William Crossley charts the 22-year journey from British Rail via privatisation to completion and what now lies ahead

As commuters streamed off the train and headed for a day’s work, it looked like any other morning peak service at London’s Marylebone station.

But the arrival of the 7.24am from Oxford Parkway saw the climax of a journey that began 22 years ago.

In 1993, as British Rail began preparations for privatisation, Adrian Shooter – BR director of engineering performance – was invited to set up a new Chiltern train operating unit to run services between London, Buckinghamshire, north Oxfordshire and the West Midlands.

Just weeks later he picked out Oxford as a future destination for Chiltern services. This week that vision became reality.

Mr Shooter led the company into private ownership, retiring as Chiltern Railways’ chairman in 2011 and is now chairman of the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership.

He said: “I started thinking about the route’s potential. It had just seen investment and there were new trains and stations. Bicester had better services – though nowhere near as good as today – and I thought: ‘This is great, we can maintain this, but we can do a lot more’.

“Right at the start, in August 1993, I identified Oxford as a place that would be good to serve. There were a couple of different routes. We evaluated them and in about 2004 we decided that this was the best route for a variety of reasons.”

He added: “It’s absolutely fantastic to see it open. I sneaked out and rode on the very first train from Oxford Parkway on Sunday morning, the 7.49am, and that was wonderful.

“I know that Bicester Village and Oxford Parkway are both going to be tremen- dously busy stations.”

Joining Mr Shooter on the journey to develop Chiltern Railways was the company’s managing director Rob Brighouse, who returned to the UK from Hong Kong in 2000 as projects director.

Speaking on board the 7.24, he said: “We had a massive investment programme so initially my work was all about that. It was great to come back in 2011 as managing director and today is the absolute pinnacle of that experience.”

Now that the trains are running, the aim is to deliver an excellent service for passengers, another core part of Chiltern’s business strategy set out by Mr Shooter in 1993.

He said: “The idea we had right from the start was how we could delight passengers. It’s a simple commercial concept, because if you delight passengers, they will spend more money with you and tell their friends. That’s basically what guided us right the way through.”

Mr Brighouse aims to carry this philosophy through into his next job in a railway career that spans 40 years.

He leaves Chiltern at the end of this year to be a director of Network Rail, where he hopes to apply his expertise in project management and ensure results for the public.

He said: “Having spent the past few years focusing on what customers want from the railway, I hope I can bring that perspective on things being discussed, to ensure the board will remain very customer-focused.”

Among major schemes set to benefit from his expertise is the East West Rail route, due to open in 2019, which will share the revamped Oxford-Bicester route before striking east to Milton Keynes and Bedford, with the goal of reinstating the connection to Cambridge and East Anglia in the 2020s.

Martin Frobisher, Network Rail’s West Midlands route managing director, said: “Development work for East West is on plan but still in the early stages.

“Today is the first phase. There are plenty of challenges ahead but we are working through them as the project develops.”