Ian Yeowart, Managing Director of Grand Central
Ian Yeowart is inching towards giving Sunderland a direct train link to London. He tells Chris Gray about the battle to make Grand Central a reality and why success will be a vindication of former BR staff.
On entering Grand Central's York headquarters, it is clear you have arrived at a start-up railway operator.
The front room of the converted Victorian terrace is full of the clutter needed by a company hoping to be a few weeks away from launching main line long-distance train services. Rule books are stacked up in piles, conductors' handbooks sit ready in cardboard boxes, and artist impressions of staff uniforms are propped up against the wall.
Marilyn Monroe gazes serenely down on the chaos from a poster showing her at Grand Central station in New York City, bought for 50p at a car boot sale by Ian Yeowart's wife Sue. It was an astute purchase, as the poster has provided the name and distinctive branding for the Grand Central venture.
The scene is a world away from Sea Containers House, the plush Thames-side headquarters of the Bermuda-registered owners of GNER, who proved the most fierce opponents of Grand Central's aim to run direct services from Sunderland to London on the East Coast main line.
Down in the basement, Ian is deep in telephone conversation as he tries to bring together train refurbishment, catering and clothing suppliers, staff training and timetabling issues for services to start on 20 May.
When he frees himself from the phone, he admits the deadline is under threat because although the first carriages were on schedule to be finished by the end of April, the power cars will not be ready on time.
He had hoped to sub-lease power cars in time for the deadline, but that proved impossible, as the National Express carriages themselves needed to go into works.
Despite the setback, he is absolutely confident direct Sunderland to London services will be running in September, as Grand Central now owns its own trains, has a track access agreement, an accepted safety case to run them, 31 staff appointed and in training, timetable slots for three services agreed with Network Rail and negotiations continuing about a fourth.
Details of staff uniforms are being finalised, menus have been worked out, Heaton depot in Newcastle has been lined up to maintain the trains, wi-fi suppliers are ready to equip the carriages. Everything is in place. Ian says Grand Central decided to buy the trains outright, through a sister company Sovereign Trains, rather than lease them so "we have control over our own destiny".
"We had to convert the trains from Mark 3 loco-hauled to HST but that's good for the industry because there's a whole fleet of them lying around.
"Once we have done the work then the principle for making the modifications is already there, and owning your own trains means we have guaranteed access to them and takes us away from reliance on others."
Such independence is close to Ian's heart. After spending seven years trying to launch an open access operation, first across the Pennines and then on the East Coast main line, he can now finally see his plans coming to fruition and he does not want them endangered by reliance on any other company.
The challenge now is to demonstrate he can do what he has spent years being told he will not be able to do, and fighting people who want to stop him doing it.
Chief among those opponents was GNER, which appealed against the Office of Rail Regulation's decision to give Grand Central track access, and claimed Ian's venture would waste taxpayers' money by eating into GNER's market.
The battle has clearly left its mark on Ian, who frequently talks about his "disappointment" with GNER, who he says not only opposed his plans but refused to co-operate with a driver training programme even after it had lost its franchise.
Its attitude and also that of "certain people in government" was in marked contrast to the support from North East councils, who saw the help the service could be in regenerating towns on Grand Central's route, he says.
"The thing that is vital for these arteries in the North East is the visibility we give them in London. At King's Cross you never see the names Sunderland, Hartlepool or Teesside. They just don't appear but they will now every day.
"Suddenly these places are on the map. They've all been regenerated in the past few years, although they are behind bigger centres like Leeds or Newcastle, but Hartlepool is well worth a day out. The marina is spectacular and the front is pretty good. That's one of the things we will try and market for them."
And Ian doesn't do a bad line in marketing, arguing that Hartlepool has better sand than Scarborough, and on a hot day "apart from the accents, you could be in Spain".
He's enthusiastic about the regeneration potential of Grand Central, not just for the North East but for the West Yorkshire towns of Halifax, Bradford and Huddersfield, which he hopes to serve by the end of 2008.
But the real drive for his ambitions, as well as the profit motive, business challenge, and love of the railway - his father was a signaller and his grandfather a stationmaster - is to prove wrong a point he believes was unfairly made on privatisation.
"All us railwaymen were told we were useless. We didn't have any commercial bones in our bodies therefore we had to leave it to the privateers to come in and sort it all out.
"I never thought all my colleagues and me were as bad as they were tarred. There was a great deal of innovation within the industry but it was a public service industry and therefore the great ideas people did have were never allowed to go forward because it was a very tightly constrained
business."
That is not to say he was against privatisation in principle, and accepts he has it to thank for the chance to run Grand Central from Sunderland.
"Under nationalisation these would never have happened. It's only the private market that has allowed companies like ourselves to look at it and think we'll give it a go. British Rail would never have made a case for it because they would have been competing against themselves at Newcastle."
Ian started his career as a roster clerk at Toton depot in Nottingham, and he has made a point of recruiting managers with a history in the railway. But he plans to give staff more freedom to make decisions and have a wider range of duties than was possible under BR.
Drivers will also be train managers and will be expected to sort out problems in discussion with their crews, who will also have more freedom, including the power to give customers 50 per cent refunds if they cannot find a seat.
"People will make the wrong decisions but if they do that for the right reasons that's fine. They learn from it and try and get it right next time.
"I'm a railwayman and I've worked in the frontline. I know what it's like when you're dealing with passengers and quite often the person on the frontline knows exactly what they should do."