The third rail

The other day many people were stranded at London Euston and Liverpool Street stations due to engineering works overrunning after Christmas. I, myself, had a rubbish journey up to Yorkshire just before Christmas having to change onto a bus at Hatfield, back to train at Peterborough, then again at Doncaster. Not nice, especially with a hangover!

The cause of the problems came from a lack of skilled maintenance engineers being booked to carry out the work. Inevitably, this has lead to a renewed discussion of the merits of Privatisation and Nationalisation of the nation's railways.

The Labour Opposition in 1996 (another of Prezza's pronouncements) stated that they would re-nationalise the railways. Of course, they did no such thing - it would have cost them a fortune to buy all the Railtrack shares and untangle the Train Operating Company (TOC) contracts. In the end, they were able to re-nationalise by default when Railtrack went into Administration.

John Major's Government failure was not to privatise the railways but to do it such a cack-handed way so as to separate track from train. It may have looked ok on paper, and boy, how much paper? Contract after Contract after Contract. Probably the most complicated privatisations in history. One too far for Margaret Thatcher anyway!

So how to get out of this mess? I don't believe full scale nationalisation will improve matters. One of the good things to come out of privatisation has been a wealth of new rolling stock, I believe we'd still have slam door trains if we had the old BR. We do, however, need to tie track back to train.

Before nationalisation there four big train companies, LNER (London and North Eastern), LMS (London, Midland and Scottish), GWR (Great Western) and Southern. We should return to the same sort of regional private companies which control some services and the tracks for an area. There should then be a secondary level of private railway company, these would operate on the tracks provided by the regional companies and pay for the privilege (a similar arrangement to now). This would allow for competition on the railway (ORR would still enforce fair rates) and mean that the train companies have a good reason for providing good tracks (as they would be penalised by overruns too) and trains.

There would still need to be some public subsidy, of course, that will not change. But we could witness the re-birth of Britain's railway.

Squiffy.