Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way

by Richard Branson

  When you don’t know what to expect – when you don’t know how many people are going to end up as casualties, whether your driver will live or die, or whether there is something that has been done or not done by your crew – and when you arrive at the scene and you see the train looking like a Dinky Toy set thrown everywhere, there is a sense of unreality. It was ghastly; but wonderful that it had stood up to the accident so well. It was impossible to prepare yourself for this. You think about the world of public relations and suchlike and how people have written statements and seem so controlled. But my experience is that you can never be prepared for situations like the one we were walking towards. It was important to avoid the ‘don’t apologise’ industry approach by appearing on the scene of the accident to apologise, to reassure and to make it quite clear that we would take responsibility if responsibility had to be taken and that we would discover what had caused the accident. It seemed to be the logical and the human way to handle the situation. But, of course, lawyers and insurance people always advise people not to do that.

  We knew a lot about the history of rail accidents because we had studied them. One of the big issues was the appalling communications, which made things worse, especially for families and friends. So one of the models we tried to create when we planned for a potential accident scenario was fast, efficient and honest communications from the word go. When we arrived at the scene there had been very little in the way of communication from anybody who was there, apart from the police, who had already held a press conference that morning at the site. They’d said that they suspected it was track failure at the points and the train was not at the centre of their inquiries. This was a great relief for us; though obviously not for the chief executive of Network Rail who was already there – a very nice man called John Armitt (who has gone on to run the infrastructure of the British Olympics). Robin Gisby, director of operations and customer services for Network Rail, who was with John, explained to us again that the cause was most likely points failure. The nine carriages had rolled off the bank but most of them had managed to stay upright – clearly they had been thrown into the air while travelling at 95 miles an hour – and most of them seemed intact. John and Robin showed us where it had happened and how the train must have come off the tracks before travelling for some distance along the stone chippings.

  John just looked at me and simply said, ‘Sorry.’ I knew exactly how he felt and how overcome he must have been.

  It was time to make a statement to the gathered press, who had been herded at a safe distance below the embankment by the police. I had always laughed at funny films and cried at sad ones and my children always took a box of tissues for me. Mum always said, when public speaking, don’t think of yourself but of who you are talking to. Thankfully, as I faced the press, my emotions didn’t get the better of me. Obviously, it would have been far more difficult if the cause had seemed to be something we were responsible for. It was still an emotional moment, though, when one reporter said there was a hundred-foot viaduct seconds away and it was pure luck, a matter of seconds, that the train had stopped in time.

  I didn’t know a great deal at that stage of what had actually occurred, but I praised the bravery of the driver who stayed at his post and managed to slow and control the train as much as possible: ‘It is a very sad day because of the loss of one life and the injuries caused to other people. The actions of the emergency services, the RAF and the police in dealing with the crash were wonderful. The driver of the train, Iain Black, deserves recognition. He came around a corner to find the line defective before the train started to leave the line. He carried on sitting in his carriage for nearly half a mile, running the train on the stone. He could have tried to get back and protect himself but he didn’t, and he’s ended up quite badly injured. He is definitely a hero. In the sober light of day we will have to see if he can be recognised as such.’

  I continued, ‘The train itself was magnificent – it’s built like a tank. I think, if it had been any of the old trains, the injuries and the mortalities would have been horrendous. Each carriage is built like a motor racing car with rolling bars. Not one of the carriages has crumpled; hardly any of the windows have been broken. Everyone is going to have to learn from this incident and Network Rail are going to have to look at this track problem and make sure nothing like this ever happens again.’

  When asked why I had come to the scene of the accident in person, I replied, ‘You know, the thing is I’m here not as the boss of this company. I am here because I am a human being and, if my children had been in that train, I would have expected the owner of the train company to come and learn from it and to go to the hospital and show sympathy to the relatives. And I think people would expect the same of me. You keep asking me whose fault it is. We don’t know the answer to that yet; but, clearly, it is some form of track failure and the train is not at the centre of the investigation. That will come out in the fullness of time. The only thing that we have to take away from today is to learn lessons for the future, to make sure that something like this never happens again.’

  After talking to the press I went to visit all the emergency services that remained. The helicopters and ambulances had gone and the remaining services were winding down from the night’s activities and were getting ready to do the more forensic work on the train. Chief Superintendent Martyn Ripley of the British Transport Police said forensic experts, engineers, scenes of crime officers and accident investigators were working on the scene. ‘All of us who were involved were amazed that we didn’t get more fatalities at the time. We were very, very fortunate.’ This opinion was backed up by Superintendent Jon Rush, of Cumbria Police, who said, ‘It is a scene of devastation. We were very surprised that there have been so few fatalities.’

  After the uncertainty of the morning, I felt a great relief that things were far better than we had originally imagined – even though I continued to feel very aware of the poor woman who had died, and the others who were injured. As we walked away from the scene of the accident, Tony said, ‘Richard, you probably won’t remember this, but you were the one who sat at the first meeting we had as the train manufacturer and said, “I want to build the safest train in the world.”’

  Next, we went to the farmhouse next to the track to thank Geoff Burrows, the farmer who owned the field where the train crashed, for his help. He had supplied the passengers with sandwiches and tea and had helped the rescue effort by pulling cars and ambulances out of the muddy ground with his tractor. Finally, we went back to the Royal Lancashire Infirmary to meet the family of Mrs Margaret Masson, the lady who had died. They wanted to meet me in the morgue. However difficult it might have been for me, it was obviously far worse for them and I knew it was the right thing to do to be there and talk to them – as much as one can in those circumstances. I sat with them feeling deeply moved. They never looked to me for an explanation. We shared their grief together.

  Obviously, as a company, we later analysed how everything was handled and how we could learn from the accident. I was genuinely very proud of the way the Virgin team had handled things. Long ago, we had put emergency plans in place and they had swung smoothly into action. Because the entire London to Glasgow line had to be closed, some twenty to thirty thousand passengers were stuck up and down the railway line. We hired virtually every spare taxi in Britain and every single passenger was home in a taxi by one o’clock that morning. We had carers on the scene at the hospital and the site of the crash. The counselling of the injured people and the families was carried out on a one-to-one basis by the staff – that is continuing as I write. How people deal with adversity is important and they did so well. The driver was released from hospital after a month and I was told he would fully recover. Hopefully, he’ll be back driving.

  During our analysis a great irony surfaced: we’d had to fight the government to allow us to build our Pendolino train to high specifications. When the media repeatedly reported that the survival rate in the accide
nt was ‘a miracle’ I wanted to say it wasn’t a miracle. If it was a miracle, it was a miracle by design, in the sense that if you plan properly for some eventuality and make no compromises to the solutions to that possible eventuality, then you can build unprecedented levels of safety into any transport system. Virgin has a proud record of safety – we’ve never lost a passenger in an air accident in twenty-five years of flying. And we’d had ten years of operating trains by the time Cumbria happened and never lost a single passenger – until now. Mrs Masson’s death was a real tragedy and I was angry that every argument we’d had over those trains, ludicrously, was with the government, with many civil servants advising ministers that we had ‘overspecified’ the train. And as a result, they’d said it was ‘too heavy’ and ‘too expensive’!

  That train went into that accident with no faults whatsoever – yet they insisted that we’d had ‘needless’ systems built into it, such as an automatic computer system that monitored the entire train and sent back a satellite signal to our headquarters in Birmingham which would inform headquarters if any fault ever developed on any Pendolino. Unlike in previous accidents in the rail industry – where people were kept waiting for years to find out the answer, which causes enormous distress to families – we could walk into that situation in Cumbria and honestly report that that train had arrived there with no faults on it. To compare, the technology that Network Rail has to monitor its tracks and points is still decades behind the train that’s travelling on them.

  If you look at the health and safety regulations in Britain, the Virgin Pendolino surpasses the regulatory minimums for safety in its systems by a factor of three. That was what the civil servants meant by over-specified. It was built well above and beyond even current safety standards in the UK. It’s now causing a lot of hand wringing in government, with people wondering what to do about the fact that new trains are being built right now that are not to the same standard of safety specifications as the Pendolino.

  Whilst the tracks our trains are running on aren’t as modern, there is no excuse for bad maintenance. But at least it was good to see the head of Network Rail taking it on the chin and accepting responsibility within twenty-four hours.

  The handling of the accident has become a BBC case study for new journalists on standards that BBC reporters should expect from corporate organisations. They said Virgin had set a new standard for the management and the handling of emergencies of this nature. A director at the BBC was on the train and, while still stuck in her carriage, she witnessed the way the accident was handled – and how the events unfolded afterwards and how they were in turn dealt with. As an eyewitness she was highly impressed by the conduct of our people, by the procedures that were followed.

  Very few people knew that we’d taken some big decisions in the previous twelve months about whether or not we wanted to stay in the rail industry. Now that the Pendolino was up and running and we were growing passenger numbers fast and taking real market share from the airlines on routes like London to Manchester, Liverpool or Glasgow, the business was finally becoming profitable – and there were lots of people out there who wanted to buy it from us. We had had to decide whether or not to stay in rail. In the early years, until huge sums were poured into upgrading the railways, we had caught a lot of flak from critics. This had caused problems for the Virgin brand and we had had many discussions over whether or not to expand in the business. The delivery of the Pendolinos and then getting them into service convinced us to stay in. Interestingly, by the time the Cumbria accident had happened, we had decided to expand in the business and start bidding for other franchises. In 2007 we made a bid to run the East Coast line and take it over from GNER, whose parent company went bust, but the route was awarded to National Express.

  I’m a great believer in rail – and I do think a new age of the train is coming in Europe. I would go further and say that I think that we are going to get to the stage from an environmental perspective whereby decent fast and efficient train services should operate between cities in the future, instead of domestic airlines. It will require continued investment for both Britain’s network and the rest of Europe’s. Ironically, despite the public perception, Britain is investing more into railways than any other country in Europe now and our railways are becoming the best in Europe. As the Financial Times pointed out in a major editorial piece in the spring of 2007, the general public only sees the French TGVs. What they don’t realise is that most French commuter trains are now over fifty years old and are providing a terrible service to commuters into Paris and the other major cities of France. Britain may not have the fastest railways, but they are at last on their way to becoming amongst the best. It’s a trend that will only become a reality if that investment continues, however.

  For the travel industry managers who are reading this, the whole value of the Pendolino contract was £1.2 billion. We set up the contract in a unique way in that the manufacturer had to take responsibility for maintaining the train and looking after it throughout its life: it was called a ‘design, build and maintain’ contract. They only got half their money for building the train; the other half they would get over the life of the train for safely maintaining it. Now the motive of that, which had never previously dawned on the rail industry, but which we had begun to learn in the airline industry, was that, if you’re a manufacturer and you’ve built trains which you then hand over to somebody, the incentive to build to the very best standards can never be as high as if you’re going to have to maintain and be paid to maintain. Obviously, in the latter case, a manufacturer will want to make that maintenance as easy and as efficient as possible. This will also generally mean that you will also build much more safety into the regime.

  Of the total of £1.2 billion, £600 million was to build the trains and the remaining £600 million was paid out for maintenance over the life of the trains. Each Pendolino cost an average of £11.5 million per train – which we were told was about £1.5 million too expensive. Part of that cost was for regenerative braking. However, we insisted on fitting regenerative braking, which puts back 17 per cent of all the electricity these trains use into the overhead wires every time they brake. At the time we decided to go ahead with that, oil was only $10 a barrel and there were certainly plenty of people in the Department of Transport who couldn’t understand why we would ‘waste money’, given how cheap energy was. They were missing the point. If you’re going to have to operate trains for twenty years you never know what the price of energy is going to be in the future, and you have to plan for more expensive energy – which was something that we at Virgin believed by 1999 was going to happen, against the trend of the time. But, even back in 1999, the more I looked to the future of energy and oil, the more I looked at environmental issues, and the more I was convinced we had to do something. That’s when the regenerative braking decision was taken. The other thing that we spent more on was the safety aspect of the trains. But, if you look at the reality today, we have already paid back the cost of the regenerative braking in the lower energy use and the lower environmental impact of the trains – and, as for the safety features, this one accident alone has caused less misery and less social cost than any 100mph accident with a train anywhere in the world in history. The train that was in the Cumbria accident will go back into service – which some people find hard to believe. But only two coaches were damaged enough to be taken out of service. The rest of the train is in very good shape and has passed all safety tests.

  On a further environmental note, red diesel was the low tax fuel during World War II for industry and agriculture, and has remained so for agriculture ever since. I don’t see why biofuel should not benefit from this same tax break, since we are helping reduce CO emissions. I went to see Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and discussed these issues with him. I’m pleased to say that he agreed with me, and in the subsequent budget he gave us the tax break we needed, so that on 7 June 2007 the first passenger-carrying biofuel train, the Vir
gin Voyager – the diesel version of the Pendolino – went into service on the London to Holyhead route. It was not only a first for the UK but for the whole of Europe.

  As a postscript, the final irony of the events of 23–24 February in Cumbria is that, the Monday after the accident, a letter of complaint was received at our head office from a member of the public. He wrote that he was unable to use his mobile phone from the Pendolino he was travelling in, because of the small windows and special metallic fillers. This safety feature protects the passengers from shattering glass, but does make for smaller than usual windows and damages mobile phone reception. We’ve not, however, had another complaint since! Having said that, in the near future new technology will allow people to use their phones uninterrupted.

  Meanwhile, I had been keeping a watching brief on our work in South Africa, and towards the end of April, I flew to there to open our new hospital. It had all come about because of Donald and Dyke, and to make sure we didn’t lose any of our staff or community again. It set alarm bells ringing and I was determined to make sure it didn’t happen again. The doctors, Hugo Templeman and Brian Brink, who I had met the previous year, were there as well, to help with the grand opening, when Africans, in their tribal costumes, danced outside and many people from the local area came to check us out. Hugo had worked on the building plans and Brian helped us do fundraising. The entire building had gone up in less than eight months, including fitting it out, at a remarkably low cost. With the doors open, ready to treat thousands of people, it cost just a million dollars. The equivalent hospital built from scratch in England would cost $100 million and take years. We put in $600,000, Anglo American $400,000 and the US government will also be putting in $5 million over some years to pay for antiretroviral drugs and other medicines. It is a complete clinic, with four maternity wards and twenty-four-hour care for full HIV, AIDS, TB and malaria treatment, as well as all the basic healthcare services.