But Hynes doesn’t see a contradiction between reducing taxpayer subsidy and making train services better.
“My two north stars are performance up and subsidy down,” he says. “If the service is better, we get more customers, we get more revenue.”
Lord Hendy and Hynes also push back on the idea that the answer to improving reliability might be running fewer trains.
Hynes says: “In an industry with high fixed costs, the best way of getting the subsidy down is to go for growth.”
Questions also remain about how GBR will manage industrial relations. Terms and conditions currently vary across operators. What will cost-conscious ministers do if unions seek to standardise these at the most generous level across the network?
While ministers argue they are getting on with improvements that people will notice, there’s acknowledgement that the speed of improvement will vary between operators.
Lord Hendy says some changes “ought to be dead boring… to make sure tomorrow is a little better than today if you can do it”.
But he says “more than 30 years worth of behaviors” will need altering to make the railway run solely in the interests of the customer.
At Woking, is there optimism that things will improve in the long run?
“I really hope so,” says Leo, “it would be amazing – as it’s not the best service now.”