Regulator tears up Railtrack's masterplan

Railtrack's masterplan for maintaining the rail network was denounced yesterday as "profoundly unsatisfactory" and potentially unlawful by the rail regulator, Tom Winsor.

For the first time since privatisation, the company's network management statement was in effect torn up, with a demand that it produce a document by 31 July that would be of some use to the industry.

Train operators joined Mr Winsor in his condemnation, declaring that the statement was "glib, a waste of time, vague, and with too many fine words but with little substance".

Mr Winsor told a conference on the future of the rail network, hosted by the Institute of Economic Affairs, that Railtrack should "get a grip" and "put behind itself its discredited and hugely damaging practice of neglect of its assets and hostility to customers and funders".

Speaking at the same conference, the chief inspector of railways, Vic Coleman, indicated that some train companies had still not met a March 2001 deadline for dealing with the problem of trains passing red signals – a date set a month before the Paddington crash in October 1999. He added that some companies had gone beyond the stage of drinking in the last chance saloon and were now on "the last dregs before chucking-out time".

Steve Marshall, Railtrack's chief executive, failed to make his scheduled speech to the conference, citing "pressure of business" as his reason. And to complete the misery for Railtrack, Sir Alastair Morton, chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority, confirmed that he had had enough of the industry and would be leaving his post within nine months.

Mr Winsor's savage denunciation of the network operator follows last week's report by Lord Cullen into the Paddington disaster, which put most of the blame on Railtrack, accusing it of "institutional paralysis".

Mr Winsor told the conference he had allowed Railtrack to delay publication of the network management statement to give it time to produce a "worthwhile" document at a time when it was still coping with the aftermath of the Hatfield disaster. He also allowed the network operator to publish it in two parts, with the first instalment covering maintenance of existing infrastructure and the second part, yet to be published, dealing with improvements. At a meeting on 15 June, train companies told Railtrack and Mr Winsor that the first part of the document was "not useful".

Mr Winsor said: "It is not the plan it should be with clear statement of what is to be done, when, what its impact will be and what resources it will use."

After his speech, he warned that unless Railtrack produced a more detailed document it could be the subject of legal action from the train operators.

Railtrack argued that it had published "the most detailed statement possible at the time". It added that since then the company had "fully discussed and agreed the way forward with both our customers and the rail regulator's office".