Bernard Ginns: If you want the North to be an economic success, you have to speed up journey times

The opening gambit in my interview with Alex Hynes wasn’t designed to provoke, but I thought I detected some bristle in the 38-year-old managing director of Northern Rail.

The time-served culture is one of the things that privatisation did away with, he responded assuredly. Perhaps I was imagining it.

Quick to rile or not, you don’t get to the top of the railway industry without having a tough exterior and a shrewd, political mind.

Hynes grew up in Manchester and crossed the Pennines to read economics at Leeds University.

His fast-track career started at Halcrow, the engineering consultancy, where he spent five years. Next came roles as an economist and policy manager at the Office of Rail Regulation, giving him an insight into the Government side of the railway industry.

He switched tracks back to the private sector in 2005 with senior positions at the Go Ahead Group before taking the top job at Northern Rail, Britain’s largest train operating company, in 2013.

The joint venture between Serco and Abellio started operating the Northern Rail franchise as a seven-year contract in 2004 and won a series of short-term extensions resulting from delays in Network Rail’s refranchising schedule that Hynes said have “blighted” the delivery of improvements.

He said: “Before I joined - through no fault of Northern’s - not a great deal had happened. In the last two years, a tremendous amount has happened, a lot is happening this year but compared to what happens in the next 44 months, it’s nothing.”

Hynes has been telling his 5,100-plus staff that the new franchise from April 2016 will be “unrecognisable” to what has gone before in terms of investment in services and stations.

He believes that the new franchise will deliver a local transport network that is ready for HS2, the high-speed train link that is set to roll into Leeds by 2033.

As for HS3, Hynes said there has to be a new line, a four-track railway, across the Pennines, beyond the planned electrification, which is scheduled for completion in 2022. “Clearly, the Chancellor, the Government and Transport for the North have recognised that even with that upgrade, journey times and capacity will remain an issue and if you are trying to make the North of England function as an economic unit in its own right, you have got to speed up journey times,” he told me.

“I spend a lot of time on TransPennine Express as you might imagine and it is slow. It is a great product, but it is slow. It is quicker to get to London from Newcastle than it it is to get from Newcastle to Liverpool.”

His is a good argument, but whether the Chancellor can afford it is another matter. George Osborne is seeking £20bn worth of public spending cuts for tomorrow’s five year spending review.

The new £100bn Infrastructure Commission has called for submissions by January 16 and is prioritising northern connectivity, London’s transport system and energy supply. Of those, the capital will trump the others with its business case based on the best returns on investment, which means the North will be needing some strong political advocacy sooner rather than later.

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