Erstmals veröffentlicht im Rail Magazine
Our final extract from Bradley’s Railway Guide: A Journey through Two Centuries of British Railway History, 1825-2025 takes us to 2000…and an accident that would change the face of the railway.
Private Eye’s cover of December 15 2000 makes fun of the dismal situation into which Britain’s railways had just been plunged.
Two months earlier, a London-Leeds express had come off the tracks in Hertfordshire while travelling at 115mph, with the loss of four lives. The cause was identified almost immediately as a shattered rail.
Defects in the rail – a type of metal fatigue known as gauge corner cracking – had been spotted 11 months before, and it was due for replacement. But the work was given insufficient priority, and disaster ensued.
The accident exposed some profoundly dysfunctional relationships at the hear of railway privatisation.
Railtrack, the company that took over ownership of British Rail’s routes, signals and stations, was essentially a holding company, scathingly described by The Railway Magazine after it’s demise as “little more than a numbered bank account for collecting TOC (Train Operating Company) access fees and awarding huge contracts”.
Track renewal, maintenance, inspection and monitoring were farmed out to separate firms which had bought up the 13 businesses into which BR’s infrastructure operations had been divided for sale.
An inspection by one of these contractors had detected the faulty rail, but another company subsequently won the competitive tender to install the replacement.
Before anything could be done, the successful firm then had to negotiate with Railtrack over the timing and duration of the work.
From Railtrack’s point of view, such projects had to be scheduled in ways that would minimise the penalty charges it would have to pay the regulator for delays to services. Questions of safety and profit were thus in conflict on both sides of what in BR days had been a unified operation.
Worse, the Hatfield derailment was preceded by two still more lethal disasters in 1997 and 1999, both on the Great Western Main Line and both likewise traceable to cost-cutting incentives created by privatisation.
What followed in 2000-01 was described by Sir Alistair Morton, chairmen of the newly established Strategic Rail Authority, as “a collective nervous breakdown”.
Rails with similar faults had to be identified and fixed as a matter of the highest urgency.
Yet Railtrack’s knowledge of its own terrain proved to be woefully inadequate, having in effect been contracted out to the infrastructure companies.
The response was therefore disproportionate to the risk, as emergency speed restrictions were applied at nearly 2,000 sites across the network until checks and repairs could be carried out.
Railway travel in the months immediately after Hatfield was a strange affair.
Speeds on many main lines dwindled to mid-Victorian levels. Long distance passengers had to allow for multiple meals en route; London to Glasgow trains were still taking eight and three-quarter hours in mid-December.
Even the temporary timetables in force often proved to be no true guide, as reliability collapsed. Heavy rains and flooding added to the misery, and a landslip closed the main line between Doncaster and York.
In the longer term the implications of the Hatfield crash proved to be Railtrack’s undoing, though two years passed before its demise.
Reproduced with permission from Bradley’s Railway Guide: A Journey through Two Centuries of British Railway History, 1825-2025 by Simon Bradley.
