The Man Who Timed the Trains

The staff at Wetherby Junction called him the Timer, and it was not unkind.

He arrived at 06:12 most weekdays, stood at the same point on platform 2 — beside the third lamp, where the sightlines are best in both directions — and timed the trains. Arrival, departure, dwell. He wrote them in a notebook. He filled about three a year.

Railway enthusiasts are not unusual. Wetherby has a good junction and gets a steady trickle of people with cameras and flasks, and the staff are, as a rule, warm about them.

The Timer was different in two ways.

He never photographed anything. And he never talked to the other enthusiasts, who tried, repeatedly, for years, and who eventually agreed among themselves that he was not really one of them, though nobody could say what he was instead.

Nineteen years.

Colin, who ran the ticket office from 2009, is the one who finally asked. It took him six years to work up to it, which he is aware sounds absurd.

"Go on then," he said, one very slow February morning. "What's it for?"

The Timer considered him for a while.

"Dwell time," he said. "Platform 2."

"I know what you're doing. What's it for?"

And the Timer said: "It'll be needed."

Then he timed the 06:41 and did not elaborate, and Colin, who had waited six years for that, went back inside and thought about early retirement.

Here is what nobody at Wetherby knew.

In 1998 there was an incident on platform 2. A woman stepped back from a moving service and was struck by a wing mirror on a road vehicle using the level crossing, and the two events were unrelated except in time, and she died.

There was an inquiry. The inquiry found no fault with the railway, and no fault with the driver, and it found — in a paragraph on page forty-one that almost nobody read — that the sequencing of the crossing barrier and the platform-2 dwell period created a window of approximately four seconds during which a person stepping back from the platform edge could be in the path of a vehicle that had been given right of way.

Approximately four seconds. Twice a day. Under specific conditions.

The inquiry recommended that the sequencing be reviewed if the timetable changed materially.

The timetable changed materially in 2001, 2004, 2009, 2011, 2016 and 2019.

The Timer's name was Peter Ashworth and the woman on platform 2 was his wife.

He was not an engineer. He had worked in insurance. What he had was the inquiry report, which he had read perhaps three hundred times, and the single sentence about material change, and no institutional standing whatsoever with which to make anybody act on it.

So he decided to build the only thing he could build alone: nineteen years of continuous, dated, timed observation of the dwell period on platform 2, against every timetable change, in his own hand, in a form that no one could dismiss as recollection.

He did not tell the railway, because he had told the railway in 1999 and 2002 and 2005, and had been answered courteously each time, and nothing had happened, and he had concluded — correctly — that what he lacked was not sincerity but data.

He was waiting for the crossing to be redesigned. There was a scheme. It had been in the regional plan since 2013 and had been deferred four times.

It went to consultation last year.

Peter Ashworth submitted nineteen notebooks.

The engineer who received them, a woman of about thirty-five who had never heard of the 1998 inquiry because nobody had, spent a weekend with them and then telephoned her director at home on a Sunday.

The four-second window is now three and a half. It occurs three times a day.

The scheme has been redesigned. It is not a large change; it is a resequencing, and it costs almost nothing, and it will be delivered in the autumn.

Colin still runs the ticket office. He read about it in the trade press and sat down.

Peter still comes. 06:12, platform 2, beside the third lamp.

He has been asked, kindly, whether he intends to stop after the autumn.

He says he'll see how the new sequencing beds in.