I worked direct to the CEO of one of the major players for a time

His personal view, and very much mine, was that while British Rail was by no means a brilliant railway system, the model that replaced it was utterly f**king stupid.

You can argue that privatisation is or is not a good thing per se. This particular privatisation - and in particular the implemented model - is pretty indefensible.

Indeed, DB - which is Germany's state railway system - makes profits from parts of our system, which they use to subsidise rail travel in Germany. As opposed to profits from our system being used to subsidise rail travel in, well, our system.

Any enterprise really wants to own its core infrastructure. I can't imagine why the rail network would not be considered part of UK Plc's core infrastructure.

Posted By: Old Man, Sep 27, 21:54:45