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but there was a serious lack of investment in the rail network since the electrification of the west coast main line in the 60's.
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Often said, but it's not actually true - the most miles electrified per annum were under Thatcher, of all people. By the early 90s BR was a pretty efficient organisation with a lot of new trains and recent electrifications under its belt and had just modernised itself into an efficient business-led structure. Privatisation blew that apart, and it now takes a lot more subsidy - the fare increases (or at least the urge to maximise revenue that leads to unregulated fares skyrocketing) are partly to reduce the subsidy requirement by paying franchise premiums back to the Treasury and partly to satisfy shareholders.
This isn't to say there hasn't been investment, but it's been patchy and, under Railtrack, often extremely badly handled. It's taken Network Rail several years and a huge amount of cash to attempt to straighten out things like signalling procurement, which was in a total mess. Unfortunately, on any network, you can't just fix the mess by fixing the process, you also have a backlog of work to do which has knock on effects on what you can do in the future. The big issue now is capacity, fixing which costs a lot of money - I foresee a future Tory Government given a choice between expensive capacity improvements and pricing people off the trains and going for b) every time.