[BBKing]

He was technically knighted over New Year, before the overrun became obvious. It's a bit unfair to criticise him for not turning up, what actually got it fixed was someone (Robin Gisby, actually, who also took the brunt of the press) deciding that it was an operational incident like an accident or severe weather which had happened to bring the overhead wires down, rather than an engineering job that just had to be finished to spec and to contract. Once they swung into that mode it actually got fixed quite fast, as everyone knew the key thing was getting the trains running and who was in charge (a Gold Command, like the police use for major incidents).

Obviously, the chairman doesn't turn up to fix operational incidents, he has professional people and processes he employs to do that. In the case of Liverpool Street, one of the cockups was not having enough gear to do the job, followed by the contractors decamping to fix Rugby (they weren't employed by NR, and the Rugby contractors were offering them large sums, so off they went). Eventually the regular NR maintenance teams turned up with their spares cupboard raided and pitched in. Once they were on site there wouldn't have been a lot of point doing anything else but feed them tea and bonuses.

One consequence of this is a suggestion that NR keep a tighter control on the country's small pool of professional overhead line people, which is where Sir Ian needs to earn his money.