Who's in charge?
I DO NOT believe that what the railways need now is franchising, or unbundling, or reorganising or restructuring. What they need is running. That is a full time job, not just something to be fitted in between bouts of office politics and managerial upheavals, and the upheaval now in prospect might have been designed to make the job more difficult. A railway sys- tem where the track, the operations and the rolling stock are all the responsibilities of different organisations, independent of each other, is a system with new things to go wrong built into it. Who (as Lord Beaverbrook liked to inquire) is in charge of the clattering train? Sorry, guy, it's not my franchise. There is everything to be said for running a railway on the straightforward virtues of consistent direction and persis- tent management. They were the secret of success at British Steel, and, with a strong chief executive and a crustacean chairman, transformed it from a licence to lose money into the best business of its kind in Europe. Private capital came at the end of the pro- cess, and came readily. British Rail has been denied these advantages. Instead its managers have been left to play politics while the politicians play trains.
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