British Rail

Rail fares are going up again, in some cases by up to 13% and the government still has to chuck £3.7  billion at the rail franchise companies, more in real terms than under the bad old days of British Rail. If you want to travel the London to Bristol route at peak time, it costs £169 for a return. For the same price, you can fly to Rome. But when in Rome, you'll find that if you do as the Romans do, you'll pay 50% less for train tickets.

In Britain, unlike those stupid Continentals with their high speed rail links and affordably priced fares, we have decided that the purpose of the railway network is to provide good retail units for branches of Marks and Spencers Simply Food and the West Cornwall Pasty Company. The trains and stations themselves are an expensive inconvenience, perhaps we should just do away with them altogether and fill the space with more branches of Clinton Cards and WH Smiths. Now anyone who remembers the catering options of British Rail will agree that a beef and stilton pasty is a huge improvement on the state run burger chain Casey Jones, a franchise found only at stations for good reason. The burgers were marginally more edible than a fried newspaper and the chips were actually made from wood pulp.  Casey Jones' unique offering was an ultra thick milkshake, which doubled as a soft drink and a heavy-duty industrial lubricant.

Yes, the food was terrible, and yes British Rail had questionable advertising such as the posters of Gary Glitter in tight trousers. Another odd BR campaign was for Motorail, a bizarre concept where instead of driving to your destination, you put your car on a train to get there which is sort of the point of owning a car in the first place. Based on the advert, Motorail's appeal was that you could get thoroughly plastered in the buffet carriage and then drive your Rover into a tree the moment you disembarked.

The truth is that the privatisation of the railways has benefited no one apart from consultants, lawyers and certain chief executives of rolling stock companies. Pound for pound, Network Rail's capital investment delivers one third of what British Rail achieved.  All the Major government did was transfer a public monopoly to a private one, leaving us with the most expensive rail network in the world. On the plus side though, the sandwiches are better.

Sky high prices and ticket options which would baffle a maths professor, have put people off rail travel.  This is a  real shame as there numerous social benefits of railways versus private cars: less pollution, less congestion and less unbelievably tedious conversations between Jeremy Clarkson book reading males about the  relative merits of luxury diesel saloons.

Let's get retro, do a Life on Mars and bring back British Rail. Many privatisations have been highly successful but this was always going to be disaster. It also spurred the growth of The Sock Shop, now mercifully defunct, where busy commuters could buy hideous novelty socks for their loved ones. This partly explains Britain's rising divorce rate during that that era.

The railways were originally private, but they were dogged by safety concerns, funding crises, lack of capital investment and were chronically unable to make money. Does that sound familiar and ever wonder why they were nationalised in the first place?  The free market does many things very well, like providing a wide range of snack options, magazines and books, but it's no way to run a railway.