Gerry Fiennes

After his apprenticeship his subsequent appointments included: Starting in 1930 as a Traffic Apprentice, Fiennes gained a broad yet deep understanding of railway operations and economics.

Consequently, he was prepared to discontinue services which could not be made to cover their costs and believed that unprofitable lines should be kept open only if there was a political will to underwrite the losses.

[citation needed] On the other hand, Fiennes believed strongly in growing traffic and using resources intensively through aggressive scheduling and that, in order to compete with air and road, the average end-to-end speed of passenger trains had to be at least 75 miles per hour (120 km/h).

As Chief Operating Officer at the British Railways Board at a time when a fleet of 100,000 freight wagons managed an average of just 20 journeys per year,[citation needed] he devised the "Merry-go-Round" (MGR) concept for continuous operation of coal and ore trains with loading and unloading on the move but was unable to overcome procrastination by his superiors and by the National Coal Board (which would have to invest in modern loading facilities) for several years.

[citation needed] 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, using track singling, unstaffed stations with larger car parks and fares collected on the trains.