I wasn't complaining about private companies receiving subsidies per se. I just find it laughable that anyone could suggest private companies are more efficient when privatisation of the railway has been nothing but a disaster. The current set up means higher fares (esp. if paying "on the day"), is more expensive to the taxpayer (we pay more in subsidies than what British Rail cost to operate) and the ethos has changed from providing a service to robbing people of money.

Recently, FGW reduced the number of services between Cornwall and London (again), and yet continue to increase the fares by the maximum they are allowed to. This would not happen under a new British Rail - any profits would go into improving the on-board service, buying new trains and laying on extra services. Which reminds me - Worst Group don't offer buffet car service beyond Plymouth either. Bastards.

Aren't people forgetting that not too long ago it was publicly owned, and it was awful?

What makes you think it would be so much better this time around?

Er, it was no worse than what it is now. At the moment we get about 90% of trains "on time" (which by the current loose definition of "on time" means anything up to 10 minutes late).

British Rail in its final year achieved 93% of trains on time, and that's without this "up to 10 minutes" nonsense.

Of course, certain companies like Worst Great Western can't even achieve 90% of trains on time on certain lines (i.e. the Great Western Mainline).

Source: Private Eye

I rode a second class Virgin today, and it had aircon and WiFi broadband.

I'm pretty sure that never happened when it was public.

Mind you, it was 20 minutes late because the doors were broken and it took 5 minutes to open them at every stop

To be fair when British Rail was around we didn't get anything like the technology and gadgets like we get now. I couldn't possibly say what today's trains would be like under BR, I really hate "what ifs".

If a train is 10 minutes late here, you get queues of customers lining up to get refunds on their tickets!

Sounds fine to me. That way you'd get the benefits of scale when designing and buying new rolling stock.

Well just because you found one example where by your criteria it was a disaster it doesn't mean that private companies are not more efficient. If nationalisation is such a great idea, I wonder why we have private companies at all. Oh, I know: Because plenty of other countries tried nationalisation and failed just affter few decades. Just look at Cuba and North Korea, they don't have any private companies a we all know how they do. Look at USSR, eastern Europe etc. they all tried but it didn't work.

So I still don't understand where you are coming from and I still haven't heard any arguments why it should work.

To be fair, the technology and gadgets we have now weren't around in BR's time.

If a nationalised rail network failed, the privatised one's hardly fairing much better.

Shame this country is nearly bankrupt, or we could have built a Maglev.

Ah, that would require engineers. Haven't had those in Britain for years. We'd need to shop it out to Europe.

Well the new high speed commuter train "the Javelin" is Japanese !

To be honest...

We need to get people working from home more. We need to improve the country's broadband. We need to stop people from needing to commute and we need to take the strain off the country's public transport infrastructure.

Blah blah..

It's our nature, we'll complain about anything!

Well, as you know, in the 1960’s a “rationalisation” of the rail network took place under a certain Dr Beeching. He trimmed back a lot of the more underused lines, and we have as a result a sparser network than we did. The result was a lot of communities were cut off from the railway network, and those who did use the trains for travel had to find alternatives. This was done to help save British Rail money. However, British Rail would not have gone out of business if they had not heeded Beeching’s demands. As we stand now, we need those closed lines more than we did then, and recent news reports show that some are going to be reclaimed for railway use. Most of these lines were small branch lines, which did not have a massive traffic volume that many here will be used to.

However, today, we see ourselves in a situation where private companies are running poor, unprofitable services on large capacity lines. It is entirely possible to see that the company could say that because services are losing them money, then the best, most prudent course of action would be to stop running it. All of a sudden, that train journey you rely on every day ceases to exist. The service you expect is withdrawn, and you, and many, many others, have to find alternatives. In essence, mini Beeching reports are carried out and implemented in the private rail companies every time the timetables are jiggled, or the capacity of the running trains change. Private companies exist, as has been stated before, to make money for the shareholders. That is their sole responsibility. That money comes from profits, and those profits come from specific services, cutting back in other areas, and so forth.

Private rail companies do not run a service through altruistic means. You many notice that on train announcements that you are not a “passenger” but a “customer”, and that distinction is subtle and clear. Passengers expect a service to take them from A to B. Customers hand over money. The issue here is that we need transport systems - it moves people and goods around, and for the country to function, this is a necessity. I place such infrastructure systems in the same box as the military – something so important that you would not want them to be run privately. After all, would you want the armed services to become a privately run business, open to the free market, traded on the stock markets? I think the sensible answer would be “no”.

By placing infrastructure into the hands of private corporations, the then Thatcherite government threw away the right to complain about the poor quality of services, and we are in the situation now where various enforcing powers have been used to try to reign them in, However, these have been embarrassingly ineffective. The real solution, and the one taken with National Express, is to pull the whole sorry system back into public ownership and control it not as a private business, but as a public service.

Or at least in local satellite offices. Totally agree with you we shouldn't be making it "easier" to commute long distances we should be encouraging companies to base employees locally to where they live or at home.