Here’s a thought. You’re one of the unfortunate hundreds of thousands who commute to work by #southernfail – sorry, Southern rail. Your daily life is blighted by delays, ticket price rises, poor customer service, faults, strikes and the relentlessly crushing experience of standing before a giant board on which the word “Cancelled” is coupled to your train. The only guarantee left is that you won’t get a seat. Until Jacques Peretti comes along with a slightly mad idea that, if nothing else, will result in an excellent BBC documentary. He takes you to the pub for a pint and a packet of peanuts. He poses a question: “Why don’t you take over your own train and run it yourselves?”
This is the utopian premise of Peretti’s latest documentary, The Passengers That Took On the Train Line (BBC2). In 2016, with the contract for Southeastern trains – which, like Southern, is run by the UK’s busiest rail operator, Govia – due to expire in six months, Peretti found five dissatisfied commuters (it didn’t take long) and followed their bid to take over the franchise. Hindsight is its own spoiler and sadly we know that Southeastern is not currently being run by a small band of disgruntled commuters living in Kent and thereabouts. It’s probably the only thing we do know.
Anyway, never mind the destination. The journey to inevitable disappointment is fascinating and Peretti is a reliable driver who gets us where we need to go on time. Which, I warn you, is a place of rage at the disgraceful state of our privatised railway system. If you have any anger left – and this documentary would have benefited from being shown in the week before the general election – you may as well direct it here. At the Department for Transport, for having neither the “imagination” nor “guts” (Peretti’s words) to welcome the commuters’ perfectly sensible bid. Or at the rail minister and Southeastern, neither of whom would be interviewed. Or at the bizarre fact that public expenditure on railways has more than doubled since privatisation began, at a £4bn cost to taxpayers a year. Or at a preposterously convoluted and unregulated system that means 70% of our railways are owned by foreign companies and £3.5bn in profits has gone to shareholders instead of being reinvested over the past decade. As Peretti puts it, British commuters are in effect subsidising German, French and Dutch commuters.
And so to “the people’s railway” team. James is a sales manager who commutes from Kent to Waterloo and misses putting his children to bed. Chrissy, an office manager commuting to south-east London, has had it with “waiting for a train that sometimes never comes”. Ross is the smooth-talking one who would win if this were The Apprentice. And Peretti also manages to get Chris Marsh on board, a top railway consultant and apple cart upsetter who clearly relishes the fact that nothing like this has ever been done before.
They have a website, office and 130 years of railway experience behind them. They go to Switzerland, which, despite also having a competitive franchise system, boasts one of the best railways in the world. Trains that run on time! And don’t break down! “Wonderful,” gasps Chrissy at the board at Zurich station displaying not one delay. They visit a not-for-profit heritage railway and a train manufacturing company, where they find out what £100m – the amount of profit Southern rail owner Go-Ahead, which co-owns Govia, made last year – can buy: roughly four 10-carriage trains. No matter: it turns out franchise owners don’t actually buy trains, so there is no incentive to invest in them.
They email their application to the DFT and Peretti gets a bit teary at the optimism of it all. Then the DFT comes back demanding £50m as proof of their financial viability. “They’re trying to frighten us,” says Kate, one of the team. The bid hangs on a knife-edge until Ross finds a social investor willing to back them and Louise Ellman, who chairs the Commons transport select committee and who has declared the entire franchise railway system unfit for purpose, tells them not to give up.
“It’s the passengers who are losing out,” she tells Peretti with a glint in her eye. “Keep going.” And they do. OK, so the project is derailed in the end, but as Marsh says: “We have exposed the system for what it is.” And that, ultimately, is how all change begins.
