By Roger Ford
Informed Sources
While Margaret Thatcher’s remark at a meeting with the British Railways Board that ‘if you were any good you wouldn’t be here’ remains apocryphal, when she was, briefly, Shadow Minister of Transport in 1969, she certainly told the board ‘There’s only one worthwhile member of your board, Mr Jones’. That was Sydney Jones, the creator of British Rail Research and father of the Advanced Passenger Train.