”.

That really does not seem much of an ask. But with no one in charge of the railways in the current situation, there is no one to make that sort of decision. And the trains have fallen into the hands of the administrators!

As Crane sums it up: “It is another example of our fragile, fragmented railway.”