Chris Gibb in 2003, when he was the managing director of Virgin CrossCountry

A non-executive director of DfT Operator has left his post only days after he warned a Parliamentary group that the trains being ordered for HS2 will reduce the number of seats on the London to Manchester route.

Chris Gibb, who has been at the DfT’s subsidiary company since 2020, was speaking on 13 April, when he told the All-Party Parliamentary Rail Group that the answer to this capacity problem would be a second fleet. 

He said: ‘In 2021 HS2 ordered a fleet of 54x8-coach trains. This is a common train length across Europe – 200m – and they can be coupled together to form 16 coach trains - the length of today’s Eurostar trains – and as such can carry about 1,000 passengers. This is great on HS2’s Birmingham to London route, with stations being built for these 400m trains [but] 8-coach trains, however, are not so good for routes like Manchester and Glasgow to London, where services will use HS2 and the WCML and are currently provided by 11-coach Pendolinos’.

He added that it would be possible for the 8-car trains to operate in pairs on HS2 itself, as they are designed to do, but trains of this length would be too long for the platforms at stations like Manchester Piccadilly.

Mr Gibb has proposed that the present HS2 order should go ahead under the present contract, but that when the Pendolinos are due to be replaced in about 15 years from now their replacements should be 286m long, offer up to 750 seats and be capable of running between Glasgow and London with one stop in 3h38m. They would have a maximum speed of 186mph (300km/h) on HS2 and 140mph (225km/h) on appropriate parts of the WCML, regulated by ETCS, which avoids the need for lineside signals.

Conservative MP Richard Holden said on X: ‘Chris Gibb dared to speak honestly about HS2 rolling stock and was fired as a result. Labour’s response to inconvenient expertise is apparently to get rid of it.

‘This is the government that buried Mandelson's vetting, apparently "speak no evil" is now official transport policy too.

‘If Labour can't handle straight talking about trains, what hope is there for honest advice on anything?’

Companies House records say that Mr Gibb ’resigned’ on 17 April, which would have been four days after his speech. At the time, he emphasised that he was speaking in a personal capacity, and not as a director of DfTO.

DfTO was formerly the DfT’s Operator of Last Resort, which stepped in when franchises failed, but it is now the parent company of newly-renationalised operators. These will be taken over in due course by Great British Railways.

Mr Gibb has more than four decades of railway experience. He was managing director of Virgin CrossCountry from 2003 and from 2007 became the chief operating officer at Virgin Trains. He joined Network Rail as a non-executive director in 2013 and served on the main board until 2019. He advised Transport for Wales in 2020 and moved to Scotland as chief executive of Scottish Rail Holdings in 2021.

The DfT has yet to comment on Mr Gibb’s departure.

What do you think? Click here to let us know.