Lunch with Adrian Shooter (well, almost...)

Declaration of interest: I was a guest of Modern Railways at this 4th Friday Club meeting

I was lucky enough to be at September's 4th Friday Club lunch to hear Adrian Shooter give a valedictory speech on his time as a railwayman. Now, I am not a journalist and didn't take notes at the time so the following reportage is very much my impressions and interpretations of what he said. (The full text of Adrian's address can be found in the November 2011 issue of Modern Railways)

Adrian's speech was really a lesson in railway history and in what the present day companies can learn from the almost 200 years of railway development in the UK. Starting by claiming George Stephenson as a forebear (on his mother's side), his first point was that by the 1860s almost all of the core network of rail routes in this country had been laid down and that, by and large, they served traffic flows to and from London. (later on in his speech, he praised Beeching for wanting to par back the railways to this core network). Naturally, I wonder if he was being post-ironic in this assertion as of course a key element of the Chiltern Railways route was not laid down until the first decade of the last century - 40 years later than the 1860s 'core' point...

Moving onto the war years, First and Second, he drew out the obvious point that once politicians and civil servants get involved in a business, they are loath not to continue to meddle in that business... he also bemoaned the fact that no government was prepared to give the Railways a 'fair deal' in terms of regulation and tariffs despite the fact that the (road) competion was unfettered.

Post Second World War, he dismissed Nationalisation as being politically motivated, and the 1955 Rail Modernisation plan as a shambles. As noted above, he loved the Beeching Report, not only for the paring back but also for the vision of how the railways could be (container trains, inter-city etc). Indeed, it was the Beeching Report which inspired him to join the railways as a career.

As an engineer, he clearly has a soft spot for the (LMS) Derby engineers from whom he seems to have learnt much. Also praised were British Rail Chairmen Sir Peter Parker and Sir Bob Reid, the latter especially lauded for letting his Sector Managers get on with it prior to privatisation...

Ah yes, privatisation: John Major was given credit for the vision of the privatised railway (something that famously even Mrs T. couldn't face doing) but 'bottled out' (my phrase) of the correct implementation. The Bill itself was a hodge-podge of inserts from interested parties which could have been made to work if the BR Board had engaged in the process. As it turned out, Adrian proved to be one of the drafters of the legalisation along with other senior BR managers working in cahoots with the Dept. of Transport's civil servants....

The story of M40 Trains and Chiltern Railways is well covered in Hugh Jones' book (The Chiltern Railways Story). What I hadn't realised fully was the risk that Adrian and his fellow-directors took with their own money when the 22 year franchise was offered by Sir Alistair Morton of the SRA. No wonder he has been so passionate about making Chiltern work.

Skipping to the present day, it seems clear that he has little time for those who do not add 'net value' to the railways (fill in your own blanks), and that he has an especial dislike of the lawyers used by civil servants to cover their backsides...

Finally, he ended with this pithy summary of the McNulty Report. The accountant in McNulty discovered that Railways have largely fixed costs. Passenger usage has almost doubled therefore unit costs should have halved... oh s**t. The conclusion that this led McNulty to has mysteriously not seen the light of day!

Passionate, opinionated, involved - will we see his like again in the modern rail industry?