Gerry Fiennes

Gerry Fiennes (full name: Gerard Francis Gisborne Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes OBE, MA) (7 June 1906 – 25 May 1985) was a British railway manager who rose through the ranks of the London and North Eastern Railway and later British Rail following graduation from Oxford University.

He was educated at Winchester College and Hertford College, Oxford and then joined the London and North Eastern Railway as a Traffic Apprentice in 1928.

He was related to the actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, and the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

After his apprenticeship his subsequent appointments included:

• Assistant Yardmaster, Whitemoor Yard, Cambridgeshire, 1932
• Chief Controller, Cambridge, 1934.
• Various appointments at York, London Liverpool Street station, Edinburgh, and Shenfield.
• District Operating Superintendent, Nottingham, 1943.
• District Operating Superintendent, Stratford station, east London, 1944.
• Operating Superintendent, Eastern Region, British Rail, 1956–57.
• Line Traffic Manager, London King's Cross station, 1957–61.
• Chief Operating Officer, British Rail, 1961–63.
• Chairman of the Western Region Board, and General Manager, Western Region BR, 1963–65.
• Chairman of the Eastern Region Board, and General Manager, Eastern Region, BR, 1965–67.

Fiennes was largely responsible for pushing for the purchase by BR of the 22 English Electric/ Napier "Deltic" locomotives in 1959 (in service 1961–82). These were deemed necessary as they were capable of prolonged running at 100 mph (160 km/h), in order to compete with the electrified West Coast Main Line. On the Eastern Region in the mid-1960s he demonstrated that large savings could be made on unprofitable lines by use of the idea of a basic railway with less costly infrastructure, utilising track singling, unstaffed stations with larger car parks and fares collected on the trains.

He was fired from British Rail in 1967 for publishing the book I Tried to Run a Railway, which was outspoken about the management of British Rail and particularly critical of the frequent management re-organisations that it had gone through since nationalisation.

Following his main railway career, he was a director of Hargreaves Group between 1968 and 1976, and also a director of the railway publishers Ian Allan Ltd, who had published his book, and for whose rail industry magazines he had previously written extensively, and was Mayor of Aldeburgh, Suffolk in 1976. He continued his association with railways by accepting an invitation to join the Board of Directors of the independent, narrow gauge, Ffestiniog Railway Company, in North Wales, on which he served between 1968 and 1974. Between 1970 and 1974 he was the Company's nominee to the Board of directors of the Ffestiniog Railway Society, the voluntary supporters' organisation.