Horsham Town centre around New Year was bathed in thick freezing fog. It was good weather for leafing through bookshops! Opening my colleague, Ken Clarke’s autobiography at random I came across his short and effective struggle as Transport Minister to get driver operated doors introduced on British trains for the first time. That was in the early 1980s: long before the Berlin Wall fell, before Tony Blair became an MP, before “Wham” produced their first record. DOO has been operating in the UK and abroad very successfully for a long time…
Services pre strike were rightly criticised but they operated. The strikes are grinding the network to a halt and causing huge stress and grief. They weighed on every regular user of the trains over Christmas. The talks that were held pre Christmas must be resumed and resolved.
Ending the dispute also matters for the economy. The South East drives the UK’s economic success. Despite many grounds for optimism this is a point of economic uncertainty and we (and international investors) need to be focussing on the huge ongoing investment in our railway system, not the strikes that are causing such disruption.
The Government is committed to delivering the biggest improvement in our railways in over a century. Around £40 billion will be invested between 2014 and 2019, which will benefit millions of passengers across the country. It will mean more trains, more seats and better stations. Southern Region is a major focus for this investment.
We have the highest use of railways of any large country except Japan, our rail service matters. However we have the oldest railway network in the world, constructed in many cases by the Victorians. Modernisation and the appropriate use of technology is vital. Driver operated doors have been deemed safe by independent safety experts and have been widely used for a long time. It is time this dispute ended. A focus instead on how we can maximise the benefits of ongoing investment for passengers would be the best possible start to 2017 most regular rail users could imagine.