For this sort of money, we could have built a whole new railway
imy railway correspondent, I.K. Gricer, is a public interest director of Network Rail, along with 99 others, and he tells me that at least one of its targets is sure to be hit. It was told not to make a profit, and it hasn't. Only an unwritten guarantee from Gordon Brown — off the public balance sheet, of course — can keep it going. Rebuilding the West Coast Main Line ruined Railtrack and has become more expensive still under its public-interest successor. First budgeted at £2 billion, this project will certainly run into eleven figures and the search is on for scapegoats. The London and North Western Railway gets blamed for the earthworks it built a century ago to accommodate an extra pair of tracks. Robert Stephenson gets blamed for laying out a railway that was evenly graded but bendy. A high-tech signalling system would have let the Pend°lino tilting trains whizz along at 140mph if only it could have been made to work. (The Stephensons could make things work.) Now these trains will run at 125mph. which on the main lines out of King's Cross and Paddington has been standard practice for a generation. For this sort of money we could have had a new railway. Indeed, for two-thirds as much money a new railway from Folkestone to St Pancras is coming in on time and within budget: top speed, 186mph. These projects are not too big to be managed. Oh, well, I.K. Gricer says that his train to Euston came in 13 minutes early, so we must be getting somewhere, however expensively.
Attributing delay
Today's railways have 800 people in full-time employment allocating blame to others. There are the delay attributors, and when the 8.15 is two hours late, they help the owners of the track and trains to work out whose fault this was. As between the regulator at Offrails, the Strategic Rail Authority, the health and safety enforcers, the Department for Transport, and the railways' various components, the scope for recrimination is limitless. Its effect is to make us nostalgic for a fictitious golden age, when the nationalised railways purred along and the trains never ran into each other. Since those days, the railways' decline has gone into reverse, traffic is up by a quarter or more, and £4 billion has gone into new trains without any need to ask the Treasury's permission. One relic of that golden age can still be seen outside Crewe station, to remind us of the previous attempt to run trains that would tilt their way round corners on the West Coast Main Line. This is British Rail's Advanced Passenger Train: so advanced, indeed, that it could not be made to work.
Walker's way
The man who showed how to modernise a railway while the trains were still running was Sir Herbert Walker. In a dozen years he electrified most of the Southern Railway's network and — with no chance of tapping the capital markets and no friendly Chancellor to lean on — had to pay the bills out of the revenue. How? 'It was essentially a rolling programme,' so Michael Bonavia, historian and railwayman, explained. 'The planning teams could be kept together and, one task completed, move smoothly on to the next. This applied to main contractors as well as to railway staff and avoided the loss of momentum and the costly delays in regaining it. Walker insisted on eliminating any frills that were not essential to the project itself — on the electrified railway, some stations were still lit by gas — 'and exercised a strict control over estimating, progress checking and the monitoring of results. Lastly, he demonstrated that increased traffic followed the third rail everywhere.' If Network Rail ever gets another project like this, I count on I.K. Gricer to call up Sir Herbert on the ouija board and let him take command.
Chancellors' losers
Poor old Mayflower. This time round. the Plymouth Rock has landed on the pilgrims, and John Major is one of them. He became a director of this bus-making company in the belief that it stood for the best of British. For 'best' read 'bust'. It is odd how former Chancellors make these mistakes. Nigel Lawson joined the board of Guinness Peat Aviation, which might have flown as an Irish airline powered by two native sources of energy. In fact, it leased aircraft, and was all set to take off and dominate the world, until the arithmetic misfired while it was still on the runway. (Maxim from my Bad Investment Guide: stay away from leasing companies — when something goes wrong with them, everything goes wrong.) Reggie Maudling adorned the Real Estate Fund of America, a little pot of money, so he hoped, for the old age he never saw — but the pot contained fool's gold. Roy Jenkins complained that nobody offered him a directorship. Perhaps he was lucky.
Leaving the Savoy
The wild frontier between finance and politics runs north and south through the Savoy Grill — or did, until Blackstone, the American owners, thought that they knew better than the faithful lunchers. At the Savoy's riverside restaurant, they saw off the customers by shutting it. I could never see why they had bought the Savoy Group, except, of course, in the hope of selling its assets to somebody else for more money, and now that the group is changing hands again, I cannot congratulate them on their stewardship. The Forte family, rejected suitors for so long, would have loved it more and might have looked after it better. Of Derek Quinlan, its new patron, I can only say that he was an Irish inspector of taxes and now advises some of the sharpest business minds in Dublin. Let us hope that he knows what a grand hotel is or hires someone who does. I could introduce him to Giles Shepard, late of the Ritz and formerly of the Savoy.
Staying at the Adlon
The Adlon is the nearest thing to a grand hotel that Berlin has, and the president of the Bundesbank, Ernst Welteke, is in trouble for taking a freebie there. Cross with him for voting the wrong way at the European Central Bank, his government has shafted him. Truly, an independent central banker's life is hard, as they all find out if they last long enough. The Bank of England might like to offer him asylum, or put him up in a hotel down the road.
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