As privatisation gathered pace, former British Rail manager Peter Rayner coined the term ‘the mother railway’ to express his concern about the fragmentation to come. It was a term that was immediately understood yet hard to define, since it was not about tracks or trains and did not appear on any organisation charts.
In essence, the mother railway was, and remains, the product of almost two centuries of railway operation, of discipline, of thousands of people, often with no direct supervision, doing their jobs conscientiously and safely, of tradition and ethos, of whole lives spent serving the daily railway.
It is Great Western Railway ensuring retention of Pullman restaurant cars in its new direct award franchise, because that is the Great Western way of treating passengers. It is the South Western depots topping the fleet reliability tables year after year, driven by pride and cussedness.
Today, on Thursday evenings, as we stand at our doors and windows and applaud the NHS, we should also applaud the railway staff, many of whom in the front line are putting themselves in harm’s way to maintain the essential vital transport services that get key workers to their places of work and are part of the uns…
