Use of fax machines by Northern shows our railways are off track - Andrew Vine
The fax machine, that feature of office life from 40 years ago, is alive and kicking in the offices of Northern Rail instead of enjoying a well-deserved retirement in a museum of how we used to work, alongside the typewriter and from somewhat earlier, the quill pen and inkwell.
Those of us of a certain vintage who grew up in workplaces where the fax was a cutting-edge bit of kit recall its peculiar electronic chirruping sound with a touch of affectionate nostalgia.
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Hide AdIt’s part of our past, good in its day, but life has moved on and so have we.


Except the rail unions haven’t. While the rest of the world emails, they cling to long-ago agreements that Northern Rail must send rosters and diagrams to train crews by fax.
It makes you wonder what other inviolable agreements from the 1980s might be lurking in the filing cabinets of Northern Rail.
Compulsory curly perms? Pac-Man video games for crews on their breaks? Rubik cubes for all?
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Hide AdWhat a farce. Rail North, the transport body involving all the region’s mayors, received the news that faxes are still in use with incredulity.
But passengers might just have shrugged their shoulders. Braced for a winter of delays and cancellations, with reduced services in the run-up to Christmas guaranteed to kill any seasonal cheer for travellers stone-dead, nothing about the railways surprises them any more.
And for the privilege of using this dreadful service, those passengers will have to fork out 4.6 per cent more in fares from March, or pay a £5 increase for most railcards.
This is simply not good enough. After years of berating the Conservatives for failing to address the woeful transport the north has to endure, it is up to the government to sort it out urgently.
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Hide AdNorthern Rail is a nationalised franchise, so the buck for its failings stops with ministers who must insist rail unions adopt the working practices of the 21st century instead of being stuck in a bygone era.
The trouble is, the government shows little current sign of being willing to do that, or able to give us the transport we deserve. And in one key respect it is making matters worse.
Passengers stranded on freezing platforms in the weeks ahead, in places such as Huddersfield, the UK’s capital of train cancellations, might well ask themselves why, when train drivers were handed a 15 per cent pay increase to end two years of strikes, it didn’t come with the proviso of sweeping away outdated nonsense like communicating by fax.
Or why a pay rise that gives drivers wages which many hard-working owners of independent Yorkshire businesses can only dream of, wasn’t conditional on new contracts guaranteeing crews are available to run trains seven days a week.
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Hide AdThe people waiting for trains that don’t come or arrive late will not have been greatly reassured by the Chancellor’s announcement in last week’s budget that Northern Powerhouse rail will be fully funded.
Welcome news to be sure, but the prospect of greatly improved trans-Pennine links and giving Bradford proper connections to the network lies years in the future, even if it goes ahead with none of the mismanagement, delays and overspends that have crippled high-speed rail.
For the foreseeable future, public transport looks likely to creak as badly as it has for the past decade-and-a-half.
As for the government making matters worse, how else is it possible to regard its decision to increase the cap on bus fares from £2 to £3?
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Hide AdThat 50 per cent hike will make life harder for the much-vaunted “working people” the government talks endlessly about who have taken enthusiastically to using buses since the flat-rate fares were introduced.
Here was a progressive and successful measure – one of the few truly positive legacies of the Conservatives’ later years – that persuaded people to leave their cars at home, reducing both congestion and pollution, yet it has been undermined.
As a mean-spirited decision that puts pressure on the poorest people, it stands alongside removing the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners.
Because most of the focus on public transport issues is usually concerned with the dire state of the railways, it’s too easy to forget that for countless people in Yorkshire who never or rarely use trains, buses are much more important.
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