Coventry railway station at eight in the morning is a lonely place. Not for a lack of passengers. There are scores of us standing on the platform, staring down the empty tracks. The loneliness comes from the total, resounding absence of trains.
It is no mystery why. The other morning, Avanti West Coast managed to cancel six consecutive services. Six. The digital departure board offered the official explanation: “a shortage of train crew.” It is a phrase that has become the national anthem of modern Britain.
I am beginning to think we should pave over the West Coast Main Line and open the W1 Pedestrian Motorway. Walking to London would be quicker than waiting for an engine that never appears.
I am not overcome with nostalgia for the days of British Rail. The trains ran, and there were human beings working on them. Whether one arrived at the time printed on your ticket was another matter.
Today, rail travel has become a spectacle of non-transport. It no longer resembles a public service so much as a psychological experiment designed to test the limits of human patience.
We are trapped in an administrative deadlock. A private train operator and a government department are playing a slow-motion game of chicken, leaving passengers stranded in the cold while two sets of accountants argue over who pays for the diesel.
So why don’t the trains run? We must look at the mechanics of modern rail contracts.
Under the present setup, Avanti bears no financial risk if no one buys a ticket. The Department for Transport simply pays them a flat fee to operate the line.
When Whitehall decides to save a few pennies, it approves what it calls a “reduced timetable”—a phrase engineered to cover a massive shortage of drivers by quietly deleting fifteen percent of the trains. The remaining, depleted schedule is then declared “resilient.”
There is worse to come. The entire national network relies on a system of voluntary overtime known as “rest-day working.”
The railway does not employ enough staff on regular contracts to run the advertised timetable without drivers volunteering to work on their days off.
The moment relations sour, the voluntary overtime stops, and a multi-billion-pound network collapses like a house of cards built from unused return tickets.
Avanti’s managers might wish to offer higher overtime pay to keep the trains moving, but they are forbidden from doing so. They must first seek permission from civil servants in London, who spend six months counting beans before issuing a refusal—reasoning that allowing a train to run might set a dangerous and expensive precedent for the railway.
Defenders of the system point out that private franchising is being abolished, and that the whole apparatus will soon pass into public ownership under Great British Railways.
This is intended as reassuring news. But those with memories stretching back to the old British Rail will recall that trainspotters used to gather on platforms merely to see if a train existed at all.
And in a few days, I will join the other lost souls on Platform One, trying to get to London, staring into the grey distance. The locomotives themselves look as though they would love to come out and run along the rails. But until a clerk in Whitehall grants them permission to exist, we will remain on the platform, dreaming of the W1 super-highway.