Trains

Loved it, brought back loads of memories. I was in the mid '80s Chief Operating Manager of BR's London Midland Region and this included the West Coast Mainline. With overhead electric wires and a very busy line with mail, newspaper, freightliner, coal trains and local passenger trains as well as a frequent Inter-City service, punctuality was always dicey as so much could go wrong - I used to tell the General Manager (with tongue in cheek) that I could only achieve our punctuality target (90% right time) if it was April or September and the temperature was between 55 and 70 degrees F and only then if it wasn't drizzling! My functional (operating) boss at the BR Board was Terry Worrall who made the famous remark on TV that 'it was the wrong type of snow' for which, poor man, he was ridiculed. His remark was taken by the press out of context of course - he was explaining that the very fine snow that only occurred once in 40 years (according to the Met Office) had happened the first year after new electric rolling stock was built and on that advice, had cut the expenditure of half a million pounds for each train built, eliminating a device that would have protected the motors from this type of snow intrusion. The press made out it was only BR, but on the continent it was much worse - Holland had over 50% of their trains out of action and that model of reliability - German Railways, fared worse than BR, but the press never picked this up! The classic excuse used at least twice (at Kings Cross and Liverpool Street) was the PA announcement by the revered General Manager of the Eastern Region back in 1962-3, Gerard Wickham-Twistleton-Fiennes, who grabbed the microphone from the announcer and declaimed that the arriving train was late "due to bad management"! He later got the sack from BR as he upset many of the big bosses and politicians by being a bit too frank (and honest).