Christopher Gray ponders the lack of female staff running the nation's railways

During an interview last Friday with the playwright Barney Norris, the one-time student drama officer at Oxford Playhouse, we found ourselves chortling over the fact that the Financial Times’s critic, Ian Shuttleworth, in a favourable review of his play Visitors, had written of him as if he were a woman. (Well, how many female Barneys do you know?) Moments later I found myself guilty of a similar error when Norris told me of his tutor on the creative writing post-graduate course at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the poet Jo Shapcott. A follow-up question I asked about ‘her’ revealed that I thought she was actually a ‘Joe’.

All this was in my mind later in the day when I sat down with a cup of tea to read The Times.

At the top of the letters page was a communication from the so-called Rail Delivery Group. These are the principal backers of the insane vanity project known as High Speed 2. In order of appearance they were Martin Griffiths (Stagecoach). Mark Carne (Network Rail), Alain Thauvette (DB Schenker), Dominic Booth Abellio UK), David Brown (Go-Ahead), Dean Finch (National Express), Alistair Gordon (Keolis UK), David Martin (Arriva), Peter Maybury (Freightliner), David Stretch (Serco), Doug Sutherland (Directly Operated Railways), Tim O’Toole (FirstGroup), Michael Roberts (RDG) and Paul Plummer (Network Rail).

No hint of ambiguity there, then — all 14 of them quite clearly men. Running the nation’s railways (and urging lavish new spending on them) is obviously a job only for the boys. This strikes me as odd. Surely there must be out there at least one potential Isabel Kingdom Brunel.