CITY AND SUBURBAN
Twenty years of resolute government that's how to run a railway
c II R ISTOPHER FILDES Gerard Fiennes was the railwayman who announced at King's Cross station: 'We regret the delay to the Yorkshire Pull- man. This was due to bad management.' Candour in the end got him fired. When he was general manager of British Railways' eastern region, he wrote a jolly book called 1 Tried to Run a Railway — which told too many home truths about management, and direction, and how some people on the rail- ways ought to learn the difference. Endless regroupings and reshuffles were no substi- tute for running the railway, he said, and in fact made it harder: 'When you reorganise, you bleed. Punctuality goes to hell, safety starts to slip. Don't reorganise. Don't reor- ganise. Don't. Don't. Don't.' He would recognise the signs. Four different reshuf- fles and their lobbyists are jostling for posi- tion — everything from leasing the tracks to restoring the Great Western in all its cream and chocolate glory, with four class- es: mandarin, first, third and clerical. Destabilising rumours swirl round Sir Bob Reid, the chairman head-hunted from Shell. Ministers (he is told) are disenchant- ed, Whitehall thinks he has gone native, he did well to collect his knighthood on the way in. . . Michael Heseltine picks up the fast line through Kent and airily diverts it through Essex, as part of his grand urban renewal scheme on the banks of the Thames. If Mr Heseltine ever looked out of a carriage window, he would see that you do not revive poor districts by running fast trains through them, full of rich people who are going somewhere else. The steel indus- try used to be run like this, which is how it got Ravenscraig. The railways do not need another reorganisation under political sponsorship. What they need is what Arthur Balfour said that Ireland needed: twenty years of resolute government.
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