Pity the poor passengers on the train line from hell. For decades commuters on the Brighton-Bedford “Thameslink” railway through central London, have endured travelling conditions that would be illegal for the transport of animals. With its packed, ageing carriages and appalling delays, plans for modernisation are running 15 years late.
Now the prospect of getting brand new trains at last has been thrown into question by a deadly cocktail of vested interests, misplaced patriotism and misty-eyed sentimentality about our industrial past.
The government’s award of a £1.5bn contract to the Siemens to build the new Thameslink trains in Germany led to an outcry last week as 1,400 redundancies were announced at Bombardier in Derby, the UK’s last train factory. David Cameron rushed to set up a “review” and RMT chief Bob Crow said it was “a kick in the teeth” for British workers, while the GMB union called for the deal to be cancelled.
Now, there is nobody who recalls more fondly than me the great days of the British Railway workshops, since I partly earn my living writing on railway history. Here were mighty factories where the cream of British craftsmen built superb locomotives that were the envy of the world. Doncaster designed the Mallard – still unchallenged as the fastest steam locomotive in the world, while Crewe engineered the magnificent, streamlined Coronation. During the war the railway workshops proudly helped defeat the Germans by building tanks and torpedo boats
But today British train making has mostly gone the way of our aircraft and car industries. The former Swindon works of the Great Western Railway, pride of our greatest engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is now a factory-outlet shopping centre – which says it all.
All that remains is Derby – itself much humbled since it was HQ of the mighty Midland Railway. Long gone are the days when it produced the sleek crimson “Midland Compounds” that raced up the line to St Pancras with some of the most comfortable carriages in the world. Today, its 3,000 workers are part of a regional offshoot of a multinational conglomerate, based in Canada whose primary business is building aircraft.
But nostalgia over the “last train factory” is hardly justification to rip up our deal with the Germans – who, let’s be brutally honest are offering a better product. Derby’s “Turbostar” and “Electrostar” trains are in service with many operators around the country. But they have been plagued with late delivery, and post-production problems. The latest was a fiasco over testing the emission systems of the company’s newest Class 172 trains.
By contrast, the Siemens “Desiro” trains have an enviable record for fast delivery, and the new “City” trains ordered for Thameslink are both greener and 15 per cent cheaper than what the rivals could offer. The German trains work straight “out of the box” because Siemens has its own dedicated high-speed test track near its factory back home.
I know the comparison only too well, since I have spent the past two years travelling more than 30,000 miles around the network to write two books on the best of rail travel, and I ever have the choice I always opt for the airy and spacious Siemens trains rather than the Bombardier-built “Voyagers”. Noisy and cramped, they are some of the worst modern trains made in Britain.
One very senior rail manager of a train operating company, which has traditionally favoured Bombardier products, told me last week: “Frankly, on quality and price, the Germans win hands down on this.”
Ah, you may argue, you would never see the French running German-built trains. Not true. Despite squeals from Paris, the contract for building the next generation of trains for Eurostar, an affiliate of France’s state-owned railway, has also gone to Siemens. Enterprising British firms have got into the act, too. First Group, which will operate the new trains on the Thameslink line, has put its tanks on America’s lawn where it now runs the legendary Greyhound coaches and the famous yellow school buses. We have not heard too many complaints from Mr Crow about this.
So what has gone wrong? If you were to summon up the shades of George and Robert Stephenson, Brunel and Trevithick, the very British geniuses who invented our railways and exported them to the rest of the world, I’m certain they would cite what has become a national badge for Britain – a lack of enterprise and loss of nerve. They would have no truck with the idea that British engineering is not best.
It was a national loss of confidence that led our most famous modern inventor James Dyson to relocate his vacuum cleaner plant to Malaysia. And I’m certain the ghosts of our great Victorian railway entrepreneurs will have been listening with horror to the view of British Chambers of Commerce boss David Frost, who spoke for many British small businesses when he said the other day that British workers have a “bad attitude and poor skills”.
The history of modern British industry is littered with political tinkering and industrial cowardice. What good did it do when Tony Blair stuffed the pockets of MG-Rover workers with millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash on the eve of the 2005 general election? They still lost their jobs. Worse, taxpayers lost billions after Gordon Brown ordered an aircraft carrier that nobody wants, and which will now have to be mothballed, to protect the jobs of Scottish shipyard workers
It is immensely sad that the skilled folk of Derby will lose their livelihoods. But no amount of political fixery will bring back the great days of the railway workshops. Rather than reach for the pork barrel again, politicians might use their energy studying why the confident Germans do it better. The nation’s thriving factories give the lie to the idea that heavy manufacturing can only be done by low-cost countries like China. Education, proper apprenticeships, hard work, pride in the job and quality of the end product are what most of us privately think of when we go to John Lewis or the car dealer intending to buy British but end up buying German.
Our great Victorian railway engineers knew this only too well. But sadly it seems lost on today’s Britain.
There’s no hypocrisy more depressing than the British constituency MP who poses with overall-clad workers at the local metal bashing plant for his election pamphlet – and then drives home in his BMW to a house equipped with Miele washing machine, Bosch refrigerator and Siemens kitchen appliances
But, of course, the only consumer who matters in this saga is the poor bloody rail commuter who wants comfortable trains that run on time at the cheapest possible fare. Sad that British industry has not been able to fill the bill.
‘On the Slow Train Again: Twelve more great British train journeys’ is published by Preface, price £14.99. The updated paperback version of the companion volume ‘On the Slow Train’ is newly reissued by Arrow, price £7.99
