[BBKing]

The Treasury certainly required a return on investment above what seemed reasonable (and different to that applied to roads). 8% is a figure I'm dredging up. This was one of the causes of the astonishingly cheap electrification of the East Coast line, £306m. They did have to cut corners a bit on the overhead wires, which is why you often hear of the lines down on the ECML, as the posts were placed wider apart to get the cost down. Compare the £306m (mid-80s prices admittedly) with the £280m recently quoted to a company that wanted to upgrade the short single track branch from Llandudno Junction to Blaenau Ffestiniog for heavier freight traffic. On the whole, infrastructure improvements under privatisation cost about 3 times the price under BR.

I probably have that old Eye somewhere, got 15 years of copies (many of them in a pile by the bed, as my other half will tell you at length).

One of the 'benefits' of privatisation would have been the freedom to borrow as much as the market would lend, or in other words to plunge a national strategic resource into debt, which is more or less what happened.