In the four months since it was published, transport professionals have been worrying away at the detail of the Williams-Shapps Plan and have come up with common concerns. In particular, the lack of detail on how the high level aspirations will be achieved on the real railway When it comes to getting from today’s hybrid railway to the all-encompassing Great British Railways, there are simply too many blindingly obvious known unknowns. Fortunately, Department for Transport civil servants are already at work on ensuring that when policies emerge from this primordial soup of good intentions, a formal structure will be waiting.
STOM
I returned to the railway after my decade in the ‘normal’ world, it took some time to get up to speed. Initially, when some unfamiliar abbreviation was used during an interview, I was too embarrassed to show my ignorance and looked it up afterwards.
But as confidence grew, I started asking what the letters stood for and found that, quite often, the interviewee didn’t know either. This still happens today.
And when the digital equivalent of the old-fashioned brown paper envelope slid into my in-tray the other day, the accompanying DfT PowerPoint presentation threw up a new abb…
