Reviewed by Ken Westcar, board member of Transport Action Ontario
Railway historians, enthusiasts and planners will revel in this compendium of industry experience, logic and pragmatism. In How the Railways Will Fix the Future: Rediscovering the Essential Brilliance of the Iron Road Gareth Dennis leverages his career in UK railway engineering and global research to analyse and synthesize what good looks like in railway passenger service delivery and leaves to the reader to decide on their level of faith, hope or hopelessness depending on where they live.
Maintaining a reader’s interest is achieved through an historic perspective of railway technology, it’s appeal to early entrepreneurs – “the robber barons” – and its continued development driven by customer demand and latterly, rapid technological progress. Dennis’s analysis of railway failures, primarily policy blunders and short-termism, is particularly informative.
His personal experiences with a nationalised British Rail at the pinnacle of its technological prowess and subsequent dismantling and dissolution under privatisation is a particularly tragic tale. Considering that the overall customer experience has not greatly improved and supporting services such as ticketing, on-time performance and modal integration remain somewhat chaotic, Dennis largely eviscerates the claimed benefits of privatisation. He also muses as to why travellers are returning to the railways en-masse despite frequent service shortcomings.
For passenger railways to take their rightful place in modern society, Dennis argues that countries need to develop a railway culture. In modern society where convenience and emotive choices make cars the default mobility choice for most, the reader must decide the degree to which this is possible. Nevertheless, he explores ways of achieving this and its importance to societies seeking sustainable mobility and quality of life for its citizens.
His rather utopian view of the role of railways is likely aspirational, except in forward-thinking European and Asian countries where national mobility policy is entrenched rather than subject to political opportunism, lack of investment continuity, meddling and the interests of third parties.
His paragraphs on operational safety discuss how focus on this can easily be lost in a fragmented corporate environment where management and policy directives can be bereft of ground-level operating experience and expert input from hands-on people are disregarded. Descriptions of resultant tragedies illustrate his points. He rightly argues that, without exception, the safety of employees and passengers must be fundamental to all aspects of railway operations
Dennis also argues for vertical integration of national passenger operations and suggests that regional planning and operation under the umbrella of a national authority would ensure a high level of service delivery. This includes the direct ownership of rolling stock rather than provision by rent-seeking lessors thereby ensuring that fleet renewal and refurbishment is under direct control of operating departments and meets both regional and national market needs.
Followers of the passenger rail industry know that desultory and ad-hoc investment in infrastructure, signalling and rolling stock, often resulting from opportunistic and myopic politics, drive up the capital costs of system modernisation, expansion and modal integration. Dennis discusses this in some detail while suggesting it acts to dissolve an otherwise cohesive engineering, procurement and project management talent pool. Real innovation, a favoured buzzword of politicians, is similarly inhibited. When in-house talent is lost, a phalanx of consultants is required who may perform to the letter of their contracts but mostly lack the intrinsic ownership generated by a project pipeline executed internally under lucid, visionary and experienced management. Dennis laments on such events during his career to buttress his vertical integration argument.
For those interested in the minutia of passenger rail ancillary services, Dennis’s book is informative and readily convinces the reader that running passenger trains is more than just rails, rolling stock and motive power. Indeed, the complexity he describes needs to be fully understood by those advocating for improved services and the politicians and industry leaders seeking ribbon-cutting and photo ops within their proscribed terms in office. He convinces readers that robust, long-term national policy is critical in ensuring projects are completed on-time and on-budget while meeting or exceeding performance expectations. His contrarian arguments about over reliance on business cases makes good reading.
After reading Dennis’s book it is obvious that the U.S.A. and Canada are relative basket cases for the widespread development of customer-friendly intercity passenger operations on mostly host railways. He puts forward excellent arguments as to why Class 1, privately owned freight infrastructure will always inhibit passenger traffic even with federally mandated access and despatching. Precision Scheduled Railroading, longer freight trains, deregulation and the relentless attack on operating ratios mandated by investors are the primary reasons. Dennis also questions the sustainability and safety of such extreme asset-sweating.
It is difficult to summarise such a rich work as “How The Railways Will Fix The Future” but it provides measuring tools and solutions for national passenger rail systems that are both informative and educational. Dennis’s prose is concise and easy on the eye making it a good investment for those with an interest in the potential of passenger trains in society.
Find the book at your local independent bookstore: https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781915672483/