This is all caused by Thatcher privatising the railways It wasn't in fact Thatcher who was in power when the botched privatisation was carried out - it was Major. She'd have got round to it, but perhaps she wouldn't have cocked it up so badly. It required a perverted kind of genius to achieve the outcome that we were landed with.

If it's such a good idea to re-nationalise, then why hasn't Blair done it? That answers itself. For Blair anything that sounds like Socialism is unthinkable. I wouldn't be that surprised if David Cameron proposes to take the railways back into public ownership - it'd be a voter winner, and a good way of

It messed up all kinds of things, including proper maintenance, with all kinds of separate firms shedding responsibility and failing to coordinate. Expertise that had been built up over many years was shattered. A lot of that still applies now, with Network Rail relying on outside contractors to do work for them, or in some cases, not to do it.

In spite of this the chance of getting killed in a rail journey are far lower than in an equivalent road journey. Why are rail accidents bigger news than road accidents? I suppose it's because they are unusual, and news id focused on the unusual. Also there's a sense in which in a train you are a total passenger - you've handed all responsibility over to the driver. In a car there's a sense in which even as a passenger you have a sense of having some control.