Last week then, the announcement of the outcome of the Williams Review of Britain’s railways whose headline recommendation was a new body called Great British Railways.
Given that the report should have been published 18 months ago the jokes about Late British Railways have already started (and rightly so).
The proper title of the report is the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail which is a bit of a hostage to fortune as the ‘plan’ is only in outline. The rail functions in the Department for Transport will be merged with Network Rail and co-opt parts of Rail Delivery Group to form a new “guiding mind” but beyond that it’s all very… aspirational.
The document states:
Great British Railways will be given a binding mandate to have as its primary focus serving the interests of passengers, freight customers and taxpayers and growing rail usage.
Now: I don’t think those primary focuses all focus in the same direction. Increasing passenger travel will have an impact on freight. Growing rail usage (say, by opening a new station – hey, I’m good at those, call me! – will inevitably require taxpayer funding.
The Shape of Things to Come
And while there is a diagram called Future Industry Structure it seems as if the new Passenger Service Contracts are franchises but without the ability to set timetables, branding or fares (possibly also routes).
Most of the rest – review of fares, website, ticketing app – have been promised before. Transport for the North had an integrated ticketing team, now disbanded as a cost-saving measure. Integrated ticketing is, as everyone knows, always two years away…
In fact, in the part of the railway I hang out in (on-line) most discussion has been around the branding.
Rather foolishly the document mentions a redesign of the iconic (and I use the word correctly here, I think) British Rail double-arrow logo.
Cue much weeping and wailing and static electricity from the anoraks. The change is hardly noticeable. I mean, I didn’t notice and I always noticed when the Metro logo was wrong. It’s a small change in the diagonals and a trimming of the length. Which shows that you should think about your target audiences and their responses when writing your releases, reports and White Papers (trying to make this a bit more communications relevant) and not include throwaway comments.
It’s bad enough people are coming up with speculative liveries… although I have seen one really good timetable leaflets design. No-one does timetable leaflets now, but… anyway. And no, it wasn’t one of mine.
In short: don’t worry about any of this for another year, at least. We’ve still got Covid-19 to get over first anyway.