Full marks to Network Rail Chief Executive Mark Carne for publicly accepting the Public Accounts Committee’s scathing criticism of Great Western electrification as ‘a stark example of how not to run a major project’. That must have been hard.
Mr Carne arrived at NR only in 2014, too late to halt many of the nonsenses. He can, with reason, claim ‘not on my watch, guv’. And reports from around the country suggest that his influence for the better is at last permeating parts of NR’s notoriously sclerotic organisation that his predecessors seemed unable to reach. His acceptance that NR’s traditional, centralist, ‘one size fits all’ approach to almost everything has been wrong, and that the private sector should be able to build stations, footbridges and the like on its property if they can do so cheaper than NR, both long-held views of this column, are refreshing reversals of previous policy.
Those of us railway hacks who measure our time writing about the industry in decades, rather than years, are sometimes derided as backward-looking. Rather than such disparagement, how about informed and widely experienced? Experience brings a sense of the wider picture, a better perspective, recognition of the need …
