February 8th - The Great British Railways Looks For A Home
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Much fanfare was made this week by transport secretary Grant Schapps about a competition to find a city to house the headquarters of The Great British Railways company. But what exactly is it? I take you through what the remit of the body is and what they'll be looking to do to help return Britain's rail industry to past glory.
There's also an exciting exclusive about who the finalists will be for the race to be granted the headquarters, and why it's not such a competition after all...
Of course this podcast is completely free, as is my weekly travel email. You can sign up at independent.co.uk/newsletters.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, whether you're just dreaming of a great escape, looking forward to one or actually away and having the time of your life, which I am, I guess, at the moment, I'm on a train that is going through the beautiful new forest in Hampshire. |
| 0:26.0 | And while dusk is certainly sidling up on the scenery, it is a joy to be on a train. |
| 0:34.7 | And talking of trains, well, I wanted to talk about Great British Railways. You may be aware that this organisation |
| 0:45.3 | has decided that it needs to ask the public where it should put its headquarters. And we can talk about that in just a moment, but first of all, |
| 0:56.7 | I thought I should explain what great British Railways actually is. Those of you who can |
| 1:03.3 | remember back as far as the mid-90s, no, I can't either, we'll recall that there was an organisation called British Rail. |
| 1:13.5 | And the idea was that it effectively owned all the infrastructure, the lines, the stations, |
| 1:21.5 | the rolling stock as well. And it organised the trains so that there was a hopefully half decent service. |
| 1:30.3 | Well, in the mid-1990s privatisation happened and everything split up. |
| 1:36.3 | And what we had up until the start of the pandemic was slightly creaky system, |
| 1:43.3 | but one which had kind of got run in and this was the idea |
| 1:49.5 | as I drifted across this beautiful heathland absolutely lovely it's the line I'm just |
| 1:56.5 | coming up to Brockner's station which is really at the heart of the new forest anyway you have |
| 2:02.9 | network rail which owns the infrastructure that's actually part of the department for transport |
| 2:09.1 | and then you have lots of train operators running services and with the awards of franchises |
| 2:17.2 | these haven't been always very successful, |
| 2:20.9 | and indeed we're on the second go of the East Coast mainline being taken into private ownership, |
| 2:27.6 | and it seems to be working very well. |
| 2:30.2 | As soon as a pandemic happened, everything went out of the window. All the plans that people had for revenue just were utterly shattered. |
| 2:41.0 | And the part of the problem for the railways nowadays is of course that they really don't have any money. |
| 2:47.0 | And there's not, well, I'm just looking at this, so so where are we 20 past 5 important line between |
| 2:55.4 | Bournemouth and Southampton and I think it's half a dozen people in this carriage so |
... |
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