[BBKing]

Lots of interesting points:

Firstly - a disclaimer, I'm a railway nut of many years standing who voted in 1992 tactically to try and prevent rail privatisation. My family are also friends of the Bawdens, who've been campaigning since the Potters Bar accident, which killed Nina Bawden's husband and seriously injured her.

Safety - the big accident was Hatfield. This was the one which demonstrated that Railtrack had lost control of the railways to the extent that the rail condition on one of the country's premier main lines was catastrophically Why did they lose control? Because they trusted to the free market and commercial contracts to ensure safety, rather than the historical way built up since the railways started where engineers would be integrated into the management hierarchy and thus have key input into the management of the railway. This was *deliberately* swept away at privatisation, quite deliberately. It wasn't bad management, it was deliberate sabotage of a working structure for ideological reasons. Railtrack was supposed to be a small, streamlined management structure that would basically supervise contracts and rake in the profits. What happened of course was obvious. With the people who understood the railway gone, the suppliers could charge what they liked and do a poor job safe in the knowledge that they'd get paid and no one would have the knowledge to check, which is exactly what happened. Also, consultants could propose grandiose schemes to save money by using untried technology on unrealistic timescales, and there was no one left to say 'hang on a minute'. Hence the West Coast cock up.

BR was a phenomenally safe transport company. You can point to Clapham as an example of disaster, but you really have to point to all the years where no passengers died *at all* in rail accidents. This is actually continuing today. I think the system is still very safe, but privatisation has unleashed a number of worrying new failure modes that were previously kept in check by good engineering management (broken rails and broken points as at Hatfield and Potters Bar). TPWS is already saving lives, how many we'll never know, which is one of the problems with explaining safety projects to bean counters. The annoying thing to free marketeers is that BR managed to be phenomenally safe as a public company with, in comparison to today, a tiny subsidy.

Railways don't work like other industries. They have such a reliance on engineering and the wheel/rail interface that these have to be at the heart of the whole system. The tragedy of privatisation is that both of these key points were directly targetted as being anathema to the concept of the free market, and destroyed.

Another point which a lot of people don't know - Labour's attempt to gain control over the network was to set up the SRA, which is 900 bureaucrats run by the people (Bowker and Steer) who came up with Virgin's spiffing plans to completely screw up the West Coast and Cross Country by means of a cunningly unviable business plan (basically saying 1) we'll get x% more people travelling and 2) we don't actually need to pay to provide capacity to transport them - spot the obvious flaw there). However, Richard Bowker plays music with Mr. Tony so is immune for now. I could go on about the SRA and the political turf wars with the ORR and OPRAF but I suggest anyone interested purchase this month's excellent edition of Modern Railways.

Oh, and another point, try and find out who owns Network Rail and who controls the billions of pounds of public money that it spends. It appears that the answers are 'no one' and 'no one'.

Alternatives to the car - my girlfriend and son are off to a friend in Darlington next week, by plane. It's by far the cheapest option. My attempts to get her to go GNER lasted as long as it took to get the price comparison and work out how long it would take to get to King's Cross.