in response to a threatened intervention by the Labour Party. This action effectively privatised Railtrack, although the company remained closely intertwined with the British government from an operational standpoint. Railtrack's initial operations were disrupted by an industrial dispute that largely ran between June and September 1994; at one point, the company's management proposed dismissing all of its signallers, comprising roughly 4,600 staff. Railtrack's first chief executive, John Edmonds, pursued a strategy of disposing of engineers and outsourcing their work wherever possible with the goal of reducing costs. Within its first few years of operation, Railtrack appeared to perform well financially, annual profits were recorded while its share value quadrupled within a relatively short timeframe. Furthermore, during the mid-to-late 1990s, several high-profile investment projects in cooperation with train operators and other partners were announced by the company. However, as early as 1997, Railtrack was being criticised for paying little attention to infrastructure investment. Issues and controversies The Southall rail crash in 1997 and the Ladbroke Grove rail crash in 1999 called into question the negative consequences that the fragmentation of the railway network had introduced to both safety and maintenance procedures. Railtrack was severely criticised for both its performance in improving Britain's railway infrastructure and for its safety record. It was observed in Lord Cullen's inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove accident that trains would have been prevented from passing any signal at red had an Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system had been fitted and operational; however, ATP's national adoption, a recommendation made after the Clapham Junction rail crash in 1988, had been abandoned as the cost was considered to be excessive for the increase in safety. One particular area of criticism was that the regulator was not tough enough on Railtrack and, as a result, the company had been able to abuse its monopoly position. In particular, Railtrack's customers, the passenger and freight train operators, were allegedly desperate for regulatory action to compel the company to improve its stewardship of the network and its performance. During 1993, Swift had been appointed rail regulator by the then Conservative transport secretary John MacGregor MP. When the Labour government took over after the general election in May 1997, the new transport secretary (and deputy prime minister) John Prescott took a much harder line. When Swift's five-year term of office expired on 30 November 1998, he was not reappointed. After an interim period, during which