The Other Railway Children, Chapter 11 (extract) "Planes and trains and cars..."

Britt Angel, a British Airways air hostess, had inspired an initiative called the ‘BA Runners’ to respond to the outcry in the media about the state of Romanian orphanages discovered when that country opened up to the West after the collapse of Communism there. Many flights to that country took goods for the children and ‘BA Runners‘ had linked with ChildHope to extend that help to street children organisations in Eastern Europe. Britt had visited the Consortium for Street Children in 1998 and offered to support other members’ overseas work where the project was within two hours’ road journey of an international airport that BA used. Railway Children was one of three CSC members who responded and BA agreed to visit our projects in Calcutta.

When the scheme started operating Railway Children had seven partners in the city and I approached Tim Grandage, founder and Director of Future Hope (which Railway Children did not fund), whom I had met through the CSC. Tim had been the HSBC’s Bank Manager in Calcutta and had already started work with street children when his employer wanted to promote him to a senior post in the bank’s headquarters in Hong Kong. Tim had resigned to maintain and develop his street children work and he was a person I knew could help me with the import regulations necessary for BA to be able to bring in goods for the street children. Even better, the father of one of Tim’s senior project staff was in charge of customs arrangements at Calcutta international airport and smoothed the way for BA’s regular cargoes of toys, clothes, sports equipment and educational books and materials that BA collected - a full load of boxes up to 720 kilograms on occasions. Tim and his staff would help distribute the goods fairly and appropriately between our partners.

BA had a warehouse at Heathrow in which donations of the goods were received from BA staff, local schools and communities in the Hounslow area, making them up into flight loads responding to the priority needs that our partners advised. Volunteers sorted and made up the boxed loads and each visit to Calcutta involved three or four ‘Runners’ - flight deck or cabin crew - who would spend a few days of their own leave entitlement visiting our projects, playing with the children and taking them on outings - picnics, visits to museums - even on one occasion, a quick flight round the city. ‘BA Runners’ eventually grew to some 130+ volunteer staff involved in this activity and was reconstituted as ‘BA Action for Street Children’.

One by-product of this was the offer of a number free flights for the partner NGO’s own staff to visit the projects overseas. Railway Children have had eight free flights allocated annually until 2010, when this has been raised to eleven, which is a substantial cost saving for the charity. We have used the flights from Heathrow to both India and East Africa for Railway Children staff making visits to supervise and develop our programmes, to bring Mumbai staff to the UK for key staff and Board meetings and to take both trustees and staff to India, Russia and Africa to see and be motivated by the work.

The flights are, of course, standby tickets, paying customers having priority if the plane is full. The flights allocated are technically ‘Business Class’ although any class of seat might be provided according to availability. I’ve been upgraded to ‘first class’ a couple of times and on one occasion was very grateful for the last economy seat when one passenger failed to arrive because of a late connecting flight. In fact I have never been ‘bumped off’ a flight although it has been a close shave a couple of times. One therefore has to build a little slack in one’s overseas schedule to allow for some flexibility.

The availability of this flight facility meant that I was able to make frequent visits to India to understand and promote the work and often took fellow trustees out as a way of increasing their knowledge, interest and motivation. However much one prepares, it is always a culture shock to go to India, especially to the mega cities of Bombay and Calcutta. On one occasion I’d taken two trustees, Chris Jago, then Managing Director of the Channel Tunnel high speed route in the UK, and Michael Holden, another train company Managing Director, and we’d been booked into a hotel at Juhu Beach some ten miles north of Bombay city centre, but not too far from the Railway Children India office. Because of the uncertainty about flight accommodation on our standby tickets, we’d allowed a day to acclimatise before the programme began in earnest and as the journey went smoothly we had a spare day in which to indulge in some sightseeing. We hired a car to take us to the south of Bombay to see the Gateway of India, the Taj Hotel and other well-known buildings in the tourist area, but we got caught in the usual road traffic gridlock and took two and a half hours of fume-filled air to get to our objective.

I determined not to endure a similar journey on the return so we paid off our driver and returned by rail in a suburban train from Churchgate station - at a cost of 7 rupees each if I remember rightly compared with the (not unreasonable) 500 rupees we’d paid for the car. The only problem was that we were in the rush hour (a term that seemed to cover most of the day in Bombay) and the crush in our coach was so great that we were unable to alight at our destination station and only just managed to get out at the following one. One learned to wriggle one’s way towards the gaping exit door some two to three stations before one wished to alight - a big problem if you didn’t know which side the platform would be! I remember Michael - who was Managing Director of South East Trains at the time - managed just to squeeze a camera above the standing throng and take a quick snap which he vowed to send to any passenger who dared to complain of overcrowding on his trains to Charing Cross or Cannon Street!

The road systems of Calcutta were another source of frustration and some amusement - provided you were not already late for an appointment. There were a number of one-way streets in the city, narrow but busy roads. This sensible precaution was ruined by the decision to change the one way direction of these roads at 2pm every day, which meant that between 1.30pm and 2.30pm nothing moved, the two streams of traffic facing each other, neither side giving way. The efforts of police to sort out the chaos usually only contributed to the mess and further increased the shouting and tempers of the marooned car passengers.

When I first visited India I had attempted far too ambitious a schedule based on the expectation that trains would run (roughly) to time and people would turn up to meetings on time. I soon learned that this expectation was profoundly mistaken and had to insert copious ‘recovery time’ in my plans and not to start getting tense if no-one had appeared three quarters of an hour after the time I’d agreed to meet them. I learned to relax and let things flow, putting my fate in the hands of others. I ceased to worry if my train was running a couple of hours late - after all it had probably been on the move for 36 hours already. My hosts meeting me would have allowed for that. If by chance a train I was on ran to time, I knew I’d need to wait until some breathless individual would turn up half an hour later full of excuses about the traffic. I found perversely that it was only trains that were scheduled to arrive around five o’clock in the morning that ever ran on time or even early when another couple of hours sleep would have been welcome.