Railtalk
Even the man in the poem ‘who stood at the gate of the year’ would have been hard-pressed to provide a light for the railway industry as it treads into the uncertainty that is 2022.
In the introduction to our annual publication The Modern Railway, we try to sum up in a pithy headline the prospects for the year ahead. Thus 2013 was the ‘Year of turmoil’, while 2017, in a more optimistic mood, was dubbed the ‘Year of recovery’. But after much head-scratching, the best we could come up with for 2022 was ‘Year of waiting’.
Readers may challenge this prognosis, given the positive plethora of plans which thumped into our editorial inbox throughout 2021. But these are not so much plans as visions. They paint a glowing picture of what is to be – from an end to ironing board seats to the removal of diesel-only traction by 2040 and incredible reductions in journey times.
But what is singularly lacking from these plans, and what we are still waiting for, is how the end state is to be achieved. As Jane Austen observed in Mansfield Park of a wellto-do young man who regretted not having been a naval officer, ‘the wish was rather eager than lasting’. The Prime Minister’s …
