Transport Secretary Chris Grayling and Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, former Rail Regulator and Modern Railways columnist, Sir Thomas Winsor, quibbled over vocabulary as the minister unveiled his plans for the railways (p8) at a speech at the Policy Exchange think tank on 6 December 2016. While Tom Winsor described the new policy as ‘vertical integration lite’, Chris Grayling said he preferred the term ‘virtual vertical integration’.
That it is vertical integration of some shade, we are grateful. This magazine has long called for the reuniting of rail and wheel, so we applaud the Transport Secretary’s move to put future franchises on a deep alliance footing with Network Rail. The two pioneer franchises for this treatment will be South Eastern and East Midlands – and there is a fine irony in the latter, as the Midland main line will get back through virtual vertical integration the local management attention it recently lost as part of Network Rail’s first moves to devolution of the London North Eastern Route (p7, last month).
Deep alliancing is not new: it has been tried on the South Western, where it yielded worthwhile benefits – from longer night-time possessions for the track engin…
