Mark Hopwood at the official opening of a new platform at Bristol Parkway on April 13, 2018. JACK BOSKETT
In 2000 Mark was working for Railtrack, in a role that involved liaising with franchise bidders, so he assumed that his call to a meeting with First North Western (FNW) MD David Franks in November of that year would be to discuss the refranchising ofWales and Borders, but it soon became clear that David had an ulterior motive.
Having been won by Great Western Holdings and then bought by First Group, FNW was in trouble; service delivery was poor, cancellations were rife and at one point the Oldham Loop line had no services at all for several days.
The franchise was on the brink of being terminated and David Franks had been brought in to turn the business round. Having worked with Mark at Reading some years earlier David knew he could play a key part in delivering the vital improvements. "I want to talk about you coming to do a job for me," was the offer, and in March 2001 Mark became operations director at FNW.
"For me personally that was a massive step," he recalls "I'd been in a reasonably important job operationally at Thames Trains, but it was a modest-sized business; I'd gone off to Railtrack where I was working in a team and suddenly I'd moved from where I lived 200 miles away to Manchester and at 29 years old was managing 307 stations and 2500 staff."
Although some ofFNWs problems had been brought under control by the time Mark arrived, the role was still seen as something ofa poisoned chalice within the industry, however he feels that this may have been to his advantage at the time.
"Ifit had been seen as a lucrative operations director's job they probably wouldn't have come after me to do it!" he reflects, recalling that his role was considerably larger than the title suggested.
Responsibility
"Although it was called operations director it was pretty much a chief operating officer's job with all the train crew, the stations and quite a lot of the head office functions as well. It was a big responsibility and it was really sink or swim time! The fact that people like David have been willing to take risks was obviously good for me, but it was an excellent learning opportunity. I met some fantastic people up there, like Kathryn O'Brien whom I appointed as a general manager permanently, and we worked really hard up there to sort out a lot of the issues around performance."
At the time the FNW network was extensive, from Holyhead in the west, with Carlisle and Birmingham at the north and south extremities, yet reaching as far as Wakefield to the east in Yorkshire.
"I had three fantastic years, really enjoyed it, learnt a lot and hopefully improved one or two things along the way." Mark made sure he got to know the network: "My detailed knowledge of the geography was nowhere near what it had been from the Thames Valley so I had some learning to do.
"I remember a cab ride one night on a service back from Wigan to Manchester Victoria via Atherton; it wasn't long after Ladbroke Grove, so there had been a lot of work going on around things like defensive driving techniques. We left the last station on the line, heading towards Windsor Bridge North Jct, and went past the single yellow signal. As we passed it the driver put his hand on the power handle and opened it up to full power; I clearly had a very alarmed look on my face. The driver looked at me, smiled and said 'I think you're probably wondering why I've just opened up the power handle having gone past a single yellow, but you don't want to ask me do you?' I told him he was spot-on and that it was exactly what I was thinking. 'Ah, well, he said, you might like to know the next signal is two-and-a-half miles away and we've got a l-in-80 gradient to get there, so a bit of power might be helpful.' Things like that are obviously how you learn as you go along."
Whilst Mark arrived after the running of the successful farewell trains, in conjunction with The Railway Magazine, which marked the end of the Class 309 EMUs and Class 37 loco-hauled trains, he still had a chance to mark the end of the Class 101 DMUs -a long drawn out affair as the replacement Class 175s from Alstom were late arriving and seriously troublesome in their early days.