WHEN Keith Heller was working his way up the Canadian National Railway Company, he used to keep an old photo under his desk blotter. It reminded him that, whatever happened, things could be worse.

“It was a picture of me on my dad’s farm, shovelling manure,” he chuckles. “My dad liked clean cattle.”

Heller, the Ontario farmboy now entrusted with revitalising EWS, Britain’s biggest rail-freight business, lost the photo long ago but just occasionally, you imagine, he might instinctively be stretching for it.

That’s because nothing in British railways is ever easy these days. Heller, drafted into EWS last year by Canadian National (31% owner of the business), wants to build a rock-solid base in Britain from which to launch a pan-European freight business across countries that are desperate to cut the ever-increasing lorry traffic clogging roads.

Should be no problem? Think again. With rail in Britain carved up between operators and Network Rail, access and reliability can be problematic, and getting space to build goods yards nigh impossible.

Don’t even start on the difficulties of driving different locomotives across different European countries with different technical and regulatory requirements. Running railways through the Rockies must seem a doddle by comparison.

But in Heller’s line of work, it pays to be an optimist, and in Britain his bullish drive is getting him noticed. Country Life magazine has already voted him into its Power 100 for his outspoken determination to boost rail over lorry haulage and decongest British roads, tagging him a “railway visionary”.

He certainly brings a fresh confidence. Short, tubby, balding and big-moustached, with the same bristly brusqueness that earned Bob Hoskins his “testicle-on-legs” soubriquet, Heller speaks with the authority of three decades of experience at Canadian National, the most successful privatised rail business in the world.

That earns him respect. He has used it so far to give EWS an almighty shake, introducing the Canadian system of running freight trains on regular timetables, regardless of load, and challenging established ways of doing everything.

That includes dealing with the unions: “We have four unions here,” he says bluntly. “I have good relations with three and not such good ones with the other — and you can guess which one, the RMT. They don’t have good relations with anyone.”

He shrugs, as if it is their problem, not his. Given that Heller is as likely to turn up to a meeting on his Harley- Davidson as in his company BMW, it is no surprise that he has already ruffled feathers.

In an industry short on characters, the 57-year-old Canadian stands out. But can he turn the tide that has been flowing from rail to road for so long? Sitting in his second-floor office down the tattered end of Islington, north London, he promises real change.

“What we’ve done in the last few years is to grow our freight business in the markets that were traditionally rail-freight dominated.

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