Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek Page A

Railtrack did not have the management capability to bring that in house,’ he said. He was proved right. No sooner had Railtrack committed itself to moving block than it began to waste time bringing it about. In mid-1995, its rump signalling team had dwindled to the extent that it was possible for it to move office in a single taxi. The following year, a move to Birmingham caused further losses of personnel. One senior Railtrack figure at the time said: ‘In resources terms, two years were lost.’ It wasn’t until March 1996, just a few months before Railtrack was privatised, that the firm picked two consortia of engineering multinationals to develop alternate prototypes of the moving-block system. Soon the consequences of Edmonds’ determination to gut Railtrack of its in-house engineering and project-management expertise became apparent. ‘What Railtrack did in 1996 was quite exceptional, which was to take a really high-calibre engineering team on the BR system and destroy it,’ said Chris Green.
    Railtrack had assumed that the two signalling consortia would develop similar types of moving-block technology. It assumed their work could then be pooled to provide the foundation for a system that actually worked. But it didn’t happen that way. The consortia saw each other as rivals.
    ‘Not unexpectedly, their work tended to diverge rather than converge,’ said a senior figure in the signalling industry at the time. This wouldn’t have mattered so much, except that while the moving-block research was meandering, Railtrack made a catastrophic decision. It invited Richard Branson to hold a gun to the company’s head.
    In February 1997, Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains had won the franchise to run fast inter-city services on the WCML. InOctober, after the newly elected Labour government backed away from its commitment to renationalise the railways, Branson and Railtrack announced how the WCML project was going to be financed. They painted a wonderful picture for inter-city travellers. Railtrack would spend £1.5 billion to restore the worn-out railway to basic reliability, and, in exchange for a slice of Virgin’s profits, would lay out another £600 million to install moving block and other improvements to create a high-speed line. By 2002, new Virgin tilting trains would travel the line at 125 mph; in 2005, they would accelerate to 140 mph. London and Manchester would be only an hour and forty-five minutes apart, London and Glasgow less than four hours. Suddenly, Railtrack found itself locked in a contract with Virgin to deliver a non-existent signalling system on the entire west coast main line by a firm date – 2005 – with crippling financial penalties if it failed to do so.
    ‘They thought, “Oh crumbs, we’ve just signed [the Virgin deal], we’d better get on with this.” There was a realisation the talking had to stop,’ said the signalling source.
    Yet Railtrack was locked in a catch-22 situation. It couldn’t put a contract out to tender to develop a thing if it couldn’t specify what the thing was. And it couldn’t specify what the thing was until it had signed a contract for somebody to develop it. Meanwhile the two signalling consortia had made the technology look less, rather than more, certain. ‘Because we went on divergent routes, because we saw ourselves as rivals, it didn’t enable Railtrack to say, “It’s obvious, here’s the specification,” ’ said the signalling source. ‘What’s at the core of this, I think, is that Railtrack did not have its own sufficiently strong in-house knowledge and expertise to be able to use industry for what it was good at, to gather their views in and make a judgment.’
    Railtrack did have one ace in the hole. It had, in fact, long since recruited an expert in moving-block signalling. Way back in 1995, the then Conservative government had worried that Rod Muttram’s lack of railway experience would put off Cityinvestors. At the government’s