Ex Railtrack boss Gerald Corbett explains what happened at ladbroke Grove and Hatfield

Christian Wolmar spoke exlusively to Gerald Corbett for Rail in conjunction with the Calling All Stations podcast

Christian Wolmar spoke exlusively to Gerald Corbett for Rail in conjunction with the Calling All Stations podcast who was chief executive of Railtrack from 1997 to 2000 about his time in the industry which included two major accidents at Ladbroke Grove and Hatfield. Railtrack had just been privatised when he arrived and soon after his departure it was effectively taken back by the government as it was forced into administration and consequently he was its longest service chief executive.

More than a quarter of a century after the fraught events that followed the privatisation of the railway, the then chief executive of Railtrack, Gerald Corbett, has provided a warts and all analysis of what led to the spate of rail disasters in the aftermath of the break up of British Rail and, ultimately, to the demise of the company. In a book teasingly entitled When Something Happens Corbett devotes seven chapters to his time at the helm from 1997 to 2001.

There is much else to interest the reader as the book is a refreshingly honest and open account of Corbett’s rise from a relatively modest background – though he and his siblings were sent to a minor public school but he only finished his time there with the help of a grant from the local authority – through to a series of senior jobs in business ranging, pre railways from Dixons and Grand Metropolitan to, after Railtrack, being in charge of Woolworths and Durex, eventually ending up as the chairman of the MCC. But for those stories Rail readers will have to buy the book as, in Corbett’s own words, ‘I will always be the Railtrack Guy’ and his account of his experience in the rail industry is remarkably revealing.
One of the stated goals of privatisation was to attract outside talent into the rail industry and the appointment of Corbett to the top job at Railtrack fitted that pattern. Corbett had been displaced from a job at Grand Metropolitan as a result of the merger with Guinness and consequently applied for the top job at Railtrack after it was suggested to him by Archie Norman who was at the time the chief executive of ASDA. According to Corbett, ‘It was a fascinating brief. Commercialising Railtrack which had just been privatised was seen as a great opportunity and we had a big programme to improve 2,500 stations which we completed’. Originally under privatisation plans, Railtrack would have remained in the private sector while the rest of the industry was sold off, but the chairman, Bob Horton persuaded the Treasury to sell off not only Railtrack, but also the maintenance companies.

Corbett calls this ‘the gilt on the gingerbread’ as it led to two thirds of Railtrack’s employees being transferred to the engineering companies that took over maintenance.’ He is now convinced this was the biggest mistake of the privatisation process: ‘We were the asset manager, but 20,000 of the 30,000 people now worked for private companies which beat to a completely different rhythm. All our expertise on asset management was outsourced and what information there was about the assets had gone with them. Putting it very simply, we were an asset management company without the information about the assets and without the people who had previously managed them. That was a fundamental flaw’.

This was made worse by the fact that the railway was growing, and consequently the assets such as the track were being sweated while under their contracts the engineering companies were receiving less money every year: ‘The railway was 30 per cent bigger in terms of train miles and passengers and no one at privatisation had taken that into account’ while the maintenance companies were being cut back in terms of money and yet they had more work to do as there were more trains hammering the track’. Railtrack considered taking them back in house but it was too complex though ultimately a decade later this was done. ‘Selling them was, looking back, a huge mistake.‘ The rapid growth put extra pressure on Railtrack as access charges were going down: ‘The economic architecture had not aligned the incentives between the different parties’.

To add to the pressure, there was the aga of the West Coast Mainline Modernisation programme. At privatisation, a deal had been done with Virgin, the operator, to install moving block signalling –

which did away with the need for lineside signals, something that had never been done anywhere in the world. In his book, Corbett points the finger at the late Professor Brian Mellitt who had convinced the Railtrack board before Corbett’s arrival that the plan was feasible, even though no major railway in the world was operated with that technology: ‘I can remember Brian Mellitt explaining to me that within five years, there would be no lineside signals on the west coast, and wouldn’t be any drivers, there would just be a computer in the cab. I said to him, presumably this would be all phased in and he said no not at all, we will do it all at once, with the flick of a switch’.

Did people not warn Corbett that this was not feasible technically? ‘The problem was that we had put that in our prospectus and floated on that basis , and sold it for billions of pounds, to new groups of shareholders, and Brian had convinced the board including the engineers who all believed it was feasible’,

Corbett is quite open about the fact that he was not qualified to assess the project: ‘I had arrived from Grand Metropolitan, which sold burgers and Smirnoff, so I was not really in that strong a position to say it was all nonsense’.

The relationship with the train operators was also fraught. Operators were incentivised to carry more passengers rather than running on time and that meant running as many services as they could, putting more pressure on Railtrack. The performance regime resulted in 300 people being employed to determine who was responsible for delays: ‘You could make far more money by being good at arguing the delay attribution than running the train set better. In an integrated system, everyone was working together to improve the situation, while in the new system everyone was fighting their corner to make more money out of the bloody contracts’.

Despite all these issues, by the summer of 1999 Corbett recalls that things were, to echo the Labour slogan of the time, ‘getting better. We had improved performance on the infrastructure by 40 per cent, we had doubled the level of investment, we rescued the Channel Tunnel Rail Link which was important for the Labour government and us politically. They then saw us part of the solution, rather than the problem.

The rail disaster at Ladbroke Grove in October changed all that. Corbett remembers the day: ‘I heard about it when I was heading for a meeting at the Savoy and my driver, diverted to Ladbroke Grove. We got there about ten to nine and it was quite eerie, with this terrible pile of smoke going up, and I was told it was a SPAD. It is a difficult moment for a train company, truly shocking and some people find it difficult to keep going, and as a leader, you have to give a sense of direction and keep everyone going. You can’t hide. You have to motivate all the people working for you’.

He has an interesting insight into the reactions of his colleagues from different backgrounds: ‘The ex British Rail people responded much better than those from the private sector. In terms of helping, the private sector people headed for the hills, while the railway people, people like Chris Leah [the operations director]and Dick Fearn [the Midlands zone director] moved towards the gunfire, while the non railway people on the whole didn’t’. It gave Corbett an insight into the values of the public sector.

In his book, Corbett questions whether the accident would have happened under British Rail. Even though safety had improved overall, he wrote: ‘it has to be said that fragmentation did make it harder for the railway to handle all the issues. Under British Rail there would have been one controlling mind and one organisation. Under privatisation there were several.’ Despite concerns over the number of SPADs in the Paddington throat, ‘no one who was complained to took the broader view and thyey just saw the world through their end of the telescope. Under BR…the overall fat controller in charge of everything would have had more chance of picking up that the driver training was less rigorous than it had been

After a couple it emerged what happened, that it was a rookie driver, he had only just come into the job from Thames Trains, it is in fact difficult to run through a red light, because you have to cancel the AWS and so on, the flashing flower sign, but he continued for 700 yards and he accelerated, which no one understands why – and by Thursday, when we went to see Prescott, and found there had been 60 spads in the Paddington throad in the previous eight years, and that was all to do the layout had become more complex, because of the hewthrow Express, It was a problem, but in the previous year there had only been one spad, removing the flashing yellows which worked. So it was felt the problem had been solved. In fact there had been a very bad spad at that signal, 109 a year and a half previously and there had been a review of the spads, a recommendation had been made to have a signal sighting meeting but that had not been carried out. The red alert had not gone through the zone because the numbers had gone down. If the sighting committee had taken place it might have picked up that the signal was not quite right and might have changed it.

Better section in the book here ?

The trisk in the Padd throat had gone up because of Hex and there were more trains, and that was reflected in the number of spads, and at the same time the driver training , which was the responsibility of the operators, and some like Thames trains had reduced the amount of trainining for drivers and he had not been on a spad awareness course which he was supposed to have been. And there was a shortage of drivers because of the growth in the network, so there was all these new drivers, that increased the risk, plus the complexity from Heathrow express, and under BR someone might have put all those things together and might have done something but in the privatised railway people just looked after their own bit. Indeed, GWR, had complained to our zone about why more progress was not being made on signal sighting committees ahd so on and that had gone into the zone at quite a junior level, a commercial person in charge of contracts, whereas under BR the complaint might have been picked up

There is absolutely no question that splitting the railway into 100 different bits and the fragmentation and tying it together with contracts combined with the sudden growth we were facing which had not been anticipated made the thing a management nightmare. It put huge pressure on

On the Thursday they announced the Cullen enquiry, and then on Sunday the papers had been briefed that there was a report coming out about our safety and standards dept which was going to result in the reporting lines being changed and the wording was that Railtrak would be stripped of its safety role… which never happened. The Labour machine was worried that Prescott would get the blame for the crash, because he had not done anything in the wake of privatisation and the twps had been sitting on his desk for six months and nothing had been done about it, They wanted to get the blame away from the government, and Railtrack was in the dock.

On the Sunday, the news of the world and the Mirror wwere calling for my resignation. There was stuff about corporate manslaughter, signallers were being spat at in shops, and signal box windows being broken, and we went out there to make our case.

On the Thursday, the BtP said tht there might be 100 people in the carriage H because it had not been cleared out, which proved to be wrong. That was the background to the government briefing. Prescott led a safety recovery group, and we created a director safety, accelerated tpws, put safety in as a bonus to people to incentivise people, and spads dropped by 30 per cent over the next year and reduced broken rails

1998 had been the first year with no passenger death on the railway since 1902 …

Before Hatfield in september,we had the breaking through in the tunnel on the ctrl and prescott went down with me. And he said it was going better indicated that the regulator would give us more money and he said I don’t know what we would do if there was another one

Hatfield was caused by a derailment with four people fatalities, and originally someone thought it was a bomb. But it wasn’t and it was a broken rail, which was down to railtrack, and at its heart it was sloppy maintenance. Itr was a broken rail, caused by gauge corner cracking, and the rail should have been changed but it hadn’t because the contractor hadn’t done it – the new rail was by the track, but the possession to do the work had not been given, not happened in the April, and there was no speed restriction – the last resort is the track patrolling system back in the day three ppl used to do it to make sure it was ok and that had been cut back by Balfour Beatty, and cut back the size of the patrols and therefore they were doing it from the cess, and that meant they could not see the rail on the other side, and if they had kept the manpower , then they would have seen it and that a speed restriction was necessary. And that combined with what do we do – we had to check everything across the whole network, the engineers were nervous because there ws talk of corporate manslaughter etc, and there was a guy who was legally responsible called David Ventry.

We had a big problem that the engineering expertise had been contracted out. There were 20 people and two lawyers there.

Any rail with a crack of more than 30 mm had to have a speed restriction of 20mph, and that was quite draconian ..because the data on the track was with the maintenance contractors and there wasn’t a data base,BR hadn’t got one, and the Regulator had pushed for one, but there is still not one and no one knew how many speed restrictions would go on,and the best estimate was 300 but thjree weels later there were 1800, because all the maintenance contractors acted so cautiously…

I remember a professor whose name escapes me saying the engineers have stopped making engineering judgements, everyone is petrified – and you could understand why

I concluded on the day of the accident that I had to resign as it was a broken rail. If it had been a fault with the signal at ladbrokd Grove, I would have resigned but it wasn’t. You have to be accountable, that is why you get paid all this money. I tendered my resignation

The following morning I tendered my resignation and there was silence, but then the phone started ringing people had appreciated the work we had done, and No 10 was supportive as well.

The Mirror the mouthpiece of No 10 was supportive, so was Pam Warren. My resignation was rejected by the board, and we got on with it.

Just as things were getting better, I was suddenly asked to leave by the chairman sir Philip Beck , a month after the accident. I asked why Has there been political pressure, pressure from the train operators, from the regulator, the shareholders --- no and I asked why are we doing this,and he said everyone is attacking us, and this will lance the boil. I said Philip I think they will attack us more . It was odd they had supported me a month before, and then changed their minds

I left November 15^th 2000.. The chairman said, when are we going to announce it – what reason are we going to give is that you are exhausted and need time off as if we say that we asked you to leave, they might attack us.

He said the truth will out, but this is a better way for the company.. we can say nice things about you, whereas if we say you were asked to leave, we can’t

I had to say I was going to India for a holiday…the next year, the company stopped being part of the solution. My su successor, steve marshall, approached it from a finance point of view and his approach was simply to keep on asking for more money. They stopped doing enhancements, didn’t got for the second fast of CTRL.

They paid a dividend despite losing £400m and the share price plummeting – would you have done that?

No I wouldn’t Because of the regulatory review, we were getting a 50 per cent increase in the amount of money – and I would have gone on with the second phase of the ctrl as the first phase had gone well..

There was a need for WCML discussions – but I had to go because there had been two train crashes on my watch, and can you imagine what it would have been like with a third – and tghere was a third

So it was the end of Railtrack . What killed it off was that they didn’t perform, there were continuous requests for money, they paid that dividend and there was a new chairman who went in and asked for a comfort letter from the banks and he went by himself, because he knew Byers who put it into administration…they could have saved it, because they could have asked the regulator, tom winsor for an interim review, and he would have had to grant it. They could have fought it

Was it ultimately that a privatised railtrack was a bad idea?

It would have had more chance if the maintenance had not been privatised, We might have got through. But it would have been much easier if it had not been privatised at all…it was the great rush to do it all that was the problem. If they had not privatised it and just done the train operators, and taken it gradually, the extra complexity and the fragmentation would not have been as serious and it would have been easier to manage, and the railway would have had time to get used to it. But you would always have the problem of the big subsidy, and the real problem was the politics… back in the day when there was a minister and BR reported to the minister, the minister would never hang the railway out to dry, because he was responsible for it, it was the vilification post Ladbroke grove, railtrack getting the blame, that was the real problem –

I would like to have seen the old big four integrated railways to have been privatised if one had gone wrong, it would not have wrecked the whole model .The regulator could then have compared and contrasted Perhaps eventually, in 15 20 years time, the problems of a big utility reporting to a minister, annual controls from the Treasury, someone else will come up with a new solution and I hope the idea of the big four will be revived… you could do one to try out the idea…and take it slowly..the problem was that it was all done in such a big rush … It was amazing it all held together at all…The old BR graduates held it together

Did you enjoy your time on the railwaysj and are you please you did that? Yes, I am, yiou learn much more when things go wrong than when they go right. I learnt a lot and the railway people were wonderful – of course the crashes were awful … the public sector ethos grew on me, and they were bloody good people, working in the right way, and worshipping the right gods. They say in life you are either successful or learn a lot.

I wish GBR well but the problems will emerge again. But if they do it again, it should be as an integrated railway.

Thanks for you support and pleased refer my substack to a friend

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