King of Tracks

If you get on an early-morning train somewhere on the Oxford line and notice a crop-haired man in a train worker’s jacket sinking a little lower in his seat, you’re probably squashed next to the head of Britain’s rail network.

Iain Coucher wears his Network Rail coat, with a badge displaying his name and title, whenever he travels. “If you don’t believe me, look, here’s my iPod,” he says, emptying the pockets of the anorak hanging on the back of his executive chair.

It’s brave, because only a few months after he became chief executive, the company had a PR disaster. Tens of thousands of passengers were left without trains on the West Coast line because Network Rail couldn’t finish repairs in time.

Mr Coucher, whose organisation demands £5 billion of taxpayers’ money a year, will receive the biggest public questioning of his life in front of MPs in the next few days.


He says that when commuters nobble him on the train, their attitude is . . . what? Tearful? Hostile? Violent? No, he says: “Sympathetic.”

What? They don’t complain, not even since the new year fiasco?

“No, no, they don’t complain.” This is hard to believe. “Honestly, I kid you not. A couple of people will say, ‘I’ve had disrupted journeys’.” And here he recounts being on a train down from Bolton last week, which came to a grinding halt.

“The driver spoke about a signalling problem. In reality, we were actually held there because we had reports of vandals putting stuff on the track, and we wanted to make sure it had been cleared. So when I spoke to them, they went, ‘Thank you very much for explaining, now I understand. Can you tell me about the works on the West Coast? When are they going to be completed?’.”

They talk of “disrupted journeys” rather than complain – through the sheer steely force of his character Mr Coucher manages to transform what sounds like a grumble into a vote of support.

It is a talent that will serve him well in the coming weeks as, after the honeymoon years when everyone was just so pleased they were better than the old Railtrack, Mr Coucher is coming under fire from all sides.

His task is to drag a Victorian system into the 21st century, making Britain a greener, faster, prouder nation. Fans say this driven “hard man” (“I’m ambitious, I’m driven, I like to push people hard”) is one of the few people forceful enough for this challenge, but he can also be just as dogmatic in his resistance to radical change.

On a rail map of Britain on his wall, his 12-year-old son has written his father’s job description in felt tip, “King of Tracks/Dad”.

Yet our King of the Tracks is an unlikely railwayman, arriving almost by chance via aviation and IT: he rides a mountain bike, and confesses to sometimes driving home in his Aston Martin.

As a boy he preferred Airfix planes to train sets, never wanted to be an engine driver, and the closest he came to feeling that trainspotter tingle was illegally jumping across the tracks that ran near the back of his home in Leeds.

“Like many kids, I was bored, I found myself playing on the railways. Only now do I realise the danger of doing so.”

Does he love trains? “I’ve learnt to love them . . . It’s now reaching a point where we are seeing a genuine renaissance in rail. For the past 50 years or so, it was an industry which wasn’t going anywhere, and now we’re combining the heritage and legacy that we’ve got, a proud history of huge great bridges and stations and saying, ‘Actually, we’re going to build something new and better’.”

On the back of his office door are lots of drawings that his children have done of trains, all with plumes of smoke.

“They say choo-choo, and they go clackety-clack, which of course trains don’t do these days. They have never seen a steam train as far as I know, but they still like to draw steam coming out of trains. It’s a little thing that makes me smile.”

So his children didn’t learn that the sounds trains emit is not choo-choo but “we’re sorry for the delays”?

“No because there’s never any delays,” he says with a wry smile – delays, have, admittedly, fallen dramatically.

Later, when one of us complains that a romantic weekend was spoilt by an eternal rain journey, he jokes about providing “quality time”.

He’s mostly deadly serious about modernising. “Because we’ve got such a huge demand for railway now, we need to do things differently. We now need to run railways every single day of the week, we need to run them on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

“We have traditionally taken weekends and Bank Holidays to do engineering work, but we know that there is demand to use the railways 365 days a year so we’ve got to change what we do and how we do it, and find ways in which we can do both: improve the railway, invest in the railway; and allow people to use it later at night, earlier in the morning, Bank Holidays and weekends.” It sounds as if he is planning to put the trains on his own relentless work schedule.

He gets up at 6am in his London pad, at which time he will, most mornings, be greeted by a call telling him of problems on their 22,000 miles of track. Anything serious, they’ll wake him in the night. He works until 8pm, and goes home to his family in Banbury only on Wednesday nights and weekends.

“I’m sure that my family would like to see me more, but I try to make the most of what time I have with them.” When things go wrong, as with this new year, journalists camp outside his home: “It’s difficult on the family.”

Meanwhile, Mr Coucher was hauled in to see the Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, recently. Was she furious? “I’m not going to say exactly the mood of the meeting, but it was – you know, we let the passengers down, we let our stakeholders down, and we resolved to make sure that doesn’t happen again. But, yeah, it was serious stuff.”

Some were surprised that Mr Coucher was not more visible during that crisis. What they did not know was that just as the news broke, his father died. When we ask about it, he says: “I don’t want people to use that as an excuse.”

Once, he said that his job was the most thankless in Britain. “Sometimes it feels like that,” he says. “It can be a thankless task, because we are measured against perfection.

“For us, if everything goes perfectly, everybody’s happy, but sadly we’re such a large railway, moving parts, so many things going on in any one day, roughly 10 per cent of the trains will be late. With three million people travelling every day, that’s a lot of people that can be affected. So, you know, always, at some part of the country, that somebody’s going to be upset.

“But,” he says quickly, aware he has become downbeat, “we’ve made a huge difference in what we do, which in itself is translated into a much better railway for people who use it every single day, so that side is very rewarding.

“It’s a great challenge, and I’ve always been attracted by challenges and seemingly impossible jobs, and this is one of those.”

Is his determination blinding him to the need for change? Over the new year he said that the disruptions were “inexcusable” – a nod, perhaps to the weariness train users have with endless and sometimes farcical excuses for train delays. In the intervening weeks he seems to have mustered his, well, excuses.

Of course, “with hindsight”, he would have done things differently, and he’s very sorry, but the project was huge, the timescale was short, etc, etc. He excuses himself at length without addressing the reasons for his failure.

He hopes that MPs will give him an “objective and fair hearing”, but instead they may challenge him on greater reform.

What about changing the strange, nonaccountable nature of Network Rail’s board?

“The last thing that this industry can need is fundamental change. We have got too big an agenda now, that the passengers need investment, we need to get on and do that, quickly and efficiently without having to constantly reexamine structures and . . . We can’t hang around, there’s a lot of work to be done.”

What about experimenting with a company owning track and trains? “The last thing this industry needs is radical restructuring and change. The passengers won’t see a better railway for it, it won’t save any money, it won’t make it any safer and it won’t make it perform better . . . Change will be the enemy of the passenger.”

Mr Coucher may be the man with a great, Victorian-scale vision, for a second age of the train. But first he has to get on friendly terms with change.