Like any large bureaucracy it suffers from 'the way we do things' and different parts of the company don't always understand each other. There are actually three parts to the company - the office staff, the signalling staff and the on-track staff, and each have their own culture. I personally ended my time at NR under a cloud following a breakdown in relationships with (in the opinion of myself and others) a very bad and very senior manager who remains in place and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Although such incidents are rare, the likelihood of such an individual being held to account is low - once you're in place you can stick like a tick. Lip service is paid to issues such as Mental Health awareness but it doesn't generally translate into actual behavioural change on the ground. The other key issue is the safety culture, which gets stifling after a while. You can understand the reasoning behind it - railways can be very dangerous - but when you're getting told off for not holding a handrail when walking down five steps (yes, that happened) it's gone bonkers. There are some signs that the new CEO Andrew Haines recognises this, but there's still a long way to go. Gender balance is good amongst office staff, but very poor elsewhere, and ditto diversity generally.
The other issue is to do with government interference. The railways are number three on the list of things Whitehall likes to fiddle with (after health and schools) in order to show that it's doing something. NR is stuck between DfT and the train operators and often gets shat on by both sides. It may be politically useful in the near future for DfT to dramatically restructure NR, possibly out of existence, but that shouldn't put anyone off applying or accepting a job here, as almost all the functions will still need to be done by somebody!
