Christopher Fildes

The state of the railways

A growth industry, despite all efforts

The Treasury thought the railways were in terminal decline. John Major’s government thought they were a political nuisance — vexed commuters meant lost voters. Privatisation would get the railways off the government’s back, and breaking them into 100 pieces would mean that if one piece was on strike, the other 99 would not be. In the event, they refused to go away, and have maintained an obstinate tendency to put on business. Successive governments have had to cope with the consequences, and we must soon be due for the next set of answers.

For New Labour, sweeping into power a dozen years ago, the first and easiest answer was to abandon its costly threats to buy the railways back. Instead a vast new ministry headed by John Prescott would take charge of transport, and the railways were to have a ten-year plan and a Strategic Rail Authority to make it work. To show that this meant business, it would be run by Sir Alastair Morton, who could fairly claim, and did claim, to have built the Channel Tunnel.

No such great achievement followed, as Terry Gourvish says in his new book*, for the SRA had been given much responsibility but little power and no chequebook. For major investment, Morton told ministers, a public contribution would be needed. Predictably, the signals in Whitehall turned red.

Railtrack was meant to be the big investor, using shareholders’ money and borrowing more — but Railtrack (as an old railway hand put it) was a property company, not an engineering company. It had made a ruinous contract to rebuild the West Coast Main Line with unproven technology. The rebuilding straggled on until this year. We could have had a whole new railway, better and faster, in less time and for less money.

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