Adrian Shooter

Adrian Shooter (22 November 1948 – 13 December 2022) was a British transport executive.

Career

Shooter joined British Rail in 1970 as a management trainee. He became maintenance engineer at Bletchley in the mid-1970s, then depot manager at Heaton, then moved to Carlisle as area maintenance engineer. He worked on expansion projects at Bournemouth and Selhurst, before becoming area manager at St Pancras, then was involved in the establishment of Red Star Parcels and Rail Express Systems, before joining what would become Chiltern Railways (originally known as "M40 Trains") in April 1994.

During the privatisation of British Rail he headed up the M40 Trains management buyout consortium that was awarded the Chiltern Railways franchise. Shooter was the first Managing Director of that franchise in 1996, and went on to become chairman. With the acquisition of Chiltern Railways by Deutsche Bahn in 2008, he became chairman of DB Regio UK, later known as Arriva Rail. He retired from this role in December 2011. During his time at Chiltern Railways, he is credited with the doubling of its passenger numbers through innovation and investment in the ambitious development of train services and infrastructure.

Shooter was a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and of the Chartered Institute of Transport. He was chairman of the West Midlands and Oxfordshire region of the Confederation of British Industry, chairman of Bicester Vision, director of Wabtec, and was chair of the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership for three-and-a-half years until late-2015. In the New Year Honours 2010 Shooter was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire "for services to the rail industry".

In 2012, Shooter founded Vivarail, a company purchasing London Underground D78 Stock and rebuilding them into the Vivarail D-Train family, including diesel class 230s and third-rail electric class 484s. During the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) short demonstration trips with a prototype pure-battery D-Train were organised from Glasgow Central station with Shooter and Henry Posner III of Railroad Development Corporation (RDC) on board.

In 2013 Shooter became chairman of Churnet Valley Railway, and a vice-president of Railfuture along with Andrew Adonis, Chris Green, Roger Ford and Barry Doe. Shooter was a director of Vintage Trains from 2018 until 2020.

On 23 November 2022, Shooter was awarded the Japanese Foreign Minister's commendation by , Japanese ambassador to the United Kingdom for work on rail safety and establishing the UK-Japan Railways exchange programme in 1993.

Personal life

Besides his professional interest in railways, Shooter also owned the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Class 'B' steam locomotive 778 (originally No. 19), which he operated on the Beeches Light Railway in the grounds of his residence in Oxfordshire. He also commissioned carriages to accompany the locomotive from the Ffestiniog Railway's Boston Lodge works, together with a replica Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Railroad inspection locomotive commissioned from the Statfold Barn Railway.

Shooter was chairman of the Model 'A' Ford Club of Great Britain. In 2014 his Model 'A' suffered a seized bearing during a classic rally race in Myanmar. He also owned an Indian Hindustan Ambassador car.
In April 2022, Adrian and Barbara Shooter welcomed two refugees into their home during the 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis with Barbara Shooter driving to the Polish border to collect them and drop off emergency supplies.

By early 2022, Shooter had been diagnosed with motor neuron disease but continued driving his Darjeeling steam locomotive for as long as possible. In September 2022, a statue of Shooter, crowdfunded by rail industry leaders and close associates, was unveiled at Marylebone station. At the same time, class 168 001, the very first train ordered by Chiltern Railways, and the first new train in the UK ordered following the privatisation of British Rail, was named ''Adrian Shooter''.

Shooter died on 13 December 2022, at the age of 74.

References

Further reading

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Shooter, Adrian
1948 births
2022 deaths
British Rail people
People from Cherwell District
People educated at Epsom College
People educated at Kingswood House School
British people associated with Heritage Railways