Adrian Shooter by Adrian Shooter

Author:Adrian Shooter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Business
ISBN: 9781473893214
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2018-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

If one were to describe what the railway felt like from my perspective in the mid 1970s, I would start by pointing out that the aftermath of the Beeching closures was still being experienced, although some were not actually in his original 1963 plan but had been added later. For example, for most of the time I was at Bletchley, the line to Bedford was going to be closed. That it was not was largely down to the efforts of a Bletchley doctor, Peter Jarvis, and his daughter Hilary, who, along with many others, used the line to get to and from school in Bedford. They successfully argued that the local roads were too narrow and indirect for a bus service to be practicable.

Commuter numbers into London were slowly falling, and continued to do so until 1984, and much of the railway felt under threat as a result. On the other hand, Bletchley TMD was an important part of the WCML support infrastructure. At that time, everything had been renewed and a very good fast, reliable train service ran. It was not as frequent as now, but it worked very well and we were all proud to be part of the team that ran it. It demonstrated that a high quality, fast, fairly frequent InterCity service was a winner.

However, there was very limited vision, as is exampled by my boss, John Marson’s, reaction when I expressed disappointment that the BR Board had just announced it would not safeguard any of the trackbed of the closed Great Central route. Having told him, as we stood at Calvert on the GC one sunny day in 1974, that I thought the decision was shortsighted and would be regretted, I can still hear him saying: ‘Do you really think so?’

Some really stupid decisions were taken by quite senior people who seemed to lack brains. An example: all the AC electric locos had been built with two pantographs, which was sensible because pans can be damaged, for example, by pieces of wire hanging down in their way. If you have a second pan, you can swap over and often continue. Someone decided that it would save a lot of money if the second pan was removed. Quite how this was supposed to save money is not clear to me since we had both pans, and the suggestion that cost would be saved by reduced maintenance was nonsense since you could only wear one out at once. At a stroke, electric loco reliability, and hence train punctuality, was reduced for no measurable benefit.

Freight was largely a disaster, with hundreds of thousands of archaic, uneconomic and unsafe four-wheeled wagons in use but doing less than five journeys a year. A huge opportunity had been lost in the 1955 Modernisation Plan when millions were wasted in perpetuating this nonsense rather than taking the first steps to develop a modern network. This was almost certainly because the best managers had left at nationalisation and those remaining either had no imagination or chose not to challenge conventional wisdom.

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