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York. A city of narrow lanes. A Roman city. A city of chocolate. A railway city.
Its elegantly curved trainshed houses services for London and Scotland, the seaside at Scarborough, the tearooms of Harrogate and the grit of the Pennines.
Tucked behind an arch cut through the city walls, and just beyond a small brick railway hut, is Network Rail’s local headquarters. Its modernity stands in contrast to the city’s railway heritage.
From his desk on the fourth floor, Route Managing Director Rob McIntosh is determined to change the way NR works. He wants a company that listens to local communities. He wants a company that helps communities. He wants a railway that is the community’s - even though it’s Network Rail that remains its custodian.
McIntosh has been in the post since January, taking over from Phil Verster, who moved north to head an alliance between ScotRail and Network Rail. His appointment coincided with NR Chief Executive Mark Carne making changes to NR’s structure that pushed power from central headquarters down to the routes. Then Nicola Shaw published her review of NR’s long-term shape. She advocated devolution and more control of NR at regional level, which chimed with government policies to push responsibility down to local politicians. No longer would London decide what was best for Leeds.
Yet McIntosh is clear about the wider relevance of Shaw’s work: “The passenger doesn’t care what Shaw says. It’s ‘Nicola who?’ as far as they’re concerned. They just want to get on a train when they expect they should and get off that train when and where they bought a ticket for. As an industry we struggle to keep sight of that sometimes.”
That’s a refreshing view… concentrate on the passenger (or freight shipper) rather than the report itself. McIntosh continues: “The Shaw report was initiated to try and understand what we needed to do with NR, to take it forward and make it better. The passenger cares simply about value for money, and getting on the train when they want to and getting off where and when they want to. The industry that sits behind that is incredibly complicated.
“So, the product is fairly simple - a safe and reliable railway. But the industry that delivers that is incredibly complicated. The Shaw report was initiated to try to understand what we might do with the industry, as well as NR, to make that better.”
Yet, if the railway industry was to be honest, there wasn’t much in Shaw that it didn’t know deep down already. After all, her first recommendation was that rail users should be placed at the heart of the railway. That she had to say this did not reflect well on the railway.
McIntosh agrees that while there was little new in Shaw’s report, there was a change of direction, as he explains: “The Shaw report looked very much like the direction of travel that Mark Carne and Sir Peter Hendy had already set out on. In fact, it really underlined the direction of travel.
“The one aspect of the Shaw report that stands out that wasn’t in our strategy was the recommendation that there was a northern route. The Shaw report talks about greater devolution, more control, better alignment with customers, the skills agenda, diversity, inclusion, how do we deal with the ageing workforce - all things that we’d set out in our strategy anyway. But the northern route was not something that was in our plans at that time.”
Northern England’s railways have always been split, but the nature of that split changed radically nearly a century ago. Before 1923, railway companies straddled the Pennines - the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway did exactly what its name describes, with its route through the Calder Valley; the London and North Western Railway crossed the ‘big hill’ a little further south at Standedge; the Great Central crossed at Woodhead; and the Midland Railway took a route that demanded two long tunnels, one at Cowburn and one at Totley.
The routes didn’t change when the government grouped them and Britain’s other railway companies into four. But instead of several railway companies crossing the Pennines in their own corridors, grouping brought an east-west split with the London, Midland and Scottish Railway to the west and the London and North Eastern Railway to the east. Of course, it wasn’t this simple. The LMS took most of the LYR, LNWR and MR (and their routes under the Pennines), while the LNER took the GCR and its Woodhead tunnel.
Creation of British Railways in 1948 changed things again. As far as northern England was concerned the LMS become the London Midland Region and the northern half of the LNER became the North Eastern Region. It was later merged into the Eastern Region.
The boundary sat just west of Hebden Bridge on the old LYR route, and it remains the boundary between McIntosh and his counterpart Martin Frobisher. BR’s boundary sat just east of Standedge Tunnel on that route - today NR’s sits at the west end of the tunnel. On the Woodhead the BR regional boundary sat east of the tunnel - today it doesn’t exist (the line closed in 1981). Trains on the old Midland road crossed the regional boundary just before plunging into Totley Tunnel as they ran west. It remains there today.
So does it matter where boundaries lie?
