Let's start with a little table I prepared for my Gresley Memorial Lecture in March. Sir Nigel thought the talk was pretty good, well at least his two grandsons were happy to be photographed with me after the presentation. My chosen title was 'East Coast traction - the Gresley heritage; and I tried to show how succeeding traction engineers had reduced journey times on the East Coast progressively over the seven decades since the great man's death (Table 1). Of course, the secret of the East Coast's success, compared with its rival the West Coast, was that its civil engineers invented continuous improvement several decades before Toyota got round to calling it keizen. Each new generation of traction cut journey times. But instead of sitting back, the East Coast civils team would chisel away further minutes here and there, year on year. From the 1960s onwards, the late Brian Perren's annual timetable review would show headline times coming down. It was, in retrospect, journey time elasticity expressed in concrete and steel.
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