We might not have all the pieces, but we have enough to make a very good start. Let’s begin transforming the UK rail industry
If you’re the sort of person who plunges into a jigsaw puzzle without consulting the picture on the box first, you’ll know how hard it can be. You tip the pieces out, sort them out by colour and pattern, then try to get them into some sort of order. But without knowing what the final image should look like – or even if you have all the pieces – there’s inevitably guesswork involved.
In many ways, that’s what the ongoing transformation of the UK rail industry feels like right now. We know we’re working towards something big and important – something better connected, more efficient and fit for the future – but we’re doing it without having it all mapped out in advance. The ‘picture on the lid’, so to speak, is missing. Even so, we press on.
When I was speaking recently to a senior industry colleague, we ruminated on this. We agreed that, even without having the full picture, the best way to start with this particular jigsaw is with the four corner pieces; as in any puzzle, the corners help to anchor everything else. In rail, I see those four corners as: culture, the workforce, the customer and the infrastructure. If we get those right, I believe that we have a much better chance of everything else coming together.
So, let’s look at each one in turn – and think about what happens when we try to build the rest of the UK rail jigsaw around them.
CULTURE:
The central piece in the puzzle
Culture is the piece that holds the rest of the jigsaw together. If we don’t fix our industry’s culture first, we’ll find it near impossible to make meaningful change a reality elsewhere.
Right now, however, different parts of the rail industry are still working in silos, with segmented organisations, priorities and – a lot of the time – competing agendas. There’s a lot of discussion about Great British Railways (GBR) and its potential to unify the sector. But while governance matters, mindset matters more. We need to see ourselves as being part of the same team.
This means putting ego to one side. It requires leadership that’s brave, collaborative and accountable. It means calling out outdated behaviours and attitudes, and empowering a new generation of leaders to build something better. Also, it means making space for healthy disagreement so that we can move forward, not stand still and stagnate.
Cultural change, therefore, has to be the cornerstone of rail’s transformation. Without it, we’ll keep trying to build our puzzle on a table that keeps shifting around underneath us.
WORKFORCE:
Building with the right skills
Once we’ve got the cultural piece in place, we need to focus on people. The rail workforce is ageing and the industry’s skills gap is growing. Adding to that sizeable challenge, we’re still failing to attract the diverse talent we need if rail is to thrive over the long term.
Too often, we recruit on the basis of time served rather than looking to potential. But the industry we’re building won’t necessarily look like the one we’re in today. We need people who are adaptable, tech-savvy, customer-focused and comfortable with shifting expectations. That means casting our net wider, rethinking our job specs, interview methods and outreach strategies. It means creating environments where everyone feels welcome and able to grow personally and professionally.
Different parts of the rail industry are still working in silos
This isn’t just an optional extra – it’s business-critical. The 2024 NSAR Rail Workforce Survey made clear that unless we act now, the rail sector faces a damaging skills shortfall in the years ahead. Acting now doesn’t just mean hiring more people, but also developing the people we already have by upskilling and reskilling, supporting mental health and wellbeing, and giving employees a sense of purpose as well as ample opportunities for career progression.
If we’re going to complete the jigsaw, we need all hands on deck – and we need our people to feel empowered, and truly valued.
CUSTOMERS:
The central consideration, not an afterthought
Too often, in the rail industry as elsewhere, ‘the customer’ is treated as a single, homogenous entity. In reality, we’re talking about millions of people with different needs and expectations: commuters, leisure travellers, students, tourists and many more. People with disabilities, people travelling with kids, people living in rural communities.
Each of them relies on the rail industry for something vital, whether it’s helping them get to work, staying connected with friends and family or simply exploring. We must move beyond the idea of the passenger as merely a number on a spreadsheet and view them as individuals. This means designing genuinely inclusive services, clear communication, simple ticketing and reliable timetables. It also means clean and safe stations with friendly, visible staff who are empowered to help. There are some great examples of this on the network already, and we need to see more.
Groups such as the Campaign for Better Transport have been making this case for some time already: namely, that a better railway is one that truly works for the people who use it, not just its operators. If we can put the customer at the centre of everything we do in the rail industry, the broader puzzle starts to take shape in an entirely new way.
INFRASTRUCTURE:
Carrying the weight
The fourth corner piece – perhaps the most obvious, but also probably the most complicated – is infrastructure. Tracks, trains, stations, signalling, digital systems: these are the physical and digital assets that bear the weight of everything else.
But infrastructure is also about how we plan, prioritise and invest. Currently, decision-making is often slow and fragmented. Projects stall due to funding gaps, political shifts or a lack of vision. At the heart of the issue is long-term planning – or, more accurately, the lack of it. The way the curtailment of HS2 north of Birmingham was handled, whatever your view on the project itself, has shaken trust in government commitment to delivering rail projects.
Plans to invest £15bn in rail, light rail and bus projects in the North, Midlands and West Country, recently announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves, are certainly welcome.
But there’s more to this than money alone.
Let’s not hang around and wait for perfect conditions to materialise, because they won’t
We need a joined-up, systems-level view. One that acknowledges interdependence: between regions, between policy and practice and between rail and other modes of public transport. Rail has to work in concert with buses and other modes of transportation, including active travel options. That means placing infrastructure within a wider, strategic view of place and purpose.
Venturing into the unknown
The reality is that we’re not always going to have all the pieces of this jigsaw at our disposal. There will be gaps. Some pieces might get lost along the way, while others will arrive later, out of order, or not necessarily shaped as we’d expected. But that needn’t deter us from pressing forward.
It’s okay not to know exactly what the final image might look like right from the outset. We have to expect that the picture will evolve and shift as we progress. What matters is that we’re agreed on a general direction, that we’re working together and that we’re committed to getting it done.
This isn’t just a rail industry problem, either. It’s a change problem, and it’s common to every sector. Organisations across the board find themselves grappling with the same fundamental questions: how do we plan for the future when the present is in flux? How do we put people first? How do we channel and unleash the full human potential that we have?
Rail has a chance to provide a lead in this regard, demonstrating in practice how a complex legacy industry can reposition and reinvent itself – not necessarily by purporting to have all the right answers, but by being bold enough to ask the right questions.
Picking up the pieces – together
It’s not hard to foresee what happens when the corner pieces of the puzzle are ignored. Culture can become toxic, with worsening workplace morale, while infrastructure and service standards deteriorate – causing customers to seek alternatives.
But, at Intuitive, we’ve seen the opposite first-hand. We’ve worked with organisations that put both people and purpose at the very heart of transformation. And we’ve seen what happens when leaders stop looking for a blueprint and start building anyway.
We should never forget how fortunate we are to have this opportunity. As Laura Shoaf, chair of Shadow Great British Railways, put it in her keynote speech to the Women in Rail Awards: “We will redefine the rail industry, and that is a privilege.” Indeed it is, and it’s something we should always remember as we proceed with this journey of reform and renewal.
So, here’s the challenge: let’s not hang around and wait for perfect conditions to materialise, because they won’t. Let’s start by focusing on those areas that we know need our attention – the importance of culture, the value of our workforce, the importance of customer needs and the vital role of high-quality infrastructure – and let’s commit to solving this jigsaw puzzle together.
We might not have all the pieces, but we have enough to make a very good start. We may even find that the table we’re assembling it on is too small when we get halfway through the puzzle. In other words, our ambition may outstrip our existing capabilities – but what matters is that we create the space, figuratively and literally, to imagine something better. Laying solid foundations, planning with purpose and learning from past missteps gives everything else a chance to fit into place.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nina Lockwood is CEO of Intuitive Talent Solutions and has specialised in recruiting talented leaders for over 20 years. For seven years, Nina has chaired the Outstanding Personal Contribution category for the National Rail Awards and judged the Outstanding Teamwork category. She also sits on the Women in Rail North West Committee and is a mentor for the Women in Transport Mentoring Scheme.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
Putting rail’s jigsaw puzzle together
by Passenger Transport on Jun 13, 2025 • 11:39 am No CommentsWe might not have all the pieces, but we have enough to make a very good start. Let’s begin transforming the UK rail industry
If you’re the sort of person who plunges into a jigsaw puzzle without consulting the picture on the box first, you’ll know how hard it can be. You tip the pieces out, sort them out by colour and pattern, then try to get them into some sort of order. But without knowing what the final image should look like – or even if you have all the pieces – there’s inevitably guesswork involved.
In many ways, that’s what the ongoing transformation of the UK rail industry feels like right now. We know we’re working towards something big and important – something better connected, more efficient and fit for the future – but we’re doing it without having it all mapped out in advance. The ‘picture on the lid’, so to speak, is missing. Even so, we press on.
When I was speaking recently to a senior industry colleague, we ruminated on this. We agreed that, even without having the full picture, the best way to start with this particular jigsaw is with the four corner pieces; as in any puzzle, the corners help to anchor everything else. In rail, I see those four corners as: culture, the workforce, the customer and the infrastructure. If we get those right, I believe that we have a much better chance of everything else coming together.
So, let’s look at each one in turn – and think about what happens when we try to build the rest of the UK rail jigsaw around them.
CULTURE:
The central piece in the puzzle
Culture is the piece that holds the rest of the jigsaw together. If we don’t fix our industry’s culture first, we’ll find it near impossible to make meaningful change a reality elsewhere.
Right now, however, different parts of the rail industry are still working in silos, with segmented organisations, priorities and – a lot of the time – competing agendas. There’s a lot of discussion about Great British Railways (GBR) and its potential to unify the sector. But while governance matters, mindset matters more. We need to see ourselves as being part of the same team.
This means putting ego to one side. It requires leadership that’s brave, collaborative and accountable. It means calling out outdated behaviours and attitudes, and empowering a new generation of leaders to build something better. Also, it means making space for healthy disagreement so that we can move forward, not stand still and stagnate.
Cultural change, therefore, has to be the cornerstone of rail’s transformation. Without it, we’ll keep trying to build our puzzle on a table that keeps shifting around underneath us.
WORKFORCE:
Building with the right skills
Once we’ve got the cultural piece in place, we need to focus on people. The rail workforce is ageing and the industry’s skills gap is growing. Adding to that sizeable challenge, we’re still failing to attract the diverse talent we need if rail is to thrive over the long term.
Too often, we recruit on the basis of time served rather than looking to potential. But the industry we’re building won’t necessarily look like the one we’re in today. We need people who are adaptable, tech-savvy, customer-focused and comfortable with shifting expectations. That means casting our net wider, rethinking our job specs, interview methods and outreach strategies. It means creating environments where everyone feels welcome and able to grow personally and professionally.
This isn’t just an optional extra – it’s business-critical. The 2024 NSAR Rail Workforce Survey made clear that unless we act now, the rail sector faces a damaging skills shortfall in the years ahead. Acting now doesn’t just mean hiring more people, but also developing the people we already have by upskilling and reskilling, supporting mental health and wellbeing, and giving employees a sense of purpose as well as ample opportunities for career progression.
If we’re going to complete the jigsaw, we need all hands on deck – and we need our people to feel empowered, and truly valued.
CUSTOMERS:
The central consideration, not an afterthought
Too often, in the rail industry as elsewhere, ‘the customer’ is treated as a single, homogenous entity. In reality, we’re talking about millions of people with different needs and expectations: commuters, leisure travellers, students, tourists and many more. People with disabilities, people travelling with kids, people living in rural communities.
Each of them relies on the rail industry for something vital, whether it’s helping them get to work, staying connected with friends and family or simply exploring. We must move beyond the idea of the passenger as merely a number on a spreadsheet and view them as individuals. This means designing genuinely inclusive services, clear communication, simple ticketing and reliable timetables. It also means clean and safe stations with friendly, visible staff who are empowered to help. There are some great examples of this on the network already, and we need to see more.
Groups such as the Campaign for Better Transport have been making this case for some time already: namely, that a better railway is one that truly works for the people who use it, not just its operators. If we can put the customer at the centre of everything we do in the rail industry, the broader puzzle starts to take shape in an entirely new way.
INFRASTRUCTURE:
Carrying the weight
The fourth corner piece – perhaps the most obvious, but also probably the most complicated – is infrastructure. Tracks, trains, stations, signalling, digital systems: these are the physical and digital assets that bear the weight of everything else.
But infrastructure is also about how we plan, prioritise and invest. Currently, decision-making is often slow and fragmented. Projects stall due to funding gaps, political shifts or a lack of vision. At the heart of the issue is long-term planning – or, more accurately, the lack of it. The way the curtailment of HS2 north of Birmingham was handled, whatever your view on the project itself, has shaken trust in government commitment to delivering rail projects.
Plans to invest £15bn in rail, light rail and bus projects in the North, Midlands and West Country, recently announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves, are certainly welcome.
But there’s more to this than money alone.
We need a joined-up, systems-level view. One that acknowledges interdependence: between regions, between policy and practice and between rail and other modes of public transport. Rail has to work in concert with buses and other modes of transportation, including active travel options. That means placing infrastructure within a wider, strategic view of place and purpose.
Venturing into the unknown
The reality is that we’re not always going to have all the pieces of this jigsaw at our disposal. There will be gaps. Some pieces might get lost along the way, while others will arrive later, out of order, or not necessarily shaped as we’d expected. But that needn’t deter us from pressing forward.
It’s okay not to know exactly what the final image might look like right from the outset. We have to expect that the picture will evolve and shift as we progress. What matters is that we’re agreed on a general direction, that we’re working together and that we’re committed to getting it done.
This isn’t just a rail industry problem, either. It’s a change problem, and it’s common to every sector. Organisations across the board find themselves grappling with the same fundamental questions: how do we plan for the future when the present is in flux? How do we put people first? How do we channel and unleash the full human potential that we have?
Rail has a chance to provide a lead in this regard, demonstrating in practice how a complex legacy industry can reposition and reinvent itself – not necessarily by purporting to have all the right answers, but by being bold enough to ask the right questions.
Picking up the pieces – together
It’s not hard to foresee what happens when the corner pieces of the puzzle are ignored. Culture can become toxic, with worsening workplace morale, while infrastructure and service standards deteriorate – causing customers to seek alternatives.
But, at Intuitive, we’ve seen the opposite first-hand. We’ve worked with organisations that put both people and purpose at the very heart of transformation. And we’ve seen what happens when leaders stop looking for a blueprint and start building anyway.
We should never forget how fortunate we are to have this opportunity. As Laura Shoaf, chair of Shadow Great British Railways, put it in her keynote speech to the Women in Rail Awards: “We will redefine the rail industry, and that is a privilege.” Indeed it is, and it’s something we should always remember as we proceed with this journey of reform and renewal.
So, here’s the challenge: let’s not hang around and wait for perfect conditions to materialise, because they won’t. Let’s start by focusing on those areas that we know need our attention – the importance of culture, the value of our workforce, the importance of customer needs and the vital role of high-quality infrastructure – and let’s commit to solving this jigsaw puzzle together.
We might not have all the pieces, but we have enough to make a very good start. We may even find that the table we’re assembling it on is too small when we get halfway through the puzzle. In other words, our ambition may outstrip our existing capabilities – but what matters is that we create the space, figuratively and literally, to imagine something better. Laying solid foundations, planning with purpose and learning from past missteps gives everything else a chance to fit into place.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nina Lockwood is CEO of Intuitive Talent Solutions and has specialised in recruiting talented leaders for over 20 years. For seven years, Nina has chaired the Outstanding Personal Contribution category for the National Rail Awards and judged the Outstanding Teamwork category. She also sits on the Women in Rail North West Committee and is a mentor for the Women in Transport Mentoring Scheme.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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