Railtrack chief puts blame on design of trains

The chief executive of Railtrack blamed the wrong sort of trains yesterday for the state of the network.

The chief executive of Railtrack blamed the wrong sort of trains yesterday for the state of the network.

Gerald Corbett said Railtrack should in future have a much bigger role in the design of rolling stock to ensure it was compatible with the rails.

"At the moment there are trains on the track that we, who own the track, have no say in designing. That can't be right," he told the Confederation of British Industry's national conference. A Railtrack spokesman added that a "generic" design of train would be helpful.

In response to the Hatfield rail crash last month, which was caused by a broken rail, Railtrack is making an urgent study to establish how the track came to fail even though it was less than five years old.

Metallurgical experts from Imperial College, London, and Nottingham University have been called in to establish the cause of the "gauge corner cracking" that caused the rail to break. Mr Corbett said Railtrack must get to the bottom of the "wheel-rail relationship".

He promised that the network would "steadily improve" and that by Christmas the serious and widespread disruption caused by his company's maintenance blitz would largely be over.

Railtrack has replaced more than 50 miles of track since Hatfield, including some rails at Wimbledon, south London, which were found to have suffered gauge corner cracking even though they were not yet a year old.

Mr Corbett admitted that part of the industry's problem was the way Railtrack had split the engineering culture that existed in the old British Rail and separated track maintenance from renewal. But he saidthe rail system was safer and better than it was at the time of privatisation, saying that performance had improved 44 per cent in the past four years. Business leaders supported Mr Corbett's idea of building a dedicated line for freight trains.

Earlier, the Transport minister Lord Macdonald of Tradeston had appeared to endorse Mr Corbett when he said: "A strong, stable and well run Railtrack is essential to sorting out the problems of the railways." His remarks were taken as a coded message of support for the beleaguered Railtrack chief after the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, pointedly refused to say he had full confidence in Mr Corbett.

Lord Macdonald arrived late at the CBI after being held up by a traffic jam in Birmingham, but said he would have been later had he taken the train. Mr Corbett also travelled up from London by car.

The minister reiterated the Government's hard line on fuel taxes, saying the 26p cut per litre in duty demanded by protestors would mean an immediate increase in interest rates, less help for pensioners and less investment in schools, hospitals, crime prevention and public transport. But he insisted that the Government was "pro car" and, referring to the hauliers' difficulties, added: "We are listening."

Among the concessions likely to be announced today in the Chancellor's pre-Budget report are a cut in vehicle excise duty for heavy lorries and plans to make foreign hauliers pay for a disc to drive in Britain.

The director general of the CBI, Digby Jones, criticised the shadow Chancellor, Michael Portillo, for refusing to commit a future Conservative government to Labour's 10-year £180bn transport plan. Mr Jones was "very disappointed" and said the CBI intended to keep up the pressure on the Tories. Mr Jones also disagreed with Mr Corbett that a new law on corporate man-slaughter would reduce safety on the railways.

Mr Corbett said it would introduce a culture of secrecy and blame in which executives were constantly watching their own backs. But Mr Jones said: "Any new corporate manslaughter legislation would make those who are possibly in the firing line make safety their number one, two and three priority."