NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS- HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY. ........................................................................ PANORAMA "The Wrong Track" RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC-1 DATE: 4:02:01 ........................................................................ JOHN WARE: Rail passengers in the 21st Century travelling by bus, and travelling by air, the railways have been in chaos since the crash at Hatfield. Tonight Panorama reveals why Railtrack lost control of its rail network, and why the Government's claims about rebuilding our railways may not add up. This is Leeds Railway Station. For much of last month it looked more like a bus station. The owner is Railtrack, Britain's biggest private monopoly. Railtrack were re-signalling the station. They promised to finish the job by the New Year but they took twice as long. This only added to the grief of some commuters already suffering from a chaotic rail network. FEMALE PASSENGER: Absolutely appalling. I arrive at Leeds every day. I'm a commuter from Saltaire, about 14 miles away. Every day I arrive at work absolutely fuming and late invariably. There isn't a service to speak of since November. WARE: May we ask you what you think of the service. MALE PASSENGER: I don't think there's any service. WARE: Well you've got a bus. MALE PASSENGER: Yes, so what? My train is due to leave at five past ten. I've got a connection to make in London which I'm not going to make. I've got to go down to Bournemouth. It's probably going to take me going on for ten hours. WARE: The marathon to Bournemouth is also down to Railtrack. Across the network there have been over 1000 speed restrictions. Since October the railways have suffered one of their greatest crises as Railtrack's contractors have struggled to get the network back together. Following the derailment at Hatfield of an express train on this line out of King's Cross, Railtrack feared the rail network was full of undiscovered defects. One of the many thousands of passengers whose lives have been turned upside down is James Jeynes who commutes daily from Doncaster to London. Before Hatfield the journey was one hour and thirty-five minutes. At first Railtrack said the timetable would be back to normal by November, then December, then February, now it's Easter. JAMES JEYNES: You've left on time according to the new timetable. According to the old timetable we wouldn't have even stopped here. WARE: Sometimes it's taken James eight hours to get to work and back. Waiting at home for James is Samantha and 7-year old Samuel. Before Hatfield, James got home in time to put him to bed. Since then contact with his family has been by phone. SAMANTHA: Are you on the train? JAMES: It says every train is cancelled until the 9.30. SAMANTHA: What time? JAMES: Well I'll give you another call when we get a bit closer just to make sure I'm not time. SAMANTHA: Well Samuel will be in bed when you get home. JAMES: I never eat with my family. Now I'm coming in, I've had a sandwich and a drink on the train and I'm straight to bed. SAMANTHA: It's a bit like being a single parent family during the week. I know it sounds really weird but we sort of do things together and James isn't really a part of it because we can't make him a part of what we're doing because he's never here to be part of it. WARE: At the height of the chaos it was hard to know what was coming or going. GNER who runs the route of the legendary Flying Scotsman had to stop and start through 100 speed restrictions. How ever did Britain's railways suffer such an ignominious collapse? JOHN WARE Today I'm travelling on the mainline from Newcastle to London to find some answers and to ask some questions. The journey south on this GNER express takes me to York, Doncaster and past the crash site at Hatfield onto London. To understand the roots of this crisis we need to go back to rail privatisation. The system that replaced British Railways is so complicated most people struggle to understand it. GNER doesn't actually own this train, it leases it. Nor does it own the bridges, signals and tracks over which it runs. They're owned by Railtrack, the only privatised track authority in the world, which is why its sell off was so fiercely contested. [Conservative Party Conference, 1995] How often have you turned on the radio and heard another devastating blow has been dealt to the government's plans to privatise the railways? Rubbish! Privatisation is happening and it will bring better services to passengers. WARE: There were soothing assurances that in private hands what was seen as a national asset would be carefully maintained. [Rail privatisation advert] The interests of the travelling public and the interests of our shareholders are identical in producing a better, more reliable, more punctual railway. The government will soon be selling shares in Railtrack. WARE: Railtrack was a rush to cut price sale by the Tories. In fact they almost gave it away by writing off 1.2 billion pounds of BR's debt. Whatever the failings of British Rail, one thing was certain, at least you knew who was in charge. Now the system has been broken into 100 different pieces all held together by legal contracts. Welcome to the most fragmented railway in the world. ROGER FORD Modern Railways Magazine Undoubtedly the different parts of the railway don't really stick together. The trouble with legal contracts is that people take a contractual approach to matters and they may not necessarily do the commonsense thing if it disadvantages their company. WARE: Railtrack added to these problems by not checking to see just how warn out the track it now owned was. Although custodians of a vital national asset, the company failed to make a proper engineering assessment of its state, something the present rail regulator who overseas Railtrack is still urging them to do. TOM WINSOR Rail Regulator It's the company's responsibility to understand the condition, the capability and the capacity of their assets. They failed properly to understand the condition of their network and that, I think, has led to some very significant difficulties down the road. WARE: Railtrack entrusted maintenance of the track to a multitude of contractors. This further fragmented an already fragmented railway. In February 1997 came an early warning that the new system could lead to maintenance problems. Seven freight wagons crashed over a viaduct at Bexley in Kent. Miraculously no one died, though four people were seriously injured. The derailment was caused by rotting track timbers. The contractors had known this for 18 months, and so had Railtrack. All Railtrack had to do was monitor the contract and they didn't even do that. VIC COLEMAN HM Inspector of Railways Here was a piece of the infrastructure which was palpably beginning to look very, very aged and was prone to failure. It had been identified several times and that information had gone in to Railtrack. Railtrack appear to have failed to monitor what had been going on and to act to ensure that the network was safe. And as a result of that, we decided the matter was so serious, particularly after we'd drawn attention to the company and to Railtrack about this, that we prosecuted both the contractors and Railtrack. WARE: Following Bexley, poor track conditions, sloppy maintenance and a failure by Railtrack to check on the contractors led to a series of derailments across the country. The problems at Bexley and the derailments that followed had to do with Railtrack's failure to carry out a relatively simple task which was to monitor the work of the contractors. That's not a very testing task is it? STEVE MARSHALL Chief Executive, Railtrack Well it doesn't sound testing if you say it quickly. But the reality is that Railtrack was not set up with the people to actually itself conduct the detailed inspection and then verification of all of it there afterwards. WARE: Are you saying you're short-staffed? MARSHALL: No. I'm saying that those functions were principally carried out by our contractors. WARE: But you'd accept you didn't change your approach to contractors as fast as you could or should have done. MARSHALL: I certainly think in retrospect we probably should have made more changes more quickly. WARE: The way Railtrack was managing the maintenance of its network through contractors was to become a common theme, and ultimately a major factor in the crash at Hatfield. Next stop on our journey to Hatfield and beyond is York. This is a city that's had its fair share of bad luck in the last year. Hit by floods, then by rail chaos. In Selby outside York is this flourishing architect's practice. Their clients are spread far and wide across the country. The railways are their life support system. Normally London is just one hour fifty minutes away. We left them a camcorder during the Hatfield crisis to let off steam. ANDREW JENKINS The journey is anything between 3½ and 5 hours. You've got to get up a lot earlier which is pretty annoying. You get a lot less time down in London. Most of the time the days are wasted. Quite a few meetings have been cancelled because of the fact that I can't actually make the meetings because I've no idea what time the train is getting in. BEN SIMCOX Getting back home last night I had to actually go to the station to ask when the train was going to be because I couldn't get through on the help line, and they advised me not to even bother because there had been so many problems with the trains. CHRIS SHEARMAN Because the trains were unreliable I had to result in going to London in the car as thousands of others presumably did because I just had to sit it out on the M1 for hours and hours which took forever. That is not an enjoyable drive. WARE: Since David Ward founded the company 12 years ago it's prospered which is just as well because many businesses this size could not survive the losses caused by the rail crisis. DAVID WARD Director DWA Architects I worked out that the company as a whole, it's costing us in the order of £3,500 a week. So far that's cost us in the order of £40,000 and by the time the rail delays have been sorted out - of course there's no real date when that will happen at the moment - it's going to exceed £50,000 which is a substantial amount for us to bear. Somebody ought to pay us it back. It's not our fault. The compensation we've got back is figures £7, £11 for a journey delayed over two hours which is ridiculous. WARE: Today they're off to London to ensure they get to a meeting the next day. More hotel bills, lost working days, lower profits. This crisis has cost the economy an estimated £5 billion. None of this should have happened because back in 1995 New Labour in opposition said they wouldn't put up with a privatised railway. [Labour Party Conference, 1995] Let no one doubt that whatever happens to the railways in the next 18 months, and nobody is more committed than I am, a Labour Government will deliver on our commitment to a publicly owned, publicly accountable railway system. (Applause) WARE: In government Mr Blair promised to be radical and to change Britain with what he described as a modernising revolution. But, as he also said, government is about tough choices. New Labour's commitment to put the railways back together again was no longer a commitment. [Labour Party Conference, 1997] I oppose that Tory railway sell off with every fibre of my being and particularly coming from a railway family, and a record of privatisation confirms my judgment all the more. But as Tony Blair said, we don't approach these questions from dogma. The question is, is it in the public interest and does it work? WARE: Now New Labour had new commitments. What Mr Blair described in his election manifesto as "a covenant with the people to safeguard the environment and to fight pollution and congestion". But, once in power, according to leaked Cabinet notes, the Prime Minister decided that transport was not a priority. He spoke of having a covenant with the people, and one of the promises he made was to deliver a better.. a less congested transport system. Do you think he has delivered on that? DAVID WARD Director, DWA Architects I don't think he has today, no, not at all. There's no major improvement in any aspect of it so far. In fact I think in particular the road network seems a lot more congested than it was before. In fact one of the reasons we travel by train as much as we can is because the M1 and the A1 are terribly congested now. WARE: So when Mr Blair talks of their being a revolution, what's your response to that? WARD: Well it must be happening somewhere else. It isn't happening where I am. WARE: By 1998 with nearly 800 million pounds in profit since privatisation Railtrack was beginning to spend much more on the network. But the quality of the track had deteriorated and it was hard to catch up, especially since they still didn't know enough about it. TOM WINSOR Rail Regulator I have been pressing the company to establish a reliable and comprehensive database of the condition, capability and capacity of their assets. I have met some resistance from the company in that respect. The company has had three attempts to create the asset database and it still has failed. WARE: Although unaware of just how rundown their track and signals were, Railtrack came up with a plan to keep them in service beyond their expected replacement date. It was called 'Project Destiny'. So for signals, although 38% of them had been rated as having zero remaining life, Railtrack planned to extend the life of many of them for several years. WINSOR: Project Destiny was a way of sweating the assets, of renewing the assets based on their condition rather than simply their age. Now there's nothing wrong in making that change in maintenance practice as long as you have a sound knowledge of the underlying condition of the assets. If you don't have that, then that is a potentially difficult and dangerous practice. WARE: Why? WINSOR: Well because the assets may fail, as indeed they did in Hatfield. Or you may be storing up a backlog of maintenance which is going to be very disruptive to tackle all at one time. You're going to bunch things together. WARE: Project Destiny also prolonged the life of ballast and sleepers so that some sections of the track were not so firmly bedded down. This can explain why cups of coffee sometimes spill when you're on a train. Railtrack's culture of patch and mend further illustrated that maintenance was not being given the priority it needed, a culture that contributed to Hatfield. Next stop on our journey south - Doncaster. It may be 165 miles from London but in recent years Doncaster has seen an increase in commuting to the capital, part of the huge growth in rail travel due to sustained economic prosperity. Our London bound commuter, James Jeynes, is making one of the 200 million more train journeys since privatisation. His £6,500 season ticket goes to GNER's bank balance, almost none of it goes to Railtrack who are responsible for maintaining a track being hammered by increasing wear and tear. Most of your £6000 goes to GNER and doesn't in fact go to Railtrack, that's the way the system is structured. JAMES: If you look over the past few months I'd argue that GNER have performed better than Railtrack so I'm happy with that. WARE: Railtrack have often complained that because they didn't share in the benefits of increased rail travel they had no commercial incentive to spend more on the upkeep of the track even though more trains were going over them. STEVE MARSHALL Chief Executive, Railtrack In practice, at the time of privatisation, growth was not envisaged, and that is why Railtrack its revenue line was fixed by and large, it didn't participate in the benefits of growth, it wasn't actually even encouraged to invest in creating extra capacity in the network. WARE: Now Railtrack say of course that they weren't rewarded for this growth and therefore there was no incentive for them to spend a great deal more money on maintaining the track. Have they got a point? CHRISTOPHER GARNETT Chief Executive, GNER I think that's total rubbish. Their job is to maintain and run the network. I think there was an extraordinary arrogance in Railtrack who didn't really believe that this growth in passenger volume perhaps was going to go on and therefore this was a short-term phenomenon, they didn't need to worry about it and therefore weren't perhaps putting the investment in place. WARE: By late 1998 the consequences of Railtrack's repeated failure to give track maintenance the attention it deserved began to show. Broken rails, a fact of life on any railway, rose dramatically. ROGER FORD Modern Railways Magazine The broken rails is a fair indication of the state of maintenance, but it should have rung warning bells earlier than it did. WARE: Inspecting the 20,000 miles of track for defects is key to reducing rail breaks. Railtrack's only method of doing this was with hand-operated trolleys. They'd mothballed the 40 mile an hour machine because it was giving too many false readings. But instead of replacing it with something more modern, they stuck to the old methods. WARE: The criticism is that by mothballing this machine, even though it may have given a few false readings, you effectively turned your back on the advancing technology at the time, and that was available to you. MARSHALL: I certainly sign up to the broader point that you're making. All my sense is that there was insufficient focus on the benefits that better, more internationally available, technology could bring. The engineering focus in the company hasn't been strong enough in the past and that is changing. WARE: This is first and foremost a railway engineering company. It's the biggest railway engineering company in the British Isles. So what more important job was there for you to do but to have engineering as your principal focus, even five years ago? MARSHALL: It is a very important part of what the company is about. WARE: It's the most important isn't it? MARSHALL: Life isn't black and white. We're talking matters of degree here. It should be the clear number one focus. It wasn't the clear number one focus. WARE: What was. MARSHALL: You're wanting me to say profit and that isn't the answer actually. WARE: No, I'm asking you what was. MARSHALL: The initial focus at the time of privatisation was getting a completely newly created entity with a vast number of subcontracted arrangements to work. WARE: So much did Railtrack lose it's engineering focus that in the two years before Hatfield there wasn't even a railway engineer's position on the board. Finally we arrive at Hatfield. The crash here of a North bound express on this section of the track was the culmination of the repeated failure by Railtrack management to give maintenance the highest priority. GARY FELLOWES Horrendous noise, a grinding noise, seemed to fill up very quickly with thick dust. It was grinding against the gravel in between the tracks and started shaking very violently, and I was thrown from sort of side to side, thrown off my feet. WARE: This was the buffet car where Gary Fellowes was standing. FELLOWES: I could see the coach up ahead start to turn over, thinking well we're going to be next. It seemed to just keep going at speed. It didn't even seem to slow down, and I just thought well.. you know.. please, just stop. I can remember thinking I wonder if other people are okay. I wonder if anyone has actually lost their life. WARE: Four people did die and seventy were injured. The specific problem at Hatfield was a new form of metal fatigue called gauge corner cracking. This is a piece of rail from near the crash site. These metal fissures are the signs that bigger cracks may be working their way through the rail. The problem had been spreading across the network in the 90s, but unlike other countries' railways Railtrack seems not to have appreciated its significance. We have pieced together some of the key mistakes that led up to this accident. We've learnt that in January 1999 the maintenance contractor Balfour Beatty said the rail needed grinding. By shaving off the rail's surface this can stop the cracks from getting bigger. However, while this was common practice abroad, we understand that Railtrack had ceased grinding in 1996. STEVE MARSHALL Chief Executive, Railtrack The level of grinding that was done on the network in the early years was not sufficient, and the company had already made its mind up to increase that, and indeed had machines on order even prior to the accident at Hatfield. WARE: Not sufficient? As I understand it grinding was stopped altogether for a number of years. Isn't that right? MARSHALL: I don't believe it was stopped altogether but it was at too low a level. There is no doubt about that. WARE: However, we understand Railtrack did cease grinding in the face of vociferous opposition from a senior Railtrack engineer. It was reintroduced only last year. On what grounds did Railtrack cease grinding? TOM WINSOR Rail Regulator We believe that they stopped grinding because they regarded the benefit they got from rail grinding as not justifying the costs involved. WARE: Was that a valid judgment? WINSOR: It was a short-sighted judgment. WARE: We've obtained this document showing that in November 1999 Balfour Beatty recorded that the rail at Hatfield was showing clear signs of gauge corner cracking. It recommends the line be re-railed within six months. The clock was ticking. Four months later in March 2000 Railtrack gave the re-railing the highest priority and scheduled it for later than month. The job was given to a second contractor, Jarvis Fast Line. On the 19th March the busy East Coast Mainline was due to be closed to allow the job to begin. But because the Railtrack truck delivering the rail was late, that slot was missed. WINSOR: The main issue is that Railtrack, by its own admission, knew the condition of that rail and, nevertheless, the renewal.. the re-railing of that part of the track was deferred, it would appear, for too long whilst temporary speed restrictions were not put on the track. WARE: Jarvis now told Railtrack they needed five 8 hour shifts to complete the job. But Railtrack chose not to close the line for that long. It would have caused delays to the travelling public and cost Railtrack stiff penalties for the train operating companies. Railtrack managers were also on performance related bonuses. Are you satisfied that the performance bonus of Railtrack zone managers played no part, no part at all, in the decision to put back the re-railing of this section of track from the summer to the winter? STEVE MARSHALL Chief Executive, Railtrack Yes, I have absolutely no reason to think that that will be the case. If you're talking about the incentivisation of our senior managers, they have got a very balanced basis of incentivisation and safety is a significant element of their bonus, indeed the largest. WARE: The re-railing was further delayed 8 months to November, a full year after the original warning that it needed doing. There was one further opportunity to avert disaster, by imposing a speed limit. But nobody saw fit to do this despite severe damage being plainly visible to track patrolmen. The badly damaged rail held until just after noon on the 17th October. Travelling at 115 miles an hour the GNER express entered the long right-hand curve to Hatfield. At that speed, 450 tons of train was exerting enormous forces on a rail that had been progressively weakened. The rail shattered into 300 pieces. Railtrack insist there is no conflict between safety and commercial considerations. Investigators are examining whether there was in this particular case. GARY FELLOWES The fact that the train operating companies have been separated from the track maintenance, track owners, for instance GNER, Railtrack, I think that places commercial pressures on people, that with people's lives and safety at risk I don't think that's a very wise system. WARE: When the network was inspected after Hatfield, nearly 4,000 sites showed gauge corner cracking. Since Railtrack still hadn't compiled an asset register, it could not be confident of the state of its tracks. On went the speed restrictions and that's when the chaos started. WARE: To what extent do you see Hatfield, beyond of course the very tragic deaths, as in a sense all these chickens coming home to roost from all the mistakes that you made over the last several years since privatisation, the patch and mend culture, the short-sighted, cost-cutting measures and so on? To what extent do you see Hatfield as the manifestation of all those problems? MARSHALL: I think that's probably making it sound too neat. There are a number of issues that have got to be addressed, some of them indeed are legacies from the past and not least the huge under investment in our network. The important thing is how we go forward and how we address those things. WARE: Following Hatfield, to manage the chaos, the government set up an action group chaired by the Transport Minister Lord MacDonald. Last month Railtrack presented their latest progress report on removing speed restrictions. In explaining why the government wouldn't buy back Railtrack, John Prescott said he didn't want to make it's fat cat directors fatter. Now he's promising to rebuild the railways through what he calls a public/private partnership. And who are his main partners in this enterprise? The Railtrack directors. The Government's public/private partnership is at the heart of their ten year plan for the railways set out in a glossy brochure. The Deputy Prime Minister has made some extraordinary claims about how much will be spent on the railways under New Labour. [Labour Party Conference, 1999] A hundred new rail sections, a thousand new train services a year.. every day, and we are getting more rail investment for 10 years than the last 100 years. WARE: More than all the new lines, electrification, the engines and coaches of the last century? That does seem a bit far fetched. It would be wrong, wouldn't it, to say that there's going to be more rail investment in the next ten years than in the past hundred years? Lord MACDONALD Transport Minister More in this particular ten year period than the whole of the hundred years put together? WARE: Correct. MACDONALD: Yes, I wouldn't have thought that a statement like that would have been made. WARE: John Prescott said precisely that at the Labour Party Conference in 1999. But that couldn't possibly be true, could it? MACDONALD: Well what we know is that we've got a very big investment programme obviously going forward which I think would dwarf the investment of most comparable ten year periods over the past 100 years. WARE: Last year Mr Prescott made a slight adjustment to this claim. But it still sounded like the biggest investment programme in the history of the railways. [Labour Party Conference, 2000] So in the railways we'll see more investment in our railways in the next ten years than at any time since the age of steam. WARE: That's just as misleading isn't it? MACDONALD: No, what we're talking about here is a period of a decade, and the comparison clearly in any commonsensical reading of that would be that we were comparing decade with decade, period with period and what we are saying is that you will see a very significant increase over the next ten years, and that's obviously what the Deputy Prime Minister was saying there. WARE: The government may have promised 60 billion for rail under its ten year plan but most of this, 34 billion, is not guaranteed. It has to be raised from the private sector. The rest, 26 billion, comes from the public purse, the taxpayer. In real terms that's just 2½ billion more in public expenditure than was spent on the railways in the last ten years. The government, however, claims it represents a major increase because under the Tories, public subsidy to the railways was supposed to be phased out. [Labour Party Conference, 2000] New track, new trains, new signalling, new services, new stations, all done by New Labour. Is that a controversial way of putting it? WARE: We'll only get those if Railtrack and the train companies can raise the 34 billion private money, and to do that they must meet some very ambitious targets. First they'll have to increase their revenue with a 51% rise in new passengers like James Jeynes. After Hatfield that may be a triumph of hope over expectation. For some people, being at the mercy of a railway you can no longer rely on has proved too much. With cars increasingly jamming the roads, there's only one place left to go. Since Hatfield there's been a 14% jump in air travel thanks to disgruntled rail passengers. The Midland Mainline from Sheffield to London has had to compete with a new air taxi service. 1st PASSENGER: I was on the train shortly after Hatfield, and after sitting for five hours on the train it gets very soul destroying. 2nd PASSENGER: I used to use trains all the time, but of course before Christmas with all the trouble on the trains, I had to cancel all my appoints. WARE: If they set this service up permanently do you think you'll stick with this or will you go back to the trains if they get back to normal. 1st PASSENGER: If this is a permanent trip then yes, I would stick with this trip. WARE: For the business traveller used to first class this service from Sheffield could be a flier. The organisers of the air taxi, home to replace this small aircraft with a 46 seater. Okay, so it was quick and it was reliable. But it must have cost you a bomb. 2nd PASSENGER: No actually it's not that much more expensive, about £30 or £40. WARE: Since Hatfield one of the railways longest standing freight customers has also been taking to the air. Loss of business from old friends like the Post Office also threatens the Government's ten year plan since it depends on the train companies earning extra profits from an 80% increase in rail freight. At the height of the Hatfield crisis the Royal Mail hired up to 32 extra aircraft because they no longer trusted the train. PAUL BATESON Logistics Director, The Post Office That confidence has been severely dented and we look for action to demonstrate the fact that it is going to improve, not promises but action. The thing that the Post Office is looking for above all else is speed and reliability. If we don't have speed and reliability we can't improve the services for our customers. So therefore that's what we look for the rail industry to provide. If the rail industry can't provide that, then we're going to have to.. in part we're going to have to use other modes of transport to actually give the service to our customers. WARE: The loss of confidence by both freight and passengers threatens the extra revenue so vital to the ten year plan. Back on our journey James Jeynes is at last approaching the end of the line. JAMES: Here we are at King's Cross, ten to ten and that's about an hour longer than normal. But this is where my day starts, so now I'm into the tube. Se you later. WARE: Here in London there's another threat to the ten year plan. For train companies to carry so many more passengers Railtrack will have to build new lines, and to do this they'll need to raise billions from the City. But the chaos of Hatfield has turned Railtrack's profits into losses. Railtrack is running short of cash to service the huge loans it's required to take on under the ten year plan. By 2006 some projections put Railtrack's debt at 14½ billion. The interest will be over 1 billion a year. We found deep scepticism in the City that Railtrack will be making anything like enough to afford this. RICHARD HANNAH Transport Analyst, Deutsche Bank The full ten year plan can't be financed from today's revenue stream from Railtrack. On our calculations the net debt rises to around £14 billion by 2006 which is very difficult to finance from the sort of revenue stream this company has got. So I think it'll have to be scaled back from what the government's dream for the industry is. WARE: In fact we understand Railtrack is already scaling back the dream. The plan calls for 8 billion pounds worth of projects from Railtrack over the next five years. But after Hatfield they're so pushed for cash they're already talking abut reducing this to 2 billion and have begun negotiating with the government. You don't think you're going to have to scale back this ten year plan? Lord MACDONALD Transport Minister We don't at the moment see that there's any possibility that we would be required to scale back on the ten year plan. WARE: Railtrack are already having to scale back on some of the projects that had been planned for the first five years of the ten year plan. There's been talk to us of scaling back 8 billion pounds worth of projects to perhaps two or three billion. MACDONALD: Well we, of course, are in negotiation..... WARE: That's three quarters of the projects planned for the first half of the ten year plan. MACDONALD: We are in negotiation with Railtrack at the moment and clearly if people are in a negotiating position you would expect to hear loud squeals of anguish coming through. WARE: The travelling public have now been told that 85% of rail services are back to normal. But even before Hatfield 'normal' meant a service that overall was getting later and less reliable. The government may have a plan for the railways but beyond Hatfield, delivery is what the people are crying out for. PASSENGER: If you want confidence back in the trains then it's going to have to improve no end. It's just gone down hill, down hill, down hill. When's it going to be back together and will it be better? _________ www.bbc.co.uk/panorama CREDITS Reporter John Ware Film Camera Jonathan Young Tony Poole Sound Recordists Jon Gilbert George Kidson Dubbing Mixer Nick Berry VT Editor Boyd Nagle Graphic Design Kaye Huddy Julie Tritton Colourist Jon Dixon Film Research Eamonn Walsh Research David Lee Production Team Charlotte Simmonds Kath Posner Susan Anstee Production Manager Yolanda Ayres Unit Manager Maria Ellis Film Editor Simon Thorne Assistant Producers Darren Kemp Sarah Gregory Producer Aidan Laverty Deputy Editors Clive Edwards Karen O'Connor Editor Mike Robinson 2 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Transcribed by 1-Stop Express Services, London W2 1JG Tel: 0207 724 7953 E-mail 1-stop@msn.com